Edit: I made a mistake, I meant to add Mailfence instead of Fastmail, but forgot to update both the icon and text
Hey everyone, here’s a follow up to my previous post, I tried to summarize all your suggestions and these are the options I have for the main Proton products I’ve been using.
I removed Bitwarden based on your feedback (basically they’re enshittifying).
I’m not including Tuta, because I dislike their UX/UI, also they seem to not apply their LLM policy to their own devs.
I’m not including Mullvlad, because of one of the founder’s donation to a far right political party in Sweden, said founder has a blog post to justify this, which links to another blog post where he claims to be a libertarian anarchist which is just another word for Ancaps which is a dealbreaker for me.
A lot of people recommended using one’s own domain for email stuff, I forgot to mention I do have a custom domain, which will make migrating a lot easier indeed. Just need to update my accounts credentials.
Let me know what you think!
What ever happened to Tuta mail? Is that bad?
OP already mentioned in their post:
I’m not including Tuta, because I dislike their UX/UI, also they seem to not apply their LLM policy to their own devs.
I recently made a post asking for email providers, and no one has yet mentioned Mailfence, I hadn’t heard of it until seeing this post. What are people’s thoughts on it?
i had enough struggle to convince my friends to switch away from google, im sure as hell not getting them to switch again. especially not when i am the one paying for the family subscription
I think it’s fine. Proton is still better than big tech. I want to move away from Proton for myself but that’s because I am not tied to an address (custom domain) and am happy to do the switch. I would still encourage Proton over big tech for regular people. We do the best we can do.
I’m confused… If you’re the one paying for it, why do you need to convince them of anything? They can come along or pay for their own services.
it was unfortunately worded. the reason they switched at all is because im paying. if i stop paxing they will just switch back
That’s their prerogative.
Just a question, is there anything wrong with just KeePass?
No, but you need to backup/sync it yourself
I meant non-XC KeePass. You have to back up XC manually as well. But I think I saw someone saying something bad about KeePass without XC or DX and I’m curious now.
I do love Posteo, but they explicitly do not support custom domains, as said in their FAQ. However, it is very strongly anti-AI, and has strong ethics that I think anyone in your situation would agree with.
For VPNs, I love AirVPN a lot, though I hear it can be rather slow. For me, I personally use it for downloading Linux ISOs as well as getting past wonky internet connections and it works really well for those use cases. From what I could see, Xeovo also seems to be torrent-friendly as well.
I’ve recommended Aegis to close family and have used KeePass (as well as XC and ChiPass, which is an AI-free fork of XC) in both a personal and professional capacity. I will have a look at AliasVault though, as I would like to move away from BitWarden myself.
yep, that’s my connundrum right now, posteo also seem to have a more generous offer for cheaper (than mailbox)
I wish there was a good one with custom domain support, unlimited aliases and good filter for tagging/moving to folder so I can move from same sender based on title
Privacy first
So, guys, I’ve had a pretty great experience with GMail, from a small company… they index the Internet, whatever that means. Anyway, the sign up is free and and I don’t have to bring a domain… again, not sure what that means, but it sounds nice.
It sounds perfect, I sure hope they’re not evil or something
It’s funny you should mention that, because they go out of their way to specifically say that they aren’t!
“Don’t be evil” seems like an aspirational sentiment rather than a reflective one. Like an addict writing “don’t do drugs” on their todo list.
Guess they should have aspired harder.
I believe 'em. Especially after they bought a co called “doubleclick”. Not sure what that is, but they probably invented double clicking with my mouse buttons. Or sth like that. No way an evil co would be giving us stuff like that.
Also, the storage they offer increases constantly in real time. There is a counter on their page if you wanna check.
I don’t see Mozilla Thundermail making any of these lists, so if there are concerns, this is the place to say why. It’s still beta, but I got my invitation only 2 days after asking, so I’d say it’s viable in that regard.
Looks like they became an advertiser via acquisition of anonym, removed the “we don’t sell your data” promise and switched from claiming “the best privacy” to “always protected” and updated their privacy policy, although the article I read didn’t cover what specific problems were introduced, just said that it was concerning. source
Thunderbird is technically separated from Mozilla to my understanding
Great wiki resource, thanks.
I second this question. I only found the email storage (30GB?) a bit small.
Also, does Surfshark VPN have anything going against them?
the marketing budget of a military coup nation state is totally not suspicious at all.
I try to avoid vpns that have to pay people to advertise their services
I wouldn’t trust a proprietary VPN, so I’d remove Xeovo. As someone else mentioned, Obscura uses Mullvad servers as the exit node. Not recommending Mullvad is fine and I’d do it too, but then recommending Obscura is weird.
Fastmail while an excellent product, is in a jurisdiction with “dubious” rules. I would give Tuta a second chance. Infomaniak is also a good alternative.
Tuta is going straight against their own policies on Ai, hard disagree on that 2nd chance. You might just as well do that with Proton then.
True, why not? it was clear that the people that work at proton were competent enough to raise the issue and make it a public discussion, I wouldn’t throw them away that easily.
That’s absolutely true
That’s my mistake, I meant to add Mailfence instead of Fastmail, but forgot to update both the icon and text
Fastmail is in Australia. correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t the Australian government basically backdoor every product hosted in their country? wouldn’t that be terrible for privacy?
No backdoors that I’m aware of but they do comply with the law: https://www.fastmail.com/policies/transparency-report/
That’s my mistake, I meant to add Mailfence instead of Fastmail, but forgot to update both the icon and text
KeePass can do TOTP, it’s better to have a separate database for those for obvious reasons, though.
Caveat: Right now keepass doesn’t really like working with multiple vaults. We also need keepass app to realize that totp is in another
castlevault.
Tuta enjoyer here. Shame you don’t include them.
Anybody know what the deal is for encrypted mail between mailbox.org and proton?
I’m looking to shift my proton over to mailbox. But I have lots of friends on proton, mostly b/c I recommended them to! And realistically, I am not gonna convince them all to move again. Some have onyl been on proton a few months.
I think proton-to-proton email is E2EE. I’m wondering if various others like mailbox that use pgp under the covers, cooperate to pgp between themselves too. Am I losing anything, if my friends stay on proton and I move to mailbox?
Email server to server might be TLS-ed most of the time anymore. But that’s not E2E.
Proton has a page on How to use PGP with Proton Mail, including instructions for using it when emailing non-Proton accounts. If your friends follow that and you setup PGP properly in mailbox it should all work.
Great list! Thanks for compiling this. AliasVault looks promising.
What are the suggested alternatives to Proton Drive?
People mainly suggested either NextCloud or Filen, or you can self host with a NAS too
Worth noting for example Mailbox.org offers some online storage so you might find an interesting combo if you need both
It’s interesting that Filen mentions you might not be able to use the free starter plan if you’re on a VPN when you register. Wonder why they are keeping track of that? Abuse prevention maybe, but it’s weird they do it that way considering they sell a privacy-focused product.
Tresorit
Yubikey -> Nitrokey
How so? I always liked that yubikeys could not be flashed with firmware updates. Makes them impossible to compromise if a bad actor gets access to it, so in don’t have to worry about it being on my keychain 24/7 even through malicious government security checkpoints. And I don’t want it for passkeys or other single factor sign on because you should always use 2 factors of differing types (something you know, something you have, something you are). So yubikey with the smaller form factor and relatively great durability has always been my choice.
