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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Chose “free” as in paying with data or pay with money. Hosting a reliable email service is not simple.
Not free, but I’ve found great value with purelymail.com. Cost is $10/year or there’s a calculator for advanced pricing (basically AWS costs forwarded).
If you provide your own domain, you can have unlimited email addresses. If you use a provided domain, there’s no predefined limit, but abuse will be stressed by the developer.
If you lose the master account’s password the admin cannot reset it for you, which indicates a strong commitment to privacy.
Because it’s paid, no activity requirements, phone number requirements, or invitations.
It has one of the best terms of service pages I’ve ever read.
10/10 review of purelymail as a 2 year user.
Cost me $20 so far. Because the service is just a service, not a massive ponzi scheme. We need more devs like the creator!
+1
Just started using purelymail and it’s great.
There is also i2p mail
Disroot matches your requirements minus the additional criteria.
I second disroot. Been happy with their service.
Sounds like mail.yandex.com should work for you. It’s the Russian copycat of gmail, basically. But they allow anonymous signup with a “don’t have” option for phone numbers, and they have next to no trackers on the website. That ones they have are easily blocked.
Yandex is pretty much as evil as Google but on a smaller scale. I appreciated it for allowing easy burners, but recently I have not seen options to register any new account without a phone number.
I’d be wary of yandex
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-6851/Yandex.html
The problem here is that lesser known services and/or software they use could have just as many if not more problems, yet be completely unknown to everyone because it’s simply not as popular, so people aren’t looking at it to find issues.
All of those are for the yandex browser, which is a dedicated app.
deleted by creator
These guys are running a very cool email option.
https://www.autistici.org/
Now, I do believe that they will probably close unused accounts, so there’s that. However, as far as I know, there is no other option out there as private as this one. If there are, please share with us as well.
Imagine the assumptions someone would make about you after receiving mail from such a domain lol
The domain in mine is paranoici.org, so it’s actually pretty accurate 🤣
cock.li but it doesn’t encrypt your inbox so keep that in mind.
They require an invitation though, correct?
not anymore
Thanks, didn’t know they had changed. Been a long while since I looked at them
IDK about each specific requirement (especially the “inactivity” one, but … dude, just log in every 6 months), but I’d say a lot of “privacy” email providers should meet your needs.
Try looking into Proton mail (warning: you’ll have to setup a local relay if you need IMAP/SMTP) or maybe search the web for something like “privacy email provider free” and look into the results.
ProtonMail’s free tier?
They are good, but do not meet the ‘does not delete for inactivity’ requirement. They delete after one year.
The dude who made this site believes in the “great replacement” and that the Covid vaccines were a psy-op to modify people’s dna and make the sheep slave people.
:/
Maybe due to his paranoia his privacy advice might be good lmao. But still. Wow.
Sounds like your best bet is to self host an email service
If checking their email a couple of times per year is too high a requirement, I would not recommend the time and effort necessary to maintain a mail server. Even people who enjoy self-hosting often do not want to host a mail server.
And for good reason
Yup.
Buy any domain name, doesn’t matter what. I pay 15 dollars a year for mine. https://gandi.net
https://mailu.io/2.0/ is pretty turnkey
https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver has a lot more customizability and you can chain together stuff like encryption, spam filtering, auto replies with an AI agent. However those are all other containers you’ll have to add into your environment.
https://jzweig.com/blog/setup-your-own-email-server-with-docker/ Is a really simple how to
Whatever you do, pay close attention to your SPF, DKIM and DMARC
https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/dkim-dmarc-and-spf-setting-up-email-security/
Edit: OP asked for free, secure, and doesn’t get taken down for inactivity. If you want to do that and pay as little as possible, with the most security, you’ll have to self host. Otherwise you should pay for the service, or deal with the data brokers that offer free email. In capitalism, unfortunately, there is no free lunch.
Suggested to OP and others that self-hosting email is easy and reliable is a bad idea in my opinion.
Instead I suggest the OP to let go of the “free” requirement. There are at least three email providers that provide email for 1 Euro a month including a few email aliases. Another option is to find a web hosting company that also provides email with web hosting. For example Gandi used to do that though I read they made some changes with their hosting options.
I could not agree more. Self hosting is fairly easy for pretty much any need, once you get the hang of it. But self hosting email servers is inherently hard and requires too much maintenance. I tried, did, and then dropped. It’s a real pain in the ass.
has no one heard the phrase beggars cant be choosers?
so many people demanding ‘free’ AND… like thats just something that should exist.
If you actually read OP post, they are not asking for the moon and… definitely non “demanding” anything.
meh. semantics. my point stands
That sounds a lot like “doesn’t matter what words actually mean. I am right nonetheless”.
…but I’m sure you’ll have some personal definition of “semantics” that will allow you to say you are still right, just like you could say “beggars can’t be choosers” in a context where no one is a beggar and there are in fact lots of viable choices.
Love this response, I’m saving it for later.
k
Tuta.io maybe
As far as I know they delete the account if you don’t log in for a few months.
True, I wasn’t aware. Free accounts get deactivated after 6 months without login. They can only be reactivated using a paid account and the correct credentials.
Woah, easy, man, you’re asking for too much with such requirements
I mean, without the additional requirement Proton may be sufficient.
Will delete your account due to inactivity. Could ask for a phone number in some cases
Ah yes, true. But it is a whole year, so you’d only need to login once a year.
And what would be a situation where you have to enter a phone number? I only know it’s optional for account recovery.