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.
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Posteo
Kagi Mail is coming soon.
Disroot
Wonder how long these alternatives will last for people who aren’t happy with this current state of affairs…
you guys have created a new bigtech company
After looking into it quite a bit myself, the ones that seem most promising are Mailbox, Posteo, Tuta and Fastmail. I’ve tried all of them except for Mailbox and they’re all pretty solid options.
Each have their selling points, so I would recommend taking a quick look at all of them before deciding. Posteo for example is really cheap unless you need loads of extra aliases and storage, but does not support custom domains. Tuta does not support third party clients. Fastmail is kinda expensive, but gives you more storage than the others and some extra features. Mailbox seems really similar to Posteo to me in a lot of ways, but has more features in their more expensive plans.
Tuta does support Thunderbird as client.
Ehh… It has a plugin that lets you run their web client from within Thunderbird. To me that doesn’t really count, but maybe it does for you and all power to you if so.
Edit: Typo
I’m thinking of how to leave proton ecosystem.
And luckily this time I’m not using as much features as I was with Google.
For the password vault, I will try this : https://www.aliasvault.com/
Mail and Drive : https://www.mailo.com/ 1,5€/month with 20 Go of storage.
I was thinking to get a domain name and use it with mailo.
For the mail alias, maybe this one. It’s free and unlimited : https://duckduckgo.com/email
For the VPN, I’m still weighing if I will pay a subscription.
And for the rest, I already have something : Photo > Immich selfhosted Calendar/Contact > radicale selfhosted Authenticator > Aegis
With all the shady VPN providers out there, and considering they have access to all your online traffic, I think it’s a service worth paying for.
True, do you have a suggestion ?
For android with split tunneling.
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.
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.
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
If folks are looking for a VPN I’d recommend Air VPN. Activisty and one of the few that still have port forwarding.
Mulvlad had its own problems: https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.html
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.
Edit: also it wasn’t just some employee, it was one of the founders of the company.
Currently working on that too. I mainly grieve over their mail and password management services. Bitwarden would be a solid ProtonPass replacement but I‘m considering hosting Vaultwarden on my tailnet for more independence from cloud storage.
E2E encrypted mail is very annoying because no one else seems to offer a bridge like proton so I‘m considering using a classic provider with a privacy commitment and just archiving locally to keep the bulk of my mails to myself. Mailbox, Tuta and others do offer similar mail experiences though.
I’m not sure I trust bitwarden these days since they sold out to a private equity firm, (temporarily) removed forever free from their website, and I believe still changed GRIT to include innovation and trust instead of inclusion and transparency. I switched over to KeePass + syncthing
Yeah, when a company’s new owners tell you who they are, you’re best off believing them. And it doesn’t get much more… transparent than removing “transparency” from their company values.
And replacing with trust of all things
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.
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.
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.
What happened with Proton?
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.
They REALLY need to oust the CEO…for starters.
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.
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.
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
