Anything better?
A couple months ago, I would have said Proton. But…
Here we are.
What’s up with Proton?
I never trusted them 100% so I never paid for their services and didn’t really follow up with their privacy and stuff. Just used their free services from time to time.
Wants you in their slow web UIs. Requires a middleman application just to use IMAP—which requires payment. Paid plans are pretty expensive if all you need additionally is CalDAV/CardDAV many will offer for $2 or less a month instead of $5.
…& these are gripes before the right-leaning heel turn.
disroot and autistici have been providing decentralised communication services (like email) free of cost for many years. They are both run by activists and survive on donations, and they don’t spy on you or get any money from your data. Also they run freedom-respecting software, so all their code is publicly auditable.
Proton, but I’ve been questioning that of late :-/
i get it… its still a quality service despite that one shithead exec
But the shithead exec is supportive of fascists which means privacy is secondary to the desires of the current regime. That’s just a standard part of fascism. And if the current regime is allowing untested backdoor code to be inserted in the Treasury department and NASA and the CDC and most major social media to strip out protections for people they don’t like, climate change, etc. Just imagine what someone who actually supports them ideologically would be willing to do.
if you distance yourself from every company that has a dick executive, youre going to need to go off-grid. good luck.
People on all social media really can’t seem to understand that the choices aren’t exclusively “everything has a perfect open source, non-profit utopia” and “fuck it, everyone is corrupt so it doesn’t matter what service you use.”
You are able to do what you can, where you can, to mitigate risks and try your best not to support fascists. Especially when there are a dozen alternatives.
Then again, maybe people are just arguing in bad faith.
CEOs != everyone
Using the official company social media to double down on what the CEO said = company policy = how company will act
I distance myself from companies run by people who say or explicitly support people who say that I don’t or shouldn’t exist. There are a few other things that make me distance myself from companies, but that one is a pretty hard line. (I’m gender “non-compliant” and on the Autism spectrum among other things that have been explicitly said don’t exist, shouldn’t exist, or need to be “cured”). Otherwise, I try to distance myself from any companies who explicitly collect and sell my information and other things that I find problematic, but that’s not always possible.
Keep fighting the good fight!
(I’m trying to be encouraging, but obviously finding a baseline decent mail or other tech provider shouldn’t have to be a “fight” …)
I think the more punchline phrasing for it:
Fascist = wants to have control over you.
Mailbox Standard compared to ProtonMail Plus:
- Cheaper (€30/yr vs ~€50/yr; if you don’t need custom domains, €1/mo)
- More aliases (25 on mailbox, 50 on own domain. Proton has 10 TOTAL - why custom domain aliases are counted against Proton ones does not make sense to me.)
- Support for any number of custom domains AFAICT (Proton Plus supports only one)
- Trial account is not allowed to send emails, so fewer issues with services blacklisting proton.me and protonmail.com for spam (hasn’t happened to me, but I have heard of some cases)
- Can use a regular email client (security tradeoff for E2EE messages - but there already were plenty of discussions on whether E2EE has benefits, especially sending mail to other services)
If you’re using a custom domain, don’t use Mailbox.org, see below:
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-custom-domains-spf-dkim-dmarc#comment-1524
They’re a little swift about locking accounts for spam suspicion. They did so to mine before I had sent a single mail and demanded I contact them through the (locked) mailbox.org mail to resolve it. Had to dispute the charge with my credit card.
My vote goes to Migadu. Slightly complicated UI, but it all works, and they don’t lock accounts before they have seen any indications of misuse.
Runbox is OK too, though they don’t support bouncing inbound mail based on recipient address, so less useful with your own domain.
Thanks. I’m on my second year in my bi-year purchase and considering options. Where’s mailbox.org located and what are their privacy policies regarding government agencies requests?
They’re located in Germany and have to fulfill requests, they publish a yearly transparency report about that: https://mailbox.org/en/post/transparency-report-2024
One of the biggest benefits with Mailbox.org is that you can create lots of aliases and trash mail addresses. Killer feature for me!
How about Tuta mail with a custom domain? They have unlimited custom domain addresses which is pretty nice
I’ve been using Tuta for damn near a decade, and it’s been great for me.
I just got an account and had no idea it’s that old
Existed since 2011
Everything is better ;-)
i.e. mailbox.org, posteo.de; there are also protonmail and tuta.com, but they don’t have IMAP
I use mailbox.org, my 2 points for it were:
- it has IMAP support, so I can use whatever client I like
- for “normal” people it doesn’t sound very strange.
tuta
Perhaps an indirect answer, but I’m using a duck.com forwarder whenever i need to give any address, these days. On top of tracker filtering and random alias generator, once i change addresses I’ll only have to update the forwarders destination.
This dude compare quite a lot of email providers in term of privacy. I do not necessarily agree with all its critics but it is a useful resource:
https://digdeeper.neocities.org/articles/email
I would recommend to buy your own domain in case you need to change again. That way, you’re not trapped by your email provider and you can change in case you’re not satisfied anymore
By any means, do you have a Riseup invitation code?
Nope, sorry. Have you tried asking on the privacy space ?
If you really wanna get started with your own domain I highly recommend just getting https://purelymail.com/ setup for the hosting provider. It’s going to be way cheaper than just about anything and you pay for what you use. I’ve been on it for a few years and never had a problem.
mailbox.org and posteo are my recs
Really liking mailbox.org so far!
I’ve been using mailbox.org, and it’s pretty great. It’s cheap, it’s private, and it works well.
I like the idea of e2ee email, but the way they all work it’s pretty much a completely useless feature for most people, myself included, and I also like using Thunderbird. It’s just not worth the trade off for something I’d basically never get any use out of anyway.
Another one for Tuta, with addy.io as a proxy service. Nice integration with Bitwarden for making new accounts + it’s simple to make rules based on the to address for easy filtering.
I’ve been meaning to check out Addy.io for a while now, because you’re not the first person I’ve seen mentioning it in threads like this. Your comment was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I’ve finally gone and checked it out. Thanks for including a link in your comment; it helped reduce the activation energy of setting it up