The basic is just to run away from Gmail, but it's not easy.

Alternatives?

I just tried Protonmail (the paid account, of course), but it's a pretty sad experience so far. The huge gmail feature that is missing is the lack of full text search: yes, you cannot search in the body of your past email (to me this, in 2018, is not acceptable)

The other big issue is import data from Gmail. I had 10Gb of data in Gmail, so I paid Protonmail for a 15GB storage, then realized soon I could not import my data: here there are some issue

1) you cannot connect to protonmail IMAP without their Protonmail/Bridge (which is pretty understandable for security) and using a Thunderbird/Outlook client, in theory, but:

2) there is no Protonmail/Bridge for linux (only Win + Os)

3) the Windows version of Protonmail/Bridge crashes very often (I did file a bug of course), and it crashes mostly during an import (so I even ended up loosing emails)

4) the Protonmail/Brige is, after a while, very slow: I see I am not the only one which thing there is a throttling check

From the Gmail side, keep in mind there are very strong limits on the amount of data you can transfer, so keep it in mind before purchasing Protonmail storage https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en

There are other mail providers out there besides protonmail that use standard interfaces by default (e.g. imap). startmail, mailbox.org, runbox, mailfence, etc.

All of the problems you described are from protonmail trying to do things their own way and ignore what everyone else wants/uses.

We (ProtonMail) don't provide a server-side IMAP/SMTP interface because we don't want to see your cleartext mail. And if you are doing the encryption and key management yourself locally, then you can literally use any email provider you want. The Bridge sidesteps this issue by exposing a local IMAP/SMTP interface and handling the encryption/decryption locally, but there are very good reasons we built it the way we did.

You still get plain text if someone in your garden tries to communicate with someone outside of your garden. Or, alternatively the folks outside your garden get an awkward link to your website where they can only view the message there.

I don't think those are very good reasons for doing what you did, since the set of users not using protonmail is orders of magnitude larger than the set of users that do, so protonmail is basically just covering a very small edge case (communication between protonmail customers) while making it more difficult to use the more common case of communication with folks that do not use protonmail.

It's not a small use case for corporate users where the internal mail is all encrypted. We also have full PGP support and the bridge is fully integrated with this, so we hope the garden aspect will decrease with time, though we expect PGP volume to remain small. You are also heavily discounting the overhead of having users manage their own keys locally in your preferred solution.

Hi, bartbutler since you are working in ProtonMail, can you suggest me a working contact for a refund request? I've been trying a week with the suggested contact@protonmail.ch but I keep receiving no answer (my protonmail account is fraxx), thanks

Hi there, I'll ask someone to reach out. In the future, please file a support ticket at: protonmail.com/support-form

Just wanted to add there is a bridge for Linux but it's in beta. You just need to email them at bridge@protonmail.ch and although it sucks there is no full text search most of the attraction is that your emails are not indexed in plain text.

"just need", you are right, but then wait for the answer. It took me five days to receive the link for the download.

I’ve heard good things about Fastmail, but I haven’t used it myself.

I’m now hosting my own mail server and it’s been working fine for the past few years.

Interestingly the linked page shows no purchases, except for Google Play subscriptions, for me.

That's probably because I use G Suite.

I have used gmail as my single mail account for more than 10 years and I don't deleted anything by real spam (unsolicited mail to harvested or stolen addresses). However, I get 99% of my mail forwarded from other addresses, I don't give my gmail address out.

When I look at the linked address I get

* no purchases * no subscriptions * (nearly?) all of my flights and hotel reservations since 2013.

Obviously Google is too American to understand that I travel more frequently by train than by plane. Several of the flights are displayed as "cancelled" although I am 100% sure that I took them without any rebooking or anything else. As a matter of fact the only flight that I could not take because of a strike is shown as "confirmed". That much about reliability of harvested data.

Originally it was part of Gmail that they scan your mails automatically in order to show you targeted ads. However, I remember they announced some time ago they would stop scanning mails. Probably I did not read the fine print in their legalize...

Evil company that I should do even more effort to avoid.