I'm done with my ISP

August 21, 2021 3:28 PM

Despite poor response times and bad customer service, I've stuck with my ISP because my email address is tied to that ISP. I've had the same e-mail address for a quarter century. I don't want to give it up, but I've reached my limit after being on hold for Primus customer service (yes I'm naming the ISP as a warning to potential customers) literally all day. Now, I need recommendations for a (preferably) Canadian company that offers e-mail hosting and a (moveable and transferable) customized email address.

Since I want a service that I can use no matter what ISP I choose, I assume I'll need to set up my own domain. How smart is it to buy a domain through an email hosting company? Right now, I run Thunderbird on my system and use POP3 to download email. I care more about having my data on my system than having it stored in the cloud.

I'll be setting this up for family members as well, so assume I need a handful (six or under) addresses tied to the domain.

I do want the ability to send and receive large attachments including images and InDesign files. This is a must.

I'm in Canada, so I would prefer to be billed in Canadian dollars and have the company's servers located in Canada. A .ca address would be a nice bonus, although it's not necessary

I'm not interested in online mail services (like Gmail). I have those kinds of accounts as secondary ones. I want something without ads, something that doesn't mine my mail for customer data, etc.

As can be assumed by my questions, I've never set anything like this up. Ideally, I just want to go through the process once and never think about it again (outside of sending in my payment once a year to keep the service active). Because this is new to me, I want good customer support (i.e. the reason I'm dumping my ISP is precisely because of how bad the customer support is). Reliability and really good uptime are also very important.

I have seen this. Anybody have any experience with any of the recommended companies? That free one looks tempting. Not that free is a requirement. I'm willing to pay for this service. I just don't want to spend money excessively or stupidly.

posted by sardonyx to Computers & Internet (16 answers total)

I registered a .ca domain through canspace.ca and pay fastmail.com for email hosting. USD $50/year. It has been very, very reliable. Previously I had web hosting that included email and it worked well when it worked but every time they did a server upgrade/migration they broke email and it made a lot of work for me to clean up and fix.

There are cheaper options, but I decided that for email (which I use constantly) I wanted the best I could find.

The catch for your use case is it's priced per mailbox so every family member will need to pay for their own mailbox. Fastmail can handle this (they'll even bill the sub-accounts for you) but it does require people willing to pay $50/year for email service.

https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/reseller.html
posted by cape at 4:18 PM on August 21, 2021

So, buy your own domain, and hire a mail box provider to run it? Once you register your domain, you can hire ANY mail provider to run it, really. But seems you want Canadian...

Ionos.ca, maybe? Domain is $5 first year, $15 yearly after, and the mail service itself is a couple dollars a month.
posted by kschang at 4:24 PM on August 21, 2021

Response by poster: Not to threadsit, but I should make it clear that while I want a domain, I have zero interest in having or maintaining a webpage. Is that a problem?
posted by sardonyx at 4:34 PM on August 21, 2021

I have a domain name that is leftover from when I had a company (now defunct). No website any longer, but I still use the domain name for continuity of email. One problem I noticed when I switched from Shaw as the hosting company to one of the cheapo brands was that quite a few of my emails to other people never got through, as their servers marked them as 'junk' -- due (I believe) to how often those hosts were used for spam and other crap. Eventually I had to switch back to Shaw so that my outgoing mails were reliably received. Not sure if others have had this problem, but it is something to consider when you are choosing a provider to host a domain for you.
posted by sonofsnark at 4:39 PM on August 21, 2021

Best answer: Having your own domain does NOT mean you have to have a web page associated with it. It just gives you what you need to do so if you want. I have no web presence with my personal domain. Registering your own domain is the bedrock of portability. Once you have it, you can take your email anywhere,

I'll second what cape says about fastmail.com, though I would also look at POBox.com, which is owned by Fastmail, and may give you a little more flexibility (though I'm not sure). POBox.com is a forwarding service, rather than an email provider, but they provide excellent service and I have had no problem at all using them with my personal domain. Their servers are, unfortunately, not located in Canada.

However, I see nili.ca has email hosting services and will help you register your own domain. I'm not sure what other Canadian-only email providers there may be.
posted by lhauser at 4:50 PM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

Anecdotally, I have successfully moved from hosting to hosting and mail provider to mail provider while still maintaining the same email address for 20 years. I've kept all my messages since 2005. Having your own domain brings that portability. I don't have any website associated with the domain. I also don't even have my name on the Whois record.

Even when I used Google Apps for years, I was able to get all my email out and imported into the next provider. You may have to muck around with your DNS settings and options someday, but any mail service tier asking for money assumes that. They will guide you through the process.

I have no Canadian-specific advice, but I recently tried some encrypted/privacy email providers in Europe. Tutanota is paranoid to the point of being impossible to use except on their website, but it's cheap. Protonmail is also paranoid, is more expensive, but has extra tools that will let you use Thunderbird. I'm happy with Protonmail. I may stop drifting my domain from provider to provider.
posted by Snijglau at 5:05 PM on August 21, 2021

Best answer: I have bee using EasyDNS for my .ca email for the past 15 years and have never had any major problems. They are based in Etobicoke.
posted by FungusCassetteBicker at 5:19 PM on August 21, 2021

Best answer: All good advice up-thread. A couple of points to emphasize:

#1 Consider paying for private registration with your domain provider. That will mask your personal contact info behind the registrar.

#2 Reiterating what sonofsnark said, not all email providers are equal with respect to internet reputation and spam filters. If the provider tolerates senders that look like spammers to the rest of the internet, everyone's reputation suffers and you'll get more mail blocked. I don't have any easy tips for figuring out which is which, but cost can be a clue.

#3 If you configure your new mailbox to send all "mailbox not found" mail to your mailbox, you can generate throwaway email addresses. Example: you are creating an account for a one-time e-commerce order. Instead of using your new custom email address, let's say [e-mail], you register with [e-mail]. The mailbox doesn't exist, but that is OK - the mail will come into your sardonyx mailbox. If the company sells your data or gets breached, you haven't given up your primary email address, just the throwaway.
posted by BlueTongueLizard at 6:51 PM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

Best answer: #3

If you go with Fastmail as your email hosting service, their webmail service has plus addressing, so using BlueTongueLizard's example, if you give that vendor either the address [e-mail] or [e-mail], then not only will the email come to you, but if you create a folder named "throwaway," any emails sent to either of those addresses will be sorted into that folder without having to set up a sorting rule.
posted by solotoro at 9:31 PM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

Since I want a service that I can use no matter what ISP I choose, I assume I'll need to set up my own domain.

I have an email account with Fastmail that I can use no matter what ISP I choose, and I have not set up my own domain. The only point of owning my own domain for email use would be that doing so would let me jump ship to another email provider without changing my email address, which given Fastmail's reliability and general all-round pleasantness to deal with is not something I can see myself doing.

ISP-provided email services are usually particularly terrible, since their only purpose is to cause exactly the kind of vendor lock-in you've been living with for all these years. Fastmail's primary business is email and they're good at it and have been for many years.
posted by flabdablet at 11:06 PM on August 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

I bought a domain through gandi.net and use their email forwarding service. It’s a fairly standard service from most domain registrars, so you don’t have to go with Gandi.

The forwarding service is a simple list of email aliases for your domain (eg. [e-mail]) and an associated real email address to forward on to (eg. a gmail address). Gandi give me 100 aliases for free.

As long as your email provider allows you to send emails using your new address then you’re pretty much done.

All I need to do is remember to renew the domain every couple of years.
posted by mr_silver at 12:39 AM on August 22, 2021

The catch for your use case is [Fastmail is] priced per mailbox so every family member will need to pay for their own mailbox.

There's a way to use Fastmail's subdomain addressing to work around that if you don't care about keeping your family's emails properly (as opposed to casually) inaccessible to each other.

If you have a Fastmail account called [e-mail], and you create folders inside it called bob, carol, ted and alice, then anything sent to [e-mail] will automatically be delivered to the bob folder, anything sent to [e-mail] will go to the carol folder and so on.

If each family member has Thunderbird or similar installed, and they're all set up to fetch mails from [e-mail] via IMAP, you can tell bob's Thunderbird to ignore the main Inbox and sync only with the bob folder, alice's Thunderbird to sync only with the alice folder and so on. And you can create [e-mail], [e-mail] and so on as sending identities inside the Fastmail account for each of them.

This is super janky but it's also very cheap.

It should also work with a custom domain, though there will probably be some SPF fuckery required to make it work right.
posted by flabdablet at 1:58 AM on August 22, 2021

When I canned Verizon, they let me keep the email address. Maybe your ISP does?
posted by james33 at 7:39 AM on August 22, 2021

Best answer: Polaris Mail is Canadian. I've been using them (from the US) for 3+ years with zero problems.
posted by COD at 3:44 PM on August 22, 2021

Response by poster: I'm marking best answers and the ones directing me to Canadian companies. If those don't pan out, I'll look at FastMail (Australia/U.S.) Despite the .ca Ionos looks like it's out of the U.K.

I also appreciate the advice about setting up the account in a way that creates throwaway email addresses. Also thanks for the warning that some email providers can be seen as spammy. That's definitely a concern.

If anybody else has any experience with Canadian e-mail services not tied to ISPs, my ears are still open.
posted by sardonyx at 9:48 AM on August 23, 2021

Best answer: I'll second the recommendation for EasyDNS. I've been using their email service with a custom domain name for many years without any trouble. I don't think I've ever needed their customer support and I don't think my messages get flagged as spam. They support aliases (emails to [e-mail] are delivered to my [e-mail] inbox) and have plans that allow separate addresses/mailboxes for family members.

You mentioned a need to send and receive large files. Looks like the max email size for EasyDNS is 25MB, which is the same as Gmail's attachment size limit for outbound messages. I wonder if you'd be better off using a file sharing service (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) for large file transfers, rather than email attachments?
posted by Gerald Bostock at 2:29 PM on August 23, 2021