Anything better?
I’ve been using mailbox.org, and it’s pretty great. It’s cheap, it’s private, and it works well.
I like the idea of e2ee email, but the way they all work it’s pretty much a completely useless feature for most people, myself included, and I also like using Thunderbird. It’s just not worth the trade off for something I’d basically never get any use out of anyway.
I personally use Disroot along with Thunderbird 😁
protonmail, tuta or guerillamail. i’m using proton, it is great, even the free version
I liked proton. Until they announced their intention to gargle MAGA balls.
Have since migrated to Tutanota
for me migrating isn’t so easy. ppl will be mad at me, they are mad already why i left gmail they can’t reach me
Saaaame.
Another one for Tuta, with addy.io as a proxy service. Nice integration with Bitwarden for making new accounts + it’s simple to make rules based on the to address for easy filtering.
I’ve been meaning to check out Addy.io for a while now, because you’re not the first person I’ve seen mentioning it in threads like this. Your comment was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I’ve finally gone and checked it out. Thanks for including a link in your comment; it helped reduce the activation energy of setting it up
Tutanota?
Posteo + Addy.io + Thunderbird
Mailbox Standard compared to ProtonMail Plus:
- Cheaper (€30/yr vs ~€50/yr; if you don’t need custom domains, €1/mo)
- More aliases (25 on mailbox, 50 on own domain. Proton has 10 TOTAL - why custom domain aliases are counted against Proton ones does not make sense to me.)
- Support for any number of custom domains AFAICT (Proton Plus supports only one)
- Trial account is not allowed to send emails, so fewer issues with services blacklisting proton.me and protonmail.com for spam (hasn’t happened to me, but I have heard of some cases)
- Can use a regular email client (security tradeoff for E2EE messages - but there already were plenty of discussions on whether E2EE has benefits, especially sending mail to other services)
Thanks. I’m on my second year in my bi-year purchase and considering options. Where’s mailbox.org located and what are their privacy policies regarding government agencies requests?
They’re located in Germany and have to fulfill requests, they publish a yearly transparency report about that: https://mailbox.org/en/post/transparency-report-2024
If you’re using a custom domain, don’t use Mailbox.org, see below:
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-custom-domains-spf-dkim-dmarc#comment-1524
Dovecot + Postfix + SpamExperts
If you do this it’s good to use something like mxroute as an SMTP server so deliverability is their problem.
Can I ask what client you prefer?
I dislike thunderbird and roundcube.
Proton, but I’ve been questioning that of late :-/
Someone mentioned Tuta…
I was looking at moving to Proton as this all went down. Those plans are on hold.
After reading through it, I am having trouble figuring out how to read his comments because I wonder if there is some different cultural references or simplification going on between the Swis exec and American readers.
It was absolutely a stupid comment and was then the response was handed badly, but I don’t know that I read it as aligning with Fascism.
This is the best writeup I can find: https://archive.ph/2025.01.29-213655/https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
Thanks for the link. I was about to extend my Proton mail subscription to the full monty, but backed out when I saw the original incriminating post (which did surprise me, based on what I thought I knew about them). The writeup does offer a compelling argument for that one post having been taken a little too far in todays tribal political environment.
Yeah. I am not ready to move to Proton quite yet, but this doesn’t feel like it was intended the way many Americans are reading it. They also have posts like this (not from the an executive I think, but official) that don’t sound like getting in bed with the government: https://proton.me/blog/trump-controls-nsa-fbi
All that is to say, I am planning to give this a little longer and see what else happens, but I have not ruled out Proton yet.
i get it… its still a quality service despite that one shithead exec
But the shithead exec is supportive of fascists which means privacy is secondary to the desires of the current regime. That’s just a standard part of fascism. And if the current regime is allowing untested backdoor code to be inserted in the Treasury department and NASA and the CDC and most major social media to strip out protections for people they don’t like, climate change, etc. Just imagine what someone who actually supports them ideologically would be willing to do.
I think the more punchline phrasing for it:
Fascist = wants to have control over you.
if you distance yourself from every company that has a dick executive, youre going to need to go off-grid. good luck.
I distance myself from companies run by people who say or explicitly support people who say that I don’t or shouldn’t exist. There are a few other things that make me distance myself from companies, but that one is a pretty hard line. (I’m gender “non-compliant” and on the Autism spectrum among other things that have been explicitly said don’t exist, shouldn’t exist, or need to be “cured”). Otherwise, I try to distance myself from any companies who explicitly collect and sell my information and other things that I find problematic, but that’s not always possible.
Keep fighting the good fight!
(I’m trying to be encouraging, but obviously finding a baseline decent mail or other tech provider shouldn’t have to be a “fight” …)
People on all social media really can’t seem to understand that the choices aren’t exclusively “everything has a perfect open source, non-profit utopia” and “fuck it, everyone is corrupt so it doesn’t matter what service you use.”
You are able to do what you can, where you can, to mitigate risks and try your best not to support fascists. Especially when there are a dozen alternatives.
Then again, maybe people are just arguing in bad faith.
CEOs != everyone
Using the official company social media to double down on what the CEO said = company policy = how company will act
Can you explain what happened/what they said
Well, the latest development I’ve seen is they’re deleting (censoring) comments calling out the political bias of their CEO on their post about how they’re fighting against censorship:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/1ij4qn9/behind_the_scenes_of_proton_vpns_fight_against/
Here’s an evidenced account of part of what their CEO asserted:
This is what the CEO posting as u/Proton_Team stated in a response on r/ProtonMail:
Here is our official response, also available on the Mastodon post in the screenshot:
Corporate capture of Dems is real. In 2022, we campaigned extensively in the US for anti-trust legislation.
Two bills were ready, with bipartisan support. Chuck Schumer (who coincidently has two daughters working as big tech lobbyists) refused to bring the bills for a vote.
At a 2024 event covering antitrust remedies, out of all the invited senators, just a single one showed up - JD Vance.
By working on the front lines of many policy issues, we have seen the shift between Dems and Republicans over the past decade first hand.
Dems had a choice between the progressive wing (Bernie Sanders, etc), versus corporate Dems, but in the end money won and constituents lost.
Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.
Source: https://archive.ph/quYyb
To call out the important bits:
- He refers to it as the “official response”
- Indicates that JD Vance is on their side just because he attended an event that other invited senators didn’t
- Rattles on about “corporate Dems” with incredible bias
- States “Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses” which is immediately refuted by every response
That was posted in ther/ProtonMail sub where the majority of the event took place: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i1zjgn/so_that_happened/m7ahrlm/
However be aware that the CEO posting as u/Proton_Team kept editing his comments so I wouldn’t trust the current state of it. Plus the proton team/subreddit mods deleted a ton of discussion they didn’t like. Therefore this archive link captured the day after might show more but not all: https://web.archive.org/web/20250116060727/https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i1zjgn/so_that_happened/m7ahrlm/
Some statements were made on Mastodon but these are subsequently deleted, but they’re capture by an archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250115165213/https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503
I learned about it from an r/privacy thread but true to their reputation the mods there also went on a deletion spree and removed the entire post: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1i210jg/protonmail_supporting_the_party_that_killed/
This archive link might show more but I’ve not checked: https://web.archive.org/web/20250115193443/https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1i210jg/protonmail_supporting_the_party_that_killed/
There’s also this lemmy discussion from the day after but by that point the Proton team had fully kicked in their censorship so I don’t know how much people were aware of (apologies I don’t know how to make a generic lemmy link) https://feddit.uk/post/22741653
I hadn’t seen all that. I may have to move my services again
You can search lemmy for keyword email, and 99.99% of recommendations will be better than Gmail.
Wait, you can search keywords on Lemmy?
I dunno, I mostly use Jerboa on Android, as far as I know Jerboa can only search for communities, unless I missed something or perhaps need to update Jerboa.
Jerboa doesn’t have all the features, including searching for keywords. You can choose other app richer in features from here, or use web UI.
Buying your own domain.
You can then use whatever provider, or host your email service… but at least you don’t need to change addresses when switching anymore.But then you need to do spam filtering for ages
If your mail server supports aliases, you can make one for each site you sign up for. Then if you start getting a bunch of spam, you can delete the alias and you will know which site sold your information.
What to do with that info tho, damage already done no?
Yes and no… say if you gave the email address lemmyworldthingy@sgarcnlsdomain.com when signin up and you start receiving garbage on it, you just delete the alias and move on.
The trick is that you can have several aliases go into the same inbox so you only have to check one place, but each thing is given its own IP making it easier to identify and filter culprits.I suppose you mean IP in the allegorical sense in terms of ip filtering to email filtering.
Its an interesting thought!
You know not to trust that site with any more information. Once the alias is deleted, anything sent to it will result in a delivery failure and you won’t get any more spam from anyone they sold that address to.
This is the way.
I started doing this, maybe 15 years ago, but if I look through my spam folder now, most of it is to the email address I used before I began using unique addresses (the rest is to random addresses in my domains that I’ve never used).
My hypotheses from that are that
- there is probably less ‘selling of email lists’ going on than we think
- I’m less interested in dubious internet sites than I used to be
- or (most likely) these days, your internet thing has to be offering me some real value if I’m going to consciously give you any of my data.
Not all providers let you use your own domain.
Not all providers deserve your business.
Just make sure your domain registrar is renewable from an alternate email in case shit hits the fan you don’t want to be locked out if something interrupts the service and bow your email doesn’t work and you can’t verify who you are… because… your email doesn’t work.
Speaking from experience?
That seems rough.Luckily no, but someone else on Lemmy has had this happen. It sounds like it would be a very bad time haha.
How can I learn how to set this up?
The basic steps are:
- Register a domain of your choice
- Select who you are setting up your email with (plenty of different providers, Zoho has a basic free plan that would be suitable for a single domain and only a few users at most; Google, outlook etc. also sell services for custom domains)
- Configure the DNS records for your domain to whatever your chosen email provider says (MX records to point to the mail server and some records for DMARC & DKIM to prevent your email being spoofed)
- Test it all works and start using it
I’m not going to write a full tutorial so if it sounds interesting I suggest you do more research. The email hosting is typically focused at businesses as they are most likely to be wanting to host email on a custom domain.
MXRoute is what I use as my domain’s email server and it’s good enough. The included browser email clients (it offers multiple) are sort of trash but if you just use your own it’s perfect. It’s pretty cheap too
Tutamail, they have direct access by fdroid too
mailbox.org and posteo are my recs
Really liking mailbox.org so far!