Proton is seeming sketchier lately. What alternatives do y’all have in your back pocket? Especially for email, but really any part of the suite.
You must log in or # to comment.
Migrated to Tutamail a year back when Proton announced their attention to gargle MAGA balls. No complaints.
Biggest complaint is email encryption doesn’t work for shit for non tuta people. They kinda fucked everyone by not supporting pgp
I honestly haven’t sent a single message to someone using pgp though, I rarely send emails at all. If I’m not mistaken, pgp can be used by any email carrier right? You’re just sending text and you decrypt it using a different program.
The decryption needs to happen client side, so that doesn’t work with these browser based email providers, unless they add support for it.
Also, proton has a public facing endpoint where you can enter the email address of any of their clients, and it will give you their public pgp key. Literally every proton account has one, even if the owner doesn’t know it. That allows me to send encrypted emails to every proton user encrypted, and it “just works”
With other email providers, I first have to ask the user for them to send me their public key. And >90% of the time, they don’t know wtf I’m talking about.
That’s why proton is the best (unfortunately). We need an alternative that “just works” like this.
If you use proton, you’re probably sending and receiving emails encrypted with pgp, and you don’t realize it. That’s the beauty. It happens automatically
I was looking at tuta as a proton replacement. Can you expand on what you mean? Does this mean the receiver can’t read the email or that they can but it won’t be encrypted?
In short, they can but it won’t be encrypted.
Whereas if every tuta account had a pgp key and they had a keyserver so anyone could download a given tuta account’s pgp public key, then anyone with pgp (eg anyone at proton) could send you an encrypted email, and it would “just work”.
What happened with Proton?
They REALLY need to oust the CEO…for starters.
More CEO foot in mouth problems.
SoSDD
Incredibly toxic CEO puts on a good face in public, but when a developer raised security and privacy questions (in a notoriously security and privacy focused company), the CEO publicly called him out, calling the idea “bullshit and loser thinking.” Further anecdotes came out from 9 current and former employees about the toxic culture.
“The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now,” an employee is cited as saying.
That’s really sad, but seems to be par for the course these days.
Kagi Mail is coming soon.
I changed to Nord last night for VPN service. I had heard a lot of good things about Mullvad, but an article I read showcased some speed comparisons where Nord was typically 2-4x faster. So far so good but it’s been less than 24h.
Mulvlad had its own problems: https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.html
If folks are looking for a VPN I’d recommend Air VPN. Activisty and one of the few that still have port forwarding.
Bruh isn’t Nord Israeli?
Edit: it isn’t but it’s still one of the worst VPNs out there for privacy as they keep logs
mullvad’s lead is similarly questionable—he recently donated a bunch of money to a swedish fascist. personally, i’m going to ride out the remainder of my annual plan and then switch to ivpn afterwards.
The company reacted by distancing itself from his personal donation, and emphasizing they promote tolerance. They also pointed out that they can’t control what groups individual employees donate to.
They can deny it all they want, it still means customer money is ending up in the pockets of the extreme far right. I personally am not comfortable with that, so I switched to IVPN.
Posteo
I’ve used fastmail since I de-googled during lockdown.
I’ll second this. Here’s my setup:
- E-mail - Fastmail
- Contacts - Fastmail
- Calendar - Selfhosted Radicale w/ custom notifications
- Storage - Home server with sftp access
- Document editing - Libreoffice
- VPN - Mullvad (general), OpenVPN (local network access)
- Mobile - GrapheneOS
- Browser - Firefox vanilla w/ uBlock Origin
My contacts and calendar are accessed via CalDav, with all calendars showing/editable on Fastmail.
Nice, slick, and Google-free.
Very similar to my setup.
I use Fastmail’s calendar and it can sync with my work schedule.
Still on Android. Afraid to brick my only phone with low funds.
Desktop browser is LibreWolf w/ Ublock, Bye Rupert to block any sites owned by Rupert Murdock, and Privacy Badger form EFF. There are several more privacy ones but I’m sure no one cares.
Mobile browser is DDG.
Just a head up on mullvad in case you are unaware, the cofounder donated a shitload of money to the far right political party in sweden. I dropped them for airvpn and havent looked back.
I’ve seen that, and thought a fair bit about it. Thing is, there has to be balance. I could have kept running from one service to the next, seeking one that perfectly aligned with my values, but that’s a lot of expense, both in time and finances. I wanted to pick one that met the majority of my needs, and let me sleep at night. I’m not one to make a knee-jerk decision based purely on emotion.
I decided to go with a high quality provider, and reviewed their responses to this individual’s donations. I like how they dealt with the matter, and remained impartial, despite the fact that VPNs are very political, in general.
Is it the right decision? Not sure. Does it fit my threat model? It fits like a thrift store jacket that just happens to be the right size.
Seconding mailbox. It’s a nice no bullshit provider so far.
E2E encryption is a bit of a distraction on email. You’re not emailing people on the same provider most of the time, and if you actually need privacy just use a purpose built communication system. With that in mind, it just comes down to something that is in a jurisdiction that you’re ok with, and has values you care about.
While you’re at it I recommend getting a custom domain if you haven’t. It’s not much extra work, and will make it easier to switch in the future.
Custom domain 100%. And use a catch all so you can use any address on it, and give a different address to every service/place.
That should work with most providers, but I made Port87 to make that super easy to manage.
The best thing about doing email that way is no matter how great a provider is now they can always turn shitty, and like you said, this setup makes it super easy to switch.
I tried the different address for every service thing and found it way too much hassle. I think at the very least having only one you tell the actual humans in your life is important.
It normally is a lot of hassle. I tried to make it very easy with Port87.
Wonder how long these alternatives will last for people who aren’t happy with this current state of affairs…
I needed email for more than one domain, and proton just became too pricey.
I’ve been on purelymail since. No fancy encryption at rest and proprietary clients. Just cheap simple e-mail.
The arbitrary limit on the number of domains is what made me stop using Proton; I use mailbox.org now and haven’t had any issues with it
Disroot
Check out Infomaniak, they seem to make good on Proton’s promises.
Looked good until they advertise their Video Conferencing as secure, and then the fine print at the end says end-to-end encrypted calls is off by default.
That’s not like proton or mega, where it’s not possible for you to make a call that lacks end to end encryption.
Makes me loose trust in them.
I’m hosting my own 🤷🏼♀️
Have been for some years actually. Has been great so far. E2E isn’t really a thing with emails anyways, unless you do PGP encryption and signing, which you should be able to do with any half-competent client, including when hosting your own.
Idk. I get it’s not for everyone.
Ive been pretty happily using tuta for email and bitwarden for passwords.
As best I know nothing has happened to make me regret going with tuta, which is nice. It just handles my email
Tuta is flirting with AI too
Everything I found when I did a search suggests that is not the case- can you elaborate or provide a source?
Edit: comment thread someone linked to in another reply says they have a code commit co-authored by Claude, so I assume thats what they’re talking about
They’ve been clearly flirting with that, and there’s that commit.
If you look through the replies they seem to be engaging pretty sincerely with peoples concerns to me, and explicitly say there are pros and cons even to careful intentional use.
I don’t lose a lot of respect for them for the way they’re handling the issue in that thread, at least for the moment. But thats just me 🤷🏻♂️
Does it have a cloud service?
Can you elaborate on what you mean?
Proton did a package thing. Multiple emails, fake emails fed in, VPN, and cloud. Out of Switzerland instead of the US. What else does that?
Yeah, tutanota isn’t that. Personally that works better for me but I can understand feeling like nothing is a drop in replacement
I’m not here to be like an ambassador for tutanota or anything, its just what I use and I’m fairly happy with it 🤷🏻♂️
What are the spam filters like?
Honeslty I haven’t used them, unless they’re there and working as intended. I never really get miscellaneous spam, except from people I gave my email to, and I just unsubscribe from those
Fuck tuta until the add pgp support. Until then, they’re not a replacement for proton.
Why is pgp so important? To be honest I dont really use it for the encryption, I just dont want my data being collected and sold. But thats just my use-case
you guys have created a new bigtech company
I use migadu. It’s the closest you can come to running your own mail server without rubbing your own mail server. You must bring your own domains and you can create as many different mailboxes as you want.
