Hi everyone! Since I was absolutely fucked by Skiff (thank fuck I didn’t pay for it) I’m looking for a new email provider :) I’m not sure I like how proton is transforming into a full on suit, I only need email. Any other recommendations or is proton my only choice really?
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Run your own, you need a server, tech knowledge and time, or maybe Tuta mail?
There isn’t. Self hosting is the only way you can send email without giving your data. All email provider have your data, assuming there is a provider that is private is lying yourself. Even if they have some kilograms of privacy policy.
https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/blob/HEAD/docs/email.md and https://www.privacytools.io/privacy-email document services you’ll probably find interesting.
My 2 ¢: Email is inherently not private. With tls you have encryption in transit, but as soon as the data hits the server no metadata is ever encrypted. With pgp you can encrypt the message content, sure, but not with many of the advanced features we expect from e.g. Signal and matrix. Therefore it doesn’t really matter if you use proton ot tuta, unless you exclusively mail other proton/tuta users.
I am extremely happy with purelymail.com. extremely cheap and versatile. I also use mailfence.com but that’s only because i’d like to have two different servers for something as important as mail. Been a customer with purely for probably 3+ years . Mailfence probably 6+ years. Have seen two small outages with mailfence. None with purely.
I’m curious what’s the advanced feature?
I am no expert, so this is just my understanding: pgp encrypts the message, with the the recipients public key. Once the private key is compromised , bruforced or cracked, all messages are compromised. With signal, and all the other apps that uses signal protocol, it’s different. Here, the key is renewed often (i think for each message) and the key is device dependant. Therefore if the key is compromised no previous messages are compromised and neither are communications with other people. This is what e2e means, and pgp is not that. Also the key or self is harder to crack I think, but i am not sure how strong signals elliptic curve crypto is finished to a 4096 rsa key.
Tldr: pgp is a simple encryption at rest, that can be cracked once and for all. Signal et. All is e2e encrypted and much harder to compromise one and for all.
Have been happy with Tuta
I was pretty happy with tuta, but I just switched to proton for the IMAP/SMTP support.
What’s your objection to Proton? You don’t have to use any of the other products, and the free tier is perfectly usable last I checked (granted many years ago). Not sure what your concern is
Edit: downvoting without replying doesn’t tell us what the concern is. Y’all weird
ProtonMail is good for professional and personal usage. It is stable, it is reliable, will not shutdown, paid tiers subsidise free tier successfully and is treated safe like Gmail/Outlook by email providers. Just not good for activist usage (check Moon of Alabama blog), but 99% of email providers are bad for that.
Plus one for Proton, I don’t use their password manager, but their other products I’ve been using and been pleased with. I consider it well worth the cost.
I just came across this one too, seems rather promising! https://forwardemail.net/en
Regardless of who you choose. Use an aliasing service. It makes moving to a new provider/email address a breeze on the future. It took me days to go around updating all my 200 sites online. If I ever move from proton it will take me 5 minutes to ensure all my sites now go to my new provider.
My only tip would be to create a new domain rather than using a shared one. This will prevent some sites from blocking you from using an alias.
Email alias indeed helps to avoid spam and helps you to assume separate identity per site, but won’t help in any way to stop mail provider/server from processing your email data for user profiling / targeted ad purpose.
Buying email domain and self-hosting is only the full proof way from privacy POV, but it is really difficult target to accomplish. A privacy respecting email hosting + alias should be next ideal choice, IMO.
Self hosting is best if you have the knowhow, inclination and time to maintain it, but there are alias services that will encrypt any mail they forward using a key you provided so this would eliminate the ability of your chosen non-self-hosted email provider/server to easily read your received mail limiting their ability to profile or target to any metadata and header info that is passed along unencrypted.
Of course, then you are placing trust in the alias service’s privacy and logging policies. But some are open source and you could host an alias forwarding service yourself if you wished as well.
Ah! I was not aware of the fact that Alias service can encrypt email before forwarding to actual mailbox.
Check out YUNOhost. It’s an open source operating system for servers which comes with email already set up. You can install it on a cheap VPS or home server and easily manage it graphically via web portal.
If you don’t need anonymity you could just buy a domain with a single email and use your own email app SMTP. I think it’s cheaper than most email providers.
Let me recommend Migadu, as email privacy is kind of a difficult topic. They offer complete email freedom for a very reasonable price; $20 ($10 for students) a year. They explain my main reasoning why I would avoid Proton:
Yeah, there’s a distinct lack of nonsense with Migadu.
I recently switched to skiff from proton as the skiff’s free tier is offering what proton’s mail plus plan. And now they are shutting down their services.
Their free tier storage offering was amazing. I honestly couldn’t see how they could offer so much for free. I was very tempted at the time but chose proton. Although I think I may move to Fastmail when my renewal is due.
We just saw that it wasn’t profitable and the business plan was to find an exit strategy via acquisition
I 💜 Protonmail. I generally like proton as a company.This video has really gained my trust for them as a privacy focussed services provider.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This video
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Proton, Tuta, or mailbox.org are good choices.