A while ago, when one of the Proton CEOs made some questionable statements, I terminated my Proton subscription. I liked Proton, having all the services I need in one place was nice and I wasn’t sure whether I’d actually leave and had a year already paid left.
I thought about at least leaving my mail there, but 4-5€ / month just for mail isn’t worth it in my opinion. And I’m very pissed that mail-forwarding and IMAP are premium features, something I probably should’ve found out way earlier. They want to lock me in, which is a dealbreaker for me.
So with that in mind, does someone know a fitting alternative? I’d of course still prefer a privacy-focused service and would be fine paying <= 2€.
€: Bonuspoints if there are no “special discounts” (discounts for commiting to a longer subscription are fine, what i mean is special deals for new customers or black friday deals, stuff like that)
€€: Going to give mailbox a shot, thanks everyone!
I have been pretty happy with tutamail
I need to figure out how to setup custom domain on it inorder to move my own mails over, but haven’t gotten around to it yet
I highly recommend Migadu, great value and performance, use it with own domains.
2,5€ for Mail + some webspace seems like a great deal, thanks for the suggestion.
Can highly recommend mailbox.org, I’m very happy with their offering, and having a built in PGP Manager makes encryption very easy. As someone else has suggested, I use my own domain with then, and the whole process is really quick and easy. This also has the nice side effect of making your email address a lot shorter than it usually would be
I also use mailbox.org with my own domain. It’s nice that my family can also use the domain with the cheaper light accounts.
If you want encryption, they also support GPG encryption of incoming emails. As a bonus of Proton, you’ll be in full control of the key.
The trick to avoid vendor lock in on email providers is to use ones that let you use a custom domain. This way when you move providers all you have to do is update the DNS records for that domain andall mail will start getting delivered to the new provider pretty much straight away.
I do that, but still keep a proton mailbox for stuff like bittorrent trackers, a whois on my domains doesn’t give out my name, but well…
Still, I recently moved (mostly) off of gmail, and I “only” had to update the aliases to the new address… all 80-something of them
Awesome approach, I’ll keep that in mind.
As one other already mentioned, i would think about getting your own domain and using it with e.g. mailbox.org. That way you become less dependent on the provider, if you wanted to switch in the future.
+1 for mailbox.org, been using them for nearly a year and am quite happy with their service. Do note that their web UI is mediocre so you’ll probably want to use a mail client.
And definitely use a custom domain, they’re super cheap and allow for so much more flexibility (such as dedicated emails for different services).
Do you recommend a specific TLD to use for emails? I have an xyz domain I’m not using but I fear it will get marked as spam. I’d want a domain that is cheap still.
vivaldi, disroot, posteo
Infomaniak.
Free (make their money elsewhere renting web hosting and servers) Based in Switzerland, carbon neutral servers. Offer plenty of other cloud based services.
I use Tuta and it is ok for me, although I can understand @[email protected]’s points. For me, mail is a unwelcome necessity, but not something I use really for anything sensitive and my move to Tuta last year was more about finding an ethical alternative to Google.
same for me. it’s sufficient and easy.
I use Tuta but unfortunately I cannot recommend it for a few reasons:
- They use a proprietary encryption algorithm so you can only a) encrypt emails going to other Tuta accounts and b) use their clients (no Thunderbird etc.)
- They’re glacially slow with feature developments. Case in point email import has been on their list since forever and they only came out with it last year, but it’s still in beta and exclusive to highest subscription tier.
- I don’t find their client very user-friendly.
Good to know, that’s indeed off-putting. Actually made a tuta acc a while back, haven’t used it yet.
I’m using Tuta and didn’t even realize I couldn’t use Thunderbird if I wanted. I don’t currently want to but overlooked the fact it wasn’t an option.
I’m currently most disappointed with their email rules and calendar reminders. Can only create rules to send email to folders or trash - can’t forward or assign labels - and even more bizarre… can’t disable notifications on email your rules are handling. If I send some email to the trash automatically I still get an email notification. And calendar reminders have preset values - various min and hour options - but you can’t customize them. Glad I left Gmail but I miss some of its functionality.
Regarding Proton I’d also make use of Proton Bridge to have a local copy of your mails just in case something goes wrong.
mailbox.org is it for me.
Standard E-Mailing - Use whichever client you want, or the web client, which is also pretty good. They also have custom domain support if you’re aiming for that. I use it like that too.
Calendar: Fantastic, create multiple calendars, subscribe to .ics via web or import .ics
Contacts: It’s just there, and syncs nicely with Android Apps like DavX5 and ICSx5
Drive: 10GB for Mails, 5 GB for Files. Webdav Support. Storage can be upgraded and downgraded on demand as you wish.
They even provide an integrated video conferencing system, so you can schedule calls, have them on demand, or have them created with your meetings, like f.e. Google Calendar or Microsoft Calendar does.Also their office suite is really good. So you can edit, in browser, DOCX, XLSX, ODF, etc, just like you can in Google Drive. I solely edit my Spreadsheets with their online solution, it’s great for 95% of the tasks. (I’m a developer + spreadsheet nerd)
For todos and notes I however go with superlist.com. Subscribed to their Premium version, and once you get the hang of it, it’s really powerful and great.
Not sure what else Proton offers, but Mail, Drive, Calendar, Contacts, Conferencing, light office work and Notes + Todos I can reliably manage with mailbox.org and superlist.com.
Hosting provider. 2€ a month for 100 addresses, custom domain and 10 gigs of (shared) storage at hetzner for example. Website possible as well.
How about fastmail? I’m on a demo account with them right now – with the exception of some relay restrictions that are especially annoying, it seems a good option, but I’m not familiar at all with them.
i love fastmail. i’m with them myself!
but you should be sceptical of them as far as privacy goes. they’re australian, and australia had a law introduced in 2018 called the AAA act which means that security agencies can compel technology companies (like fastmail) to implement circumvention mechanisms in their products… employees targeted by such orders may not even be able to tell their employers, let alone customers
oh also, no judicial oversight for any of that
I’ve been testing Forwardemail.net as my use case also involves being able to run mailing lists as well as personal and transactional email. I plan to switch over completely once they have set up servers in the EU, something they announced late last year and are actively working toward.
