After Andy Yen’s endorsement of the orange utan, I would seriously reconsider using any Proton product.
Yen tried to backpedal meekly several times since then, to get out of the pickle he got himself into with his definitely-not-impressed customers, but it’s a bit late for that: either he’s pro-Trump or he’s naive. Either way, he makes Proton sketchy.
Idc if I likes Trump or not (even though Trump is garbage); but I do care that he says the Republicans - the party that has spent years attacking encryption and privacy, who has sued to obtain private medical records of women and trans people who see doctors, and who is funded by billionaire big tech moguls - is the better option for privacy.
Also just taking ANY position for a leader of the US - one of the biggest parties to the Five Eyes agreement - just leaves a bad taste.
Do you have any recommendations for someone who just uses them for email?
I’m a happy mailbox.org user
I use them too. Their web ui and app are totally ugly crap but if you use it with thunderbird or another mail app it’s good.
Just switched and couldn’t be happier. Now I can use FairMail as a client and loving all the extra features.
I used a custom but generic sounding domain name which made the switch pretty seamless.
I’m only missing tag support on emails from them. In my ever growing archive, I came to realize, that tags are better suited for organizing than folders.
Ideally I would archive in yearly folders and also tag as much as I can.
I’ve been using Tuta for more than 8 years now and had one serious issue with their service during this time (longer outage, pretty early on). Other than that I have nothing but positive experience with them.
They’re also based in Germany if that makes any difference.I was debating between proton and tuta, but I was able to get first.last@tuta so I’m happy that worked out now.
We can only hope they won’t screw up as well in the future.
I have last@tuta.com and its a 3 letter last name, very cool.
I’m happy Posteo.net user.
German and secure email service.
But unfortunately the web frontend isn’t quite as good, so if you are dependent on something like this then don’t use it.
I’ve been a Runbox customer for many years. Never had any problem with them. They’re located in privacy-friendly Norway.
Tutanota
Seconded, but they just go by Tuta now.
I made it, so I’m obviously very biased, but I think it’s better than Proton. It’s got some really useful organization and anti-spam features.
The labeling idea is pretty interesting, an email service with inbuilt proxy, but your website is pretty light on details. Stuff like pricing or custom domain support is absent.
Good point. I’ll add that.
I’m working on custom domain support right now. And pricing is pretty straightforward, since I only have extra storage and sending options. You get 500MB for free, and the ability to receive email. Sending is $1/month. I put that behind a paywall to prevent spammers from using Port87. As a small email service, if you send spam, the big players can blocklist you and kill your service. So, keeping my SMTP servers’ IP address reputation high is really important.
You can join the Discord to follow along with new features and updates:
“…join the Discord…”
Aaaaand I’m out.
Posteo is good. Have been using them for 2 years now.
I’ve got an account with tilde.club
They even have a newsgroup service for the tilde community. It’s not full on Usenet and there aren’t any hosted files, but it’s a nice community feature.
You get a gigabyte soft cap (three gig hard cap and a week grace period to get back to soft cap) but it actually talks to google, for the time being, and I’ve been making an attempt at migrating to the point of using gmail as a ‘talking ot my republican family’ and ‘spam’ account.
I think im going to try it out. I dont like where proton is going.
https://tilde.club/signup/ https://tilde.club/wiki/faq.html
Remember. This is a hobbiest community. Personal recommendation is using tilde.club for emails, and spread your other needs across other tilde servers.
Yes commandline interaction is required.
Save your SSH keys not just on your computer but in a couple other secure places. If you have to pull them from backup, remember to reset the file’s permissions otherwise SSH won’t like them. Setting up a password backup is very helpful here especially since that will let you use your mail address with apps such as k-9 on android, or claws/thunderbird/outlook for desktop.
oh yeah def. Im going to donate if/when I take a look. sdf also has something similar.
SDF’s been, in my experiance, less sure? I don’t want to talk trash about what is effectivly pubnix’s grandaddy. I’m going to put money in the pot because I want that place to keep running, but i view it more as curiosity than cornerstone.
Migadu!
Any alternatives for their VPN service with port forwarding?
Mullvad (or Mullvad on a router with Adguard)
Private internet access is nice
Just did the transition off Proton! Most replacement self hosted in my homelab except for email.
There is not and never was any endorsement of Trump. I wish people would stop spreading such wild disinformation.
He also never backpedaled.
Here is the tweet - if that’s not the most flagrant Trump bootlicking, I don’t know what is:
And here is the backpedal:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/
Believe what you will. I believe what I read.
I wouldn’t call that boot licking. Maybe a misguided opinion.
I think he internet mob went a little hard on this one.
A perfectly guided opinion. You do get why the CEO likes Trump and left the fediverse while staying on Twitter, right?
Looking at the board of directors for the proton foundation, I’d say people are jumping to conclusions way too fast about proton.
I don’t like that they’re ditching Mastodon to focus on reddit. But, it makes sense in a marketing perspective. Reddit has a LOT more users, and potential customers. If they indeed don’t have the resources to manage both then Reddit is the best option if they want to attract more people as customers. On Mastodon they’re pretty much preaching to the choir.
Here is the tweet
I know exactly what you’re referring to.
if that’s not the most flagrant Trump bootlicking, I don’t know what is
I agree, you don’t know what is. Agreeing with a single decision someone makes is not an endorsement. But that’s exactly the kind of irrational dichotomic reaction I expect from society these days.
And here is the backpedal
I don’t see anything here that could be construed as backpedaling. If he were smart he would have, but if anything, he doubled down several times.
I believe what I read.
You didn’t read that, you made it up.
It’s kind of stupid to say that Republicans aren’t the party of big business anymore. Both parties are parties of big business.
If you want to claim it was a stupid thing to say, I will agree with you 100%. If you want to claim that it was a tacit endorsement specifically of Trump, you are just wrong and spreading disinformation.
“No you don’t get it! Supporting trump isn’t really supporting trump! Just bc the CEO likes Trump’s policy and endorsed him doesn’t mean he endorsed him!”
Normal people don’t jerk off Trump like that. Dude is blatantly a Nazi, if you can’t see it that says a lot about you
“Anyone who disagrees with me is a Trump supporter and a nazi!”
See, I too can make up things that you didn’t say and put it in quotes and pretend like you did.
I’ll sometimes agree with stuff Trump does too, like appointing Tulsi Gabbard, but I’m not going to say this means Republicans have become the party of anti war lol
What’s good about the Tulsi Gabbard here? Unless you just mean she (like all the Trump appointees) is the worst person for the job and it’ll make the country collapse faster lol
You agree with Trump about something?! How dare you, nazi!
Pointing people to reddit, as if that’s an alternative. When a VPN provider makes such bad choices it’s tempting to imagine that the decision was influenced by somebody who wants to secretly get the message out that the company is no longer to be trusted, because it’s hard to see any other logic in it.
We have to wait and see what the next audit is going to find, that will give us more security than any kind of information provided from Proton themselves.
The Swiss laws are also helping to make it so they keep the privacy standards high.
But I would definitely use your own domain for your Proton mail currently
Reddit has a ton of users. Mastodon is marginal.
Privacy usually doesn’t mean following what’s popular.
Lmao k bye Proton
I’m searching for a safe and cheap alternative for my own domain, but it’s hard! And I don’t want to give money to American companies.
tuta.com is great for me so far
Tuta Mail is free for personal use, though you must accept a few limitations. The free edition lets you send and receive all the secure messages you want, and it includes a secure calendar. Searching encrypted email is limited—with the free edition, you can only search messages up to a month old. Paying 36 euros per year for a Revolutionary subscription ($38.65 as of this writing) removes that search limitation, lets you have multiple calendars, and adds features including filtering rules and 15 alias email addresses (more about those later). It also raises the storage for your messages from 1GB to 20GB.
yea I just went with a paid plan right off the bat since I have a custom domain, has been totally fine
Mailbox.org located in Germany and run by Peer Heinlein. You can use your own Domain with it just fine
I been using Canadian webhost hosterbox.com for several years. Been very happy with them.
Namecrane, I think they are Canadian
Ouch! They really are working hard on getting any privacy oriented person to leave them.
I’m glad I have moved away from them.
fleeing to reddit of all place, banning any instance of discourse, much like facebook is now.
Such delicate snowflakes these ceos…
I do think the second part of your statement was unnecessary.
In a normal scenario yes. This is not longer a normal situation. You support Trump? You better start hiding…
Yeah. In my experience babies can be pretty fun people to be around and they have much healthier ways to express their emotions.
on reddit they can pursue sitewide bans more easily on users, since reddit had started doing this month. its to silence all criticism against them, im betting facebook will be thier next stop.
one simple reporting of your acct will get you immediately banned from the sub, and potentially a sitewide ban.
Well this is certainly one of the decisions of all time. I guess we finally got our reaction from the board. I was waiting, hoping to hear some rebuke of Yen’s bullshit. Didn’t expect another intentional step into shit. Bye Felicia.
Proton is really just trashing their rep.
One wonders why the rest of the Proton Foundation hasn’t stepped in and gotten rid of Andy; I assume it’s just because they don’t actually care about privacy, they’re just cryptonerds.
I suggest you give a read to “Privacy is power” by Carissa Veliz (on the board). She also gave a very good interview on the podcast “firewalls don’t stop dragons”.
I also don’t think “cryptonerds” applies to people like Tim Berners Lee.
The problem is they continue to allow Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, to remain on the board.
Yes that’s true, and that seems quite natural. His poor communication in a tweet is not a reason to fire someone from a board, in my opinion. Especially since at the best of my knowledge he didn’t do anything that harmed the privacy of anybody, nor he showed inclination to do so.
In any case, if you find yourself “assuming” that people that have years of track record caring about privacy and similar issue “don’t care about privacy” or “are cryptonerds”, maybe you should reflect a second. This is why I said to go listen to her interview or read her pieces.
Welp, I guess I’m switching to Tuta now.
Everyone recommends Tuta in these threads.
I just (finally) had a look at their pricing. Seems egregiously expensive? 6EUR / user / month for their cheapest business plan is a bit nuts
That’s what Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Google Workspace Starter, and Proton Mail Essentials are all priced at. Seems like the market price to me
I just set up a paid account on Tuta today replacing my paid Proton account.
We really need another Swiss alrernative
Sus af
Gross. I’m slowly moving from ProtonMail to Port87, which is kind of embarrassing because I made Port87 and launched it almost two years ago. Switching email providers is hard though. You have to update everything.
Unless you use a custom domain. That way you only need to update everything once.
Yep. Definitely worth the ten bucks a year. Also it lets you get your own DMARC reports, which can be useful sometimes.
Is there a free DMARC reports analyzer? I don’t want to pay for a premium service (it’s my personal email, after all), and I don’t like Postmark free service.
I don’t know. I just read the XML. It’s pretty easy to read. I’m sure there’s a tool out there though.
From the statement on their webpage: " We believe in people before profits, and our primary shareholder is the non-profit Proton Foundation whose mission is to fight for an open internet that promotes freedom of speech and freedom of information."
Glad I was always suspicious of Proton.
I’m not, they are a bunch of researchers having their servers in the country with the most privacy protective laws in the world.
Sure, criticise them when they do bad things, but what do you propose, google mail (etc.)?
If you don’t have some real information you are just following a gut feeling (which by the way is the simplest to manipulate) and I think that is kind of curious actually.
I like Proton, I have their email & VPN, works like a charm, and their servers are in nuke safe bunkers in the swiss mountains.
The only other company that I have seen that isn’t shady like for sure seems to be Mullvad, I mean if you hate the swiss or something or prefer the swedes …
Hard to claim manipulation when the leadership team is taking a machine gun to their feet.
Something has always felt off. Swiss security is always a red flag, and free is never truly free. Don’t really know who you can trust at this point. Everything seems to turn to shit as some point or another.
Edit: I understand they get funding elsewhere and it subsidizes the free VPN, the free VPN also brings in customers. I thought that was obvious enough not to mention.
On the other hand, the red flag is a big plus.
Their free option is very limited. You need to pay for their services .
Lately, their posts on Mastodon became full of comments questioning their CEO political views. I guess, this is the answer to those, a clear one.
That doesn’t take lot ressource for communication on both social network.
I’ll take a guess that they are going back to Reddit so they can control what gets posted and shown to others. They got railed on Mastodon following the drama, which is probably why they’re leaving.
It depends how they are doing it.
People learned years ago that there is a big difference between microblogs (twitter), blogs (facebook and tumblr), and message boards (reddit). And there are major differences even within those. The post you make for tumblr and the post you make for facebook are targeting very different audiences. Which IS time consuming for a good community manager and is shitty 100 character blog posts for someone’s nephew.
From checking out their bluesky, it looks like proton is pulling out of all the microblogs in favor of just reddit (https://bsky.app/profile/proton.me). Which sucks but is “fine”. And it is likely more that positive engagement on Mastodon was just too low to even be worth multi-posting once every two weeks. Which… is something a lot of not shitty companies have decided to be the case.
That said: I didn’t check twitter because fuck that shit. If they are still super active there then, yeah, ridiculously “sus”.
Thank i didn’t see from this perspective. On mastodon the character limit is very small so i didn’t understand how difficult it could be as i would do the same communication everywhere to stay consistent.
In my opinion, they wanted to avoid the backfire from their ceo supporting Trump.
You’re welcome to believe whatever makes you happy in this post truth hellscape we live in.
But reddit (generally left on drugs, center-right on social issues) tears into them pretty regularly for that. Bluesky seems to be left-center-left-ish and is also a place where people can tear into the account. And while there are much better moderation tools on both platforms, that still doesn’t protect them for the equivalent of a trending hashtag or /all post.
We can only speculate but considering plenty of people have criticized the mastodon community over the past year or so (Alec from Technology Connections being a great example where, if anything, he should be our patron saint rather than the guy who gets harassed any time his posts get surfaced by The Algorithm) AND basically the entire “internet” decided on bluesky… it likely really is just cost cutting and not caring enough to monitor the mastodon account.
Also, it looks like they have a Threads account anyway? https://www.threads.net/@protonprivacy. Which means that the Mastodon users can still follow them? I forgot what the status on federation with facebook ended up being.
