I’ve got a couple of e-mail addresses with the main providers, but I’m looking to switch to an ad-free and more secure provider.
I’ve been looking at ProtonMail, but what do you guys use or recommend?
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I’ve been using Proton Mail for a while, it’s been good for me.
Is the free tier truly free? The saying, “if a product is free, you are the product” comes to mind.
It’s covered by paying users. I’m one and happy to have my subscription cover Anyone who wants a free, private email address.
It is, they can’t access anything it’s all encrypted and truly private to you. My only problem with the free tier is that there’s a signature at the bottom saying it was sent with proton mail, which isn’t even a big deal you just have to remember to remove it every time you send something. That and the 1 gig storage limit fills up quicker than you’d think.
They
can’tdon’t access anything…Email comes in from everywhere unencrypted via SMTP. Proton may be a great company, but let’s make sure everyone recognizes that email (without E2E PGP) is inherently open to anyone in the chain, including at Proton, who’s snooping.
I could’ve sworn Proton used e2e encryption (with other proton users I suppose) and that was part of why it didn’t integrate well with third party tools. But yes, even if it is, the majority of people/services that you email aren’t e2e encrypted so it’s very important to remember.
Yup! That’s their implementation of E2E I mention above, should have been more specific there.
External users with PGP, or internal users of Proton mail stay encrypted. The other 99.99% of emails come in unencrypted until they are saved to the inbox.
They do have e2e for emails. Any emails between Proton Mail users are always e2e encrypted, as are any emails others send you which they’ve encrypted with their own maio client. If someone sends you an email unecrypted (most email is), then Proton will encrypt it for you and put it in your inbox. They can’t read it after that, but there is some trust required that they don’t store/look at the unecrypted email before then.
As far as I can tell, yes. I signed up for the free tier before paying for the service, and the worst I ever got was a banner here or there advertising their paid service. Proton encrypts all your data with your password, so they literally can’t access it even if they wanted to. The only info they have on you are things like when you logged in and your IP address (and I believe they’ve turned that info over to law enforcement when required, like any legitimate company would have to do), but their servers are in Switzerland where there are better privacy laws.
I used their free email for years with no issues
I went to the trouble of creating a custom domain and pay for that service and I have no problems with it. I subscribed at the level that gives me the VPN which works very well and blocks most ads and trackers.
I’ve used Mailbox.org for years as a service that replaces most of my Google services at once. I know you just asked for email and Mailbox is worth checking out.
I can vouch for Mailbox, too.
It’s also easy to get it set up on third part email clients.
+1 for mailbox, have had their 1€ tier for a year now, definitely worth it. Works great with ThunderBird and K-9 Mail.
Fastmail. Proton is too limited and has terrible search
I’ve been with Fastmail for a year and it’s always been a very positive experience. Good support. If I had to pick a weak link, I think the spam filtering could be better.
I’ve not actually had any I don’t think, although one thing which is marked as spam… Isn’t. I don’t seem to be able to prevent that one email going there, it’s irregular though.
I’ve been impressed with Fastmail. I also use Tuta, which is pretty cool (but I barely use it).
I’ve been pretty happy with Tuta. I just have a free account, but it does seem like it has pretty good features and phenomenal security.
I switched from Tuta to Fastmail. Tuta was mostly fine, but being restricted to only their client was really annoying. I can use Fastmail with Thunderbird/FairEmail/etc just fine.
I get what Tuta is trying to do with encrypted email, but IMO they’re better off joining up with Fastmail on better specs that allow for the things they want to do, instead of limiting what email clients you can use.
The inability to use my own client was the deciding factor of why I did not go with Tuta when I was email shopping. They’ve got good features and a fair price but that one decision is a serious turn-off imo.
I roll my own. Postfix, dovecot, spamassasin and dmarc friends. Easy to setup? No. But takes about an hour/year of my time to maintain once the ball is going.
do you happen to have done guide in place, or some docker compose I can look at?
mailcow is by far the easiest way to self host email: https://docs.mailcow.email/getstarted/install/#initialize-mailcow
Be aware that it’s significantly easier to host on smaller trusted hosting providers. Hosting this on cloud providers like DigitalOcean is almost impossible without getting blacklisted.
Haven’t used Mailcow in a while, but personally I found https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver better at the time. Great docs, many features.
I’ve never heard of mailcow specifically, but I was intentionally avoiding all-in-one packages when setting up. Life has proven that good things aren’t easy and easy things aren’t good.
And so far I’m happy with that decision - setup is modular, was already able to extend it with postfwd, dual dkim signatures (rsa and ed25519), mta-sts and some other policy I can’t recall right now.
I’ve also specifically wanted to run as little code as possible that’s exposed to the internet - as such, I chose to not have webmail.
I also hosted my mail directly with Postfix and Dovecot back in the day before the all-in-one packages were a thing.
mailcow has reduced my yearly maintenance from a few hours to a few minutes. Addtionally it runs in Docker, meaning each service is fully isolated and it can be updated with a single command and without headache. Also includes a really handy web interface to configure each of the services, it even does 2FA if you are worried about security.
Have been running it since before it was using Docker and have 0 complaints, it always works and always improves.
Happy it works for you!
I’m running it on arch so that I never have to go through big upgrades. Been over 5 years now - so far, so good!
In regards to docker - it’s just a container. You can make any executable run a container. I quite like a lean system myself, though.
I don’t, but I could probably come up with one next weekend.
The best option is https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver
I’ve tried them all, and this one I super-easy in comparison. Great documentation and just some ENV variables and you’re done. Happy to share my compose file with you if you want.
I use it with my Active Directory hosted with https://github.com/Fmstrat/samba-domain for users, but it has many different user options.
I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with Posteo. Their features list is very good for the pittance they charge per month.
I agree. I also use Posteo. Their privacy policy and website seem to be one of the most sane ones. They also allow you to use external email clients.
im just overwhelmed by the endless flood of minor services that leach “a dollar here… a dollar there”. add them all up and they drain you dry.
skip some and you lose essential coverage. "just $2 more a month… i swear bro! "Posteo isn’t a monthly charge to your credit card. It uses a credits that you can top up whenever you feel like it. I usually put in a year’s worth of credits in advance which costs me around $17CAD.
I’ve been paying for Tuta for a couple years, and like it. I have my gmail forward to it just in case, but these days have basically completely switched, and barely ever get any legit emails forwarded from my gmail anymore.
Addling a vote for Fastmail. It’s great, priced right, privacy centric, has wicked 1Passwold integration (including disposable email addresses) and nerdy features for those who want them.
Personally I use Hey but that’s because imma snob.
I’ve come to the end of my patience with hotmail/live, my email is out there on a list so I get tens of spam mails a day and they almost never correctly identify them, but any new service I sign up to and it goes straight to spam.
Proton mail seems expensive for a single offering and the bundle has too many unnecessary things I don’t need. Also the lack of protocol support means you are restricted on clients you can use.
I’m pleased you posted this as I’m going to give all these a try too, but I’m becoming a pessimist and I’m thinking as soon as I’ve fully switched they will put up the price. Your personal email is becoming one of the hardest things to change.
My top priority is the ability to have individual addresses for each service I use going to a single inbox, that way if my email is leaked by a company, I can just nuke that alias, and I’ll know who leaked it. May be a good feature for you too?
Register your own domain! Pick a paid email service that supports it and then you never have trouble moving to a new provider again.
If you get an email provider that does a catchall then you can just make up emails on the spot and any email to any address on your domain will pop into your inbox.
I get simplelogin with Proton and I love that too, generate new email addresses that can’t be tied to you but all go to your one inbox.
BTW your concerns with Proton are valid and it can be annoying not being able to use an alternate app for mobile.
What is the most privacy focussed way to register a domain these days?
last time I did it was about 20 years ago and they pretty much just put your home address and telephone number in a Whois lookup.
It depends specifically on the registrar as to whether there is an option to hide those details.
However, many places offer domain privacy services, where they put in their addresses and forward on any contact. Such as https://www.namecheap.com/security/what-is-domain-privacy-definition/
After a Tuta vs Proton comparison, I went for the first because of their use of renewables, and I’ve been there for over a year now after fully ungoogling. Their search kind of sucks, but I feel they focus on creating a safe service with neat features, so I’m staying. I also combine it with SimpleLogin. Awesome service!
This
Obligatory Eylenburg link https://eylenburg.github.io/cloud_comparison.htm
I’ve been using Posteo for a while now. They have the most sane privacy policy out there. They also support IMAP and POP3 ootb for external email clients, unlike some other email providers (e.g. Protonmail).
I also use Posteo, one thing to note though is that Posteo doesn’t (and probably won’t any time soon) support custom domains. If that doesn’t bother you, it’s a great choice.
The other alternative I found during my research, which doesn’t have that limitation, is mailbox.org.
I’ve always heard fastmail as the go-to for personal domain email hosting. They’re the go-to for almost everyone I know who doesn’t just setup forwarding to Gmail.
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