Looking For A New Email Solution

Are you concerned about the security of your personal data on email services? I wasn’t. I hadn’t been for the past several years. In light of recent events that began with Snowden, I’ve started rethinking things. In particular, I’m thinking about where and how to manage my email. Currently, I’m using GMail. On the desktop, the web based interface makes it easy to access my email. I also use GMail native apps on my Android phone and my iPad.

It’s hard to imagine I can find a single product or service to serve all these platforms. And let’s be honest, changing email services doesn’t solve my problem – just it’s location. A smaller service has the benefit of not being as big of a target as Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. The idea of a service is attractive because it frees me from system administration duties. However their solutions would likely not be as robust.

One of the distinguishing features of GMail is the use of labels. Other web-based providers use folders, which are cumbersome. Often times, you need to apply multiple labels to a message. In the end, Google is probably just using using some programming magic to apply a label to multiple folders behind the scenes. The other powerful feature that GMail provides is conversation threading. It makes email threads much easier to follow and understand. The standard method is not satisfying to me.

There are a number of email server solutions that will let you host your own email, that not only support standard email clients like Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, and lots of other things but also web browsers. But do they also offer iPad and Android clients? So I’m wondering – what email setup do you use?