A couple months ago, I would have said Proton. But....
Here we are.
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
What’s up with Proton?
I never trusted them 100% so I never paid for their services and didn’t really follow up with their privacy and stuff. Just used their free services from time to time.
Wants you in their slow web UIs. Requires a middleman application just to use IMAP—which requires payment. Paid plans are pretty expensive if all you need additionally is CalDAV/CardDAV many will offer for $2 or less a month instead of $5.
…& these are gripes before the right-leaning heel turn.
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.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.
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.
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.
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
Not all providers let you use your own domain.
Not all providers deserve your business.
This dude compare quite a lot of email providers in term of privacy. I do not necessarily agree with all its critics but it is a useful resource:
https://digdeeper.neocities.org/articles/email
I would recommend to buy your own domain in case you need to change again. That way, you're not trapped by your email provider and you can change in case you're not satisfied anymore
By any means, do you have a Riseup invitation code?
disroot and autistici have been providing decentralised communication services (like email) free of cost for many years. They are both run by activists and survive on donations, and they don't spy on you or get any money from your data. Also they run freedom-respecting software, so all their code is publicly auditable.
I was looking at Tuta after the whole proton CEO thing, but these look really interesting. Thanks
Just leaving my vote for fastmail. They are wicked.
I really like and use fastmail.
Although I have just started to try to completely de-google. Its a bit frustrating that they don't offer an apk download. I put in a ticket today saying as much.
They seemed to understand,but basically just said that all I can do is to use the browser version.
I'm using aurora store to download their official google play version for now but it feels icky.
They are obviously now the only ones that I am having trouble with but I thought that they might be more willing to help people distance themselves from Gmail and Google, as Gmail is their obvious competition.
The Fastmail app itself is mostly a wrapper around the web app with integrations for notifications etc. Sans notifications it works perfectly as an installed PWA on Android. Ive been using it like that for months.
Alternatively there are lots of IMAP apps available. I was testing Thunderbird for Android recently and that works pretty well too.
Disclaimer: I work for Fastmail. But any opinions I have on here are my own.
I use the FairEmail client
ahh aurora store is perfectly fine. I use it with an anonymous session. I think there should be sites that let you download the APK directly, but you wouldn't get updates.
It's probably fine to use one of these methods, just don't forget to update. 😁
I was with fastmail for more than a decade.
They're the best platform.
Their spam protection is so-so. Not as good as Gmail but better than some others.
Their pricing is egregiously expensive.
Their tech support is painfully slow for anything above chatGPT level.
I will always recommend Posteo. https://posteo.de/en
Besides the lack of custom domain support Posteo is cheap and great. Stellar support team.
I thought that was a problem too, but then I realized I use email aliases (and basically everyone should too) and Addy.io and other alias services support custom domains. I have a custom domain working great and use Posteo.
I have also been very content with Posteo.
I'm using Infomaniak Mail and am fairly happy so far. They are based in Switzerland and I get custom domain + 5 user accounts for 1.50 EUR/month. I've tried other providers but coming from Gmail I like that their webmail displays email conversation like Google does whereas most other providers just run rainloop or roundcube where threading support isn't quite the same.
Their android app is open source too and can be installed from fdroid. It can be a bit sluggish sometimes though, but K9mail/Thunderbird works fine too.
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)
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
They’re a little swift about locking accounts for spam suspicion. They did so to mine before I had sent a single mail and demanded I contact them through the (locked) mailbox.org mail to resolve it. Had to dispute the charge with my credit card.
My vote goes to Migadu. Slightly complicated UI, but it all works, and they don’t lock accounts before they have seen any indications of misuse.
Runbox is OK too, though they don’t support bouncing inbound mail based on recipient address, so less useful with your own domain.
One of the biggest benefits with Mailbox.org is that you can create lots of aliases and trash mail addresses. Killer feature for me!
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
Posteo + Addy.io + Thunderbird
Perhaps an indirect answer, but I'm using a duck.com forwarder whenever i need to give any address, these days. On top of tracker filtering and random alias generator, once i change addresses I'll only have to update the forwarders destination.
I've been using Tuta for damn near a decade, and it's been great for me.
I just got an account and had no idea it's that old
Existed since 2011
Are there any good free alternatives to Gmail or do all the good ones cost money?
I assume so since Gmail makes all its money selling YOU…
tuta
As someone just barely scraping by month to month, I needed something free and Tuta was the answer. 1gb is not bad at all, and a good choice for someone starting their degoogle journey.
If you really wanna get started with your own domain I highly recommend just getting https://purelymail.com/ setup for the hosting provider. It's going to be way cheaper than just about anything and you pay for what you use. I've been on it for a few years and never had a problem.
Proton, but I've been questioning that of late :-/
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 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.
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
How about Tuta mail with a custom domain? They have unlimited custom domain addresses which is pretty nice
Everything is better ;-)
i.e. mailbox.org, posteo.de; there are also protonmail and tuta.com, but they don't have IMAP
I use mailbox.org, my 2 points for it were:
- it has IMAP support, so I can use whatever client I like
- for "normal" people it doesn't sound very strange.
+1 for Mailbox, it also supports your own Domain to use
Get a domain and set up a provider with custom domains such as Purelymail
I personally use Disroot along with Thunderbird 😁
This, just plain old mail.
mailbox.org and posteo are my recs
Really liking mailbox.org so far!
I'm actually busy setting up my own mail server. On my own infrastructure, using public static IPs etc. I'm done with all these other mail providers. I'm going back to the start.
Tutamail, they have direct access by fdroid too
I've been moving over to Fastmail. Easy to use, tons of features, great price. 👍
Also quick tip regardless of which provider you end up on: Register a domain name for yourself and use it for your email address. This way if you want to change email providers again in the future or even host it yourself, you can take your domain name and addresses with you.
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.
Tutanota?
One option i haven't seen mentioned is Startmail. They also have a searh engine that's okay.
https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver
cracked it for me
What hardware is needed if you want to run this cheap and quiet? What you are using?
I recommended looking up the problems with self hosting a mail server first. Just go with Tuta imo, its cheaper and easier.
Zoho
Surprised this isn't mentioned more because it's one of the only true alternatives for all the google feature-set.
My only complaint is that, unless you pay for more users, all emails towards your custom domains end up a single mailbox (your [email protected]) i.e., you don't get separate mailboxes in the "lite" plan. Not a deal breaker for my use case, though.
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.
I use Migadu with my own domain
Migadu
+1 for Migadu. Their basic plan (more than enough for most people) is extremely cheap. No vendor lock in. And their support team is by far, the best I've encountered.
Can you share more info about it? Why did you choose it, any pros or cons? It's the first time I've heard of it.
I like that Migadu gives you a ton of control over your email experience. You can create unlimited users, have unlimited domains, create unlimited aliases, sending identities, they have custom routing features, etc. The backend/management panel seems like it was made with techies in mind. The actual email users don't have to worry about any of those knobs though.
What are people’s thoughts on using Apple email? I was thinking of switching from Gmail.
Do you mean iCloud Mail? I assume it is as secure as all the other iCloud services themselves. Personally, I don't use iCloud (except for the "Find my" feature). But you can set up any third party Email service with the Apple's Mail app. I use Mailbox.org as email provider and have it set up with the Mail app on my iPhone. It works flawlessly. Third party email providers often come with additional costs (the lowest tier with Mailbox.org was 12 € each year when I switched from a freemail provider a couple of years ago). I don't know if iCloud Mail is free of charge, other than additional storage space.
@nicerdicer exactly, the only real #privacy gains with web-based providers is if you trust them, or if you personally encrypt all data locally and use PGP
I suggested #tutanota and #proton, because they do all the local encryption stuff for you, so, technically, they are a bit more private than the others, although you still kinda have to trust their web (or use their open-source apps only)
Yes an iCloud email. I have an iCloud subscription already and I also use the Hidr my Email feature a lot. But everything right now is forwarded to Gmail.
So I’d like to just switch completely over to iCloud, maybe even have a hide my email for every account I have. I feel like Apple is one of the safer ones to go with because as far as I know (maybe I’m wrong) they aren’t in the business of selling user data.
I want private and safe, but also simple and easy. I wonder if Apple is a good balance here.
Do you mean an @icloud.com address?
@thoughtcrime I don't think that provides much more privacy per-se, at least when compared to GMail. I would try @Tutanota or @protonprivacy , although the latter have had some PR drama recently
Yes an iCloud email. I have an iCloud subscription already and I also use the Hidr my Email feature a lot. But everything right now is forwarded to Gmail.
So I’d like to just switch completely over to iCloud, maybe even have a hide my email for every account I have. I feel like Apple is one of the safer ones to go with because as far as I know (maybe I’m wrong) they aren’t in the business of selling user data.
I want private and safe, but also simple and easy. I wonder if Apple is a good balance here.
Dovecot + Postfix + SpamExperts
+1 for postfix.
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.
The Spam Experts inbound filter is quite efficient at preventing spam and allows you to manage which domains have permission to send emails to your domains. As for the client, I usually check emails from my mobile phone, and since I have Android, I use K9-Mail, which for me is the best option available. There's also FairEmail if you're interested in trying it. For desktop computers, I generally use Roundcube; I think it's fine for basic needs. Occasionally, I also use the email integration from Nextcloud, though I can't remember the client's name. Thunderbird has improved significantly in recent years, and I think it's a good alternative. I have also used Mailspring, which is open-source, although there was a part of it that I wasn't completely satisfied with.
purelymail, or if one guy running email by himself makes you feel uncomfortable, migadu
Migadu is like two guys running email? 😂 no 2FA support
two guys running email?
Is it? I can't tell from the about me. It says "In 2014, two of us, Michael Bruderer and Dejan Strbac, started...", but nothing else on the page talks about the size of the company. It started as two people, but is it currently two people? Anyone know?
no 2FA support
The webmail client does have 2FA, but when connecting via client there is no 2FA. Although, not sure what this would look like. Would you enter a TOTP every time you want to connect to the IMAP server? Or do you mean more like an OAuth2 flow, like Gmail, and that asks for your TOTP?
I actually haven't gotten around to playing with purelymail. Not sure if they handle this differently. What service are you thinking about?
Imap doesnt support 2fa.
IMAP protocol as well email clients do not support second factor authentication for the mailboxes. Even if they did, IMAP connections are made way too often which would make authentication unusable. Imagine needing to enter your TOTP token every few minutes. We could enable 2FA on the webmail, but IMAP/POP/SMTP accesses remain unprotected which beats the purpose. We are working on solution here which will allow sand-boxing a username/password pair to a webmail use only. We do offer so called App-specific passwords via mailbox identities though. These are commonly touted by email providers as 2FA. They are not.
My problem is the whole change of address thing. Unfortunately google had perfect timing when they offered a decent amount of storage. It was early enough that changing email was no big deal and late enough that soon it would be. I very much don't like this because if google like just went dark all of a sudden it would be a bad day. Yeah I know its unlikely to the xtreme but still. I know privacy people do not like this idea but I really would like the government to run an email where all citizens are guaranteed one. To me this would make it much easier to have an official one and other emails. I don't get why folks are ok with corporations doing it and trust that they will use safeguards but don't trust the government would. The US postal service is a good example. Laws were well made to protect mail to the point where one way of safeguarding things from police searches was to put it in a stamped envelope. Man I wish our current society and government would be doing things like that again.
If you're willing to pay money for it, you can get your own domain for $2-$15 per year, then use it with pretty much any commercial email service. That way you can change email providers without changing your address.
This is my plan going forward. I'm going to suffer the inconvenience of changing my address, but only one more time, not every time I want to change providers.
Thunderbird?
Protonmail
Did you miss when its founder sided with Republicans (the current ones, mind you) or are you ok with it?
