Any new news - things gone silent
 

Any new news about emsil provider / services? It’s almost silent in here these days.

Yes, unusually quiet.

Sad.

Used to be a very vibrant place.

I agree, maybe things haven’t moved to the current climate with everyone.

Seems par for the course with the rapid rise of PFS and E2EE messaging platforms.

Everything seems to be dying :(

It seems like that. A lot of good names have gone Cwazy, Lionrampant, dubmail, getemail.* is a muddle and whether you can access. The .io is now a contact manager provider. There’s still a few good services but you do have to look for them.

Memaio free for a year then pay. - I think the world is heading towards paying for email.

May be Best Buy your own domain which offers email with it and go that way.

22 years ago to have an email account and to be able to send and to receive emails was something like out of this world. Not everyone had access to internet, or in some cases it was just not affordable.

In 2003 I had dialup connection and it was not cheap. One year later, the cable company launched internet over coaxial cable, I had cable internet with 3 Gb of traffic / month and I was the only one from my block with cable internet.

The email and later, yahoo messenger and msn messenger was for romanians the affordable way to connect with their relatives abroad when the telephone was around 5$ / 1 minute.

This short movie reflect exactly the situation in the romanian families at that time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HDM6ERbBKA

But since then, the phone calls got cheaper, the internet is always on and it's hard to find a place where you don't have broadband or mobile 4G internet. In Romania in 2021 there were around 800 verry small communities, smaller than villages, with population around 50 - 150 persons, that had no connection to broadband or mobile internet. The rest of the country has full coverage.

The smallest mobile plan with unlimited national calls and 50 Gb/ month is 2 euros, a gigabit broadband fiber optic plan is 6 euros in most cities. The internet is as common as electricity. We preffer to call each other on whatsapp or facetime, because the sound quality is better. The email has take it's place in our life: it took the role that Postal services had. Almost all official corespondence is made by email. Bills, contracts, notifications, bank statements, medical corespondence, all is made by email.

Email did not died, but it has it's place now, a very stable one. It's the replacement of the post box.

Gmail is the main email service now. You have to have a gmail account if you have an android phone or if you need to use google services. And the majority of people use their gmail account and are not so interested into getting another one.

For us, we saw the birth of the email services, the ups and downs, the way it developed. We lived the drama, the controversy, the first 50 Mb account (I think it was myrealbox.com) when every other email providers offered 1-2 Mb... that was an epic time and we had the chance to live those moments. That's why we care and that's why we are so interested about this subject.

The income from advertising is lower and lower, because the percent of users who have adblockers is rising day by day. That's why we see less and less websites offering free email accounts.

And there are some people who are still interested in their privacy, or who run a business and need personalized email addresses, and these people are still feeding the email services business. And this is the reason why gmail doesn't open new domains for free email accounts registration.

Also, it became very cheap to get a VPN and just run your own email service. People say that it's hard but it is not, iRedMail can be installed by anybody, it's very easy, and if you have a clean IP with rdns, spf and dkim and you don't send spam, you will have no problem sending to gmail or microsoft.

Email is not dead. In fact is still evolving. The next challenge seems to be email encryption. There are more and more services that try to develop this feature. Even Microsoft and Google, of course, for business plans.

Sorry for this long message and for my english, it's not my first language.

There's no need to be sorry for a long message, that is both on-topic, and interesting.

In my opinion, your English is excellent - better than that of many native speakers ... so there's no need to be sorry about that either.

@alexu2007, with such a long history here, what email service are you using now? In the view of your above statement, I have increasingly phased out e-mail services.

The main email account, that I use with banks, medical services, house utility contracts and other contracts is at protonmail. I use the paid plan with my domain. I paid for my domain for 10 years in advance, it is a .pm domain and I registered it at infomaniak.com, this way it was about 50 $ for 10 years.

Using a paid plan, I have access to their bridge and I backup every week my account with https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/ , a great email backup utility, free for home use.

Also I use cloudflare as DNS provider for my domain. Lately Cloudflare started a new service, email forwarding for your domain. This way, if something happens at Protonmail, I can activate the email forwarding from Cloudflare account and redirect my emails to another backup email address. And because Cloudflare is so fast in updating the dns records and have so fast propagation, the downtime should be minimum.

You can find who is the cheapest registrar with the posibility to filter the registered or the renewal price here: https://tld-list.com/ . However, take into consideration the ratings of the registrars, some of them are really bad. I use Regery which seems to be ok until now even if it's based in Ucraine, infomaniak.com and porkbun as main registrar.

I also use the protonmail's drive to store online the scan copies of my important documents. It's also e2e encrypted so if someone is able to access them, then those who can break the encryption or backdoor access my account they surely have the power to bribe some clercks and to get copies of my documents from the authorities who issued them.

The second email account is on my vps, I got one from https://contabo.com/en/vps/ , the smallest one. Also I paid for a personal directadmin licence (24$ / year) but this is optional, you can make it work just with the vps and the iRedMail https://docs.iredmail.org/install.ir...an.ubuntu.html . Contabo does not block the 25 port and I have 10/10 mark from https://www.mail-tester.com/ and I never had any problems with email delivery to microsoft or google.

The third email account is at purelymail.com. They have a lot of settings that you can tweak and I like the simplicity of the service. I never encountered any problems with them in the last year.

Its a nice read, Alex. Well written.

Agreed! 👍

Interesting it is so different here in the USA. There is not a single important business or government agency I contact that uses anything other than traditional phone calls, email, or snail mail. Nobody I know uses any messaging app other than phone SMS or iMessage. I run a small business and probably about 90% of the emails we collect are Gmail.

Welcome to EMD Jacob :)