What do you folks use instead of Proton and Google? Ideally I’m looking for:
- Non-profit.
- European-based if possible.
- Paid is fine.
- Low-risk. E.g. unlikely to disappear, unlikely to go bankrupt.
My reason to want non-profit is that it’s the best way to align mine and the provider’s incentives, I think. I’d consider for-profit as well, but it’s best if it’s a non-profit.
So far I like disroot a lot. But they are principled about being unpaid, so if the financial ends don’t meet each other my emails will be in trouble. I’m donating to them, but I have my worries. I’m willing to pay a little if I know that my money will go for a quality service, for expansion of coverage (new users) and for open-source technologies.
Proton and their founder Andy are just a piece of sh*t in terms of upper management, so that’s not worth discussing.
Posteo seems adequate. Tuta feels similar to Posteo with a bit more push for fanciness. Is there something similar but non-profit?
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Happy user of Infomaniak, they’ve been in this business since 4 years before the web existed, so I hope that translates to more staying power. And they’ve only grown every year since then, so far without selling out. The majority stake is owned by the non-profit Infomaniak Foundation.
Hope that you never get your account locked, because then they will ask for a copy of your ID card! Have to send them a fake one to recover my data and then close my account without looking back!
It looks interesting. However, few things are hard for me to process:
I thought the SMS was only on free accounts and only so they can limit to the countries where they offer free services (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, Liechtenstein, maybe Benelux countries, not sure).
If it’s for every account then yeah, that’s not great. I must have forgotten about this, I use TOTP for 2FA and so never see any SMS from them.
They are definitely not the do-one-thing kind, they’re more of a bundle of dozens of things done reasonably well, and then a few things done extremely well (e.g. their VPS Lite and hosted Cloudstack infra).
About the incoming PGP I don’t know either, I believe I’ve only used something like that successfully with mailbox.org but it’s been a decade or so so I might be misremembering; mailbox.org does have some PGP-based incoming encryption but I’m not sure if they generate all the keys there.
I was looking at Infomaniak on alternativeto and found these :
I’m not sure what to make of them, as when I tried to sign up they wanted phone verification, their offering in free tier seems too generous, and with no encryption, they could hand over information easily (and yes ik email isn’t the most secure form of communication and there are better tools)
I don’t trust any e-mail encryption done by the provider (including Protonmail) and there are cryptography nerds who say things like “forget encrypted e-mail, wrong tech, wrong use-case, use something else like Magic Wormhole or Signal” (search for “the PGP problem”, most of the problems have been addressed in at least GnuPG but still, the metadata leakage for example is still an issue).
Unless I really control my end of the channel including choice of encryption software, algorithms, placement and validity of keys, etc. I don’t think it can ever be trustworthy. Protonmail for example even use web crypto which adds another layer of potential insecurity. And that’s just the tech layer, what if my recipient is an idiot and forwards my message unencrypted (because that’s what their e-mail client is gonna allow)?
So I don’t pick my e-mail provider based on how they encrypt, I can use any insecure provider because it’s me and my hardware doing the encryption. If Infomaniak ever goes completely nuts, I can be moved off them in a weekend.
I guess that sidesteps the question but I didn’t follow the controversy back then about Infomaniak because I didn’t care that much, I work with Digitale Gesellschaft and other digital rights organizations to shoot these things down on a political level no matter what a single company thinks. So far DG has been very successful. e.g. they prevented the launch of an electronic ID card that would have been insecure, privacy-invasive and run by private corporations.
Thanks for all the work you and the organizations do! I didn’t think like you, but now I’m interested, being able to jump ship quickly as I have control is interesting. I’m a noob to this, can you share resources/software you use for encrypting emails and stuff ?
Ah, thanks, my contribution is mostly just money/donations and then voting correctly 4 times a year so the government doesn’t get any crazy ideas ;)
I have to say I barely even use encrypted e-mail, when I do it’s just through GnuPG. I’ve used Claws-Mail’s GPG plugin and Thunderbird’s built-in PGP support, works well enough. But I’m not very up to date, maybe you can find better information and nicer tools from e.g. Privacy Guides. They have a section on OpenPGP but it’s dry because this is just a dry topic :(
I think they specifically say to not use email encryption at all. Instead they mention Magic Wormhole and Signal.
I second this. Moved our company email and cloud service to Infomaniak. One of my best decisions in a long while.