i have kind of solved my email situation

previously: dailies

posteo

I ended up just signing up for Posteo for several reasons:

• • cheap

Okay there are kind of other reasons that can be summed up as "I like the cut of their jib", but they are ultimately forgoable. The one thing I really wanted was alias addresses , because I want to have more than one email address I actually like without having to manage more accounts because I already have way too many. This eliminated the option of spinning up more free email accounts. Posteo gives you three addresses total which is exactly as many as I need (with the option of adding more by slightly increasing your monthly fee, which is nice as futureproofing).

And that's just the thing, I could pay more somewhere else to get more: probably more features and certainly more storage and alias addresses. For a point of comparison, Tuta Mail's cheapest paid tier is €3/month to Posteo's €1/month, and at that price it has 20GB of storage to Posteo's 2GB and 16 total email addresses to Posteo's 3. That's far better value if you try to do a kind of unit price thing, but that assumes you're actually going to use that stuff. I don't think I'm going to need 20GB of storage in my email: emails are pretty small and if my inbox fills up I can always just download all my oldest emails and then delete them from the server. As for the extra email addresses, they're €0.1/month at Posteo to add more, so I can even get the standard 15 extra and still be paying less than I would anywhere else. Not like I need that many, though.

The one thing I predict could get me in future is Posteo's lack of custom domain support. But I think in the world where I'm paying for and setting up a vanity domain I'll also be happy to futz around setting up another email account.

Can I recommend that you use Posteo as your email if you need to switch for some reason? Idk, maybe. I don't know your situation! Maybe you need some feature those other email services provides and Posteo lacks, maybe you don't need alias addresses and you'd be happy with the free tier for something. All that I can say is that Posteo seems alright so far; my emails aren't going to spam, at least.

Also, it's niche enough that I was able to snag both my universal unique-ish username and my very own firstname.lastname as emails with no numbers at the end or anything, which I'm quite happy about.

thunderbird

My original plan for making it easier to check too many email accounts was to have them all forward emails to the one account. I think this is the correct strategy to consolidate them in the long term, once I've gotten most everything switched over to using the new addresses that are all already aliases to the one account. However in the short-medium term this would be a mess and also make it annoying to reply to emails as that requires actually logging in to the original account.

So what I've done in the meantime is log into most of my email accounts in Thunderbird. I made this decision of email client because:

• it was only one i've ever heard of
• i couldn't be bothered to go looking for others

Unlike Posteo, I do actually have complaints about Thunderbird. Yes it gets the job done, I do have basically all my emails in one convenient program now, which is probably all I should have ever asked for. However, it does have a particular open-source jank about it. For instance, it has a "unified folders" feature you can enable which lets you access your Inbox, Drafts, Templates, Sent, Archives, Spam, and Trash folders for all your email accounts at once. This is excellent. But what if you want to unify some other folder across accounts, like a custom label? Just giving two folders on different accounts the same name isn't enough to give it an entry in the unified folders.

Something like this can be done, but not via the "unified folders" thing! The process is as follows:

1. Bring up the search menu with CTRL`-`SHIFT`-`F
2. Change nothing and "Save as Search Folder"
3. In the "New Saved Search Folder" menu that comes up, name your merged folder and select to make it as a subfolder of "Local Folders"
4. "Choose..." to open up another menu where you can select the folders you want to merge
5. Leave the search criteria blank and Create your new folder

Okay, this isn't that bad as a sequence of steps, but the way that creating a folder that merges two other folders requires you to first open the search menu, which doesn't(!) allow you to actually search multiple folders at the same time, and then go into a submenu by pressing a button which doesn't end in "..." so it doesn't look like a submenu... well, it's just very silly.

Still, though. I've used Outlook so I shan't complain too much. Thunderbird may be the best option out there for all I know. Don't take this as a proper recommendation or review. I'm not a lawyer and I'm not your lawyer. Ok that's all thanks!

The ground quakes. The email address mentioned on this website has changed.