I’ve moved almost completely to Proton Mail. I expect I’ll end up keeping a Google or Outlook account, not for use as a primary account, but as a recovery account or to access other services.
I currently see a lot less value in the google account than outlook, but that’s because my family does need access to full blown office. Libre office does 98% of what I need, but on occasion I do need office. An install of 2010 would probably meet that requirement as well. Firefox is set to delete cookies on exit, and I do not ever stay signed into these services.
Does anyone else keep free service email accounts around, and if so, what do you use them for? What’s the pit-fall I’m not seeing if I try to restrict them and treat them with the Principle of Least Privileged model?
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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I keep an Outlook.com account to communicate with Microsoft. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesars.
I still have an outlook for Minecraft
That’s it, that’s all I use it for
Youtube is powerful, halp
RSS feeds are what set me free, and they’re actually much more reliable, YouTube can’t seem to create working subscription notifications.
You can create a rss feed for a youtuber ?
Yes. Just go to their channel page, right click, view page source. Search the source code for channelid=(long string of letters and numbers)
Put this into your feed reader: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=(long string of letters and numbers)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/feeds/videos
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Do you need an email for it? I thought you could still use it without being logged in.
But your recommendations don’t sync between devices
Ahh, got it. That’s a feature I never used.
Nope, deleted my google account a year and a half ago. I have my own domain that proton handles for me so i can do like “finance@mydomain.com”, or " catchall@mydomain.com" and those are automatically sorted into their own folders.
I still use an outlook email. Since most email (which is unencrypted during transmission) pass through microsoft server anyway; unless you are emailing another protonmail account, but I have yet to see another one of my contact using protonmail.
Also protonmail’s UX is honestly pretty bad, since I have a work email not from proton. So I will need two email client on my phone, unless I selfhost a bridge on a server that I can connect to from everywhere.
Thank you! I rarely see talk about how shit their app is. I signed up somewhat recently and it’s dog slow on Android or the web portal. It’s just a hot mess. I’m currently testing Fastmail and the UI and performance is much better. I do understand there are some lacking privacy features with FM though, so still messing with it.
I’ve done the same as you, switched mostly to proton. I keep my 14+ yr old google account only in case there’s something I’ve forgotten to switch over, but I only access it through a separate browser I specifically use for that purpose.
Same, but I have all mail forwarded to my Proton mail so the trackers are blocked when I open the mail.
I have an old gmail account that I don’t use anymore. It’s only used to modify Google Docs that people send me since i help a nonprofit association and people use this.
My email is in a paid account somewhere else.
Honestly email is the last frontier in privacy I haven’t been able to reform in my life… can’t self host since it’s a lot of work and trouble. And you gotta trust that companies will do the right thing with your data
An important first step that you can do before any “real” selfhosting is to get your own domain that you control. That way you can more easily switch providers (or start selfhosting) later on without having to distribute the knowledge of your changed email address to all relevant contacts and services.
I’m still using Gmail (lazy and it works), but I’ve switched fully to using only email addresses on domains that I own.
It is only a lot of work to set it up. Once done, though - just keep renewing the domain and applying updates to the server. ~5 moneyunits/month for the server and ~10/year for the domain. Get in touch if you’re genuinely interested - I can give you a hand.
Out of curiosity, I’ve heard that emails being undelivered is a huge problem with self hosting as well since it gets flagged as spam. Is this something you’ve frequently encountered?
Also I appreciate the offer for help and will definitely consider it!
I’ve only really had issues with outlook rejecting email when I had DKIM config messed up, but it’s been fine the last few years. I’ve emailed friends, companies, their support endpoints - it’s worked well. There are penalties for new domains and new IPs used within the domain, but they go away in a week or so.
I just use google as an account to collect spam emails if something asks for an email and I don’t want to give them something proper with a password that I actually plan on remembering.
This is basically what I do too. Other times for sites I barely use I concede to my laziness and use “Sign in with your Google account” when I don’t really want to hand out my Proton email