Hey everyone,
I have a free protonmail account for years now and will be losing access to my (main) university mail soon. My proton mail is filling up and I will need a reliable personal mail address going forward.
What is the current status with privacy oriented mail providers in the EU? I am willing to pay for my mail service but ideally not too much, protonmail is 4€/mo which is a bit much I think.
What is the general opinion now after some months on the protonmail ceo? Will the Swiss privacy laws cause issues soon? What about tuta and mailbox.org? I think I want to switch to my own domain soon so supporting custom domains is definitely something I look for. Also the ability to use imap and not have a separate app would be good.
Last time I checked half a year ago I found mailbox to be the best compromise but I decided it’s not worth the hassle yet to deal with my mail provider.
posteo
Email isn’t and can’t be made private without something like pgp.
A company that handles pgp for you can be legally compelled to give up the keys.
A company that handles pgp for you can be legally compelled to give up the keys.
Depends on the jurisdiction.
I only know two visble options in terms of credibility and costs per feature ratio: Posteo and mailbox.
Proton should be avoided since their descructive behaviour regarding critique and their baclground. Tutanota is to be avoided since they only support their own client. That leaves us with no flexibility and a smack of something.
Mailbox.org works great with custom domains, not a single problem, most of the functions of larger providers.
It is going to be interesting to see if/when they move to opencloud (from open-xchange) where they have greater control of the feature-set and bug fixes as they are both part of Heinlein Gruppe.
Either way I am happy with them so far, while also having some minor annoyances (syncing of shared task list on iOS is a bit weird, and no IMAP VTODO (combined calendar and tasks)).
Posteo really doesn’t get enough acknowledgment, in my opinion. They’re a great and secure email service that seems to fly under the radar for most people. I recommend checking them out.
I use it too, all the way from New Zealand. It’s ridiculously cheap if you keep your emails under 2 gigabytes.
More expensive than Tuta for a similar offering, but what’s nice with Posteo is you can have a really low lowest tier with €1/mo, if that’s all you need. 👍
I’m personally with Tuta.
The thing that put me off of Tuta is that you cannot use it with any other mail client (like Thunderbird, for example).
That would be nice indeed. They do have their own desktop client, but it should be possible to connect to their servers with some kind of add-on or something. That would be awesome.
Like you I looked for an alternative to Proton and I’ve been using tuta for a couple of years now as my main mail. You can create aliases with your own custom domain. My only non important complaint is that you can’t use other email clients (Thunderbird, K-9), due to their encryption I guess. They are also fairly active in Mastodon.
What annoys me with Tuta is that they make PGP encryption very difficult (they don’t implement it at all, you have to use external solutions, which is made more difficult because you can’t use external clients).
They argue it is less secure than their solution where they send non Tuta users a link and you give them a password. I argue that PGP is something people would use, while their solution isn’t.
Proton does implement it, but I also have my gripes with Proton. Both of them feel like they want to build a walled garden / avoid being inter-operable.
How does that encryption work with mails? They get send as plain text?
Yeah you can’t use it with Thunderbird due to the nature of end to end encryption indeed.
But see also https://tuta.com/blog/2fa-desktop-clients
Custom domain is free on tuta??
I don’t think so and the comment didn’t state that either, but you can use your own domain if you pay
I pay for Proton and I’m very happy with it. I think they need Contact phone integration but otherwise rock solid products. I don’t like the CEO, but generally I hate them all, so I try not to think about that. Their full suite of products has treated me well for a few years now.
Not at all saying the alternatives aren’t better, just sharing my experience.
Fastmail.Com $50/year I have like 10 domians with catchall emails and fastmail provides it own masked email service as well. I have a referral link. But to show how much I enjoy the product I won’t post it here. They included with the $50/yr is static web hosting, A decent amount of WebDAV storage, contacts, calendar and the email.
It’s not encrypted at rest like proton. Buts it’s not gmail. You can bring your own app imap and jmap support.
If you want mail with encryption, Tuta or Proton are your choices.
If you don’t care about encryption then pretty much anything with claims of privacy is going to be pretty well the same.
The are a lot of options with encryption apart from Tuta and Proton.
Then please share a few. No point in disagreeing with me without providing some names and URLs, otherwise what’s the point?
I’m referring to encryption at the provider level, not the client. I’m sure other options exist, but nobody seems to bother mentioning any of them.
I’m saddened that you think me pointing out there are other options is “disagreeing”. I’m just offering the insight to readers of your comment that there are other options.
It’s not difficult to find, if you just search for “email provider with encryption” or similar. Pick your favorite.
The point I was making was that people shouldn’t feel like there are only two options. 🙂 Please don’t take that as me disagreeing with you personally.
I’m referring to encryption at the provider level
So was I. 👍
