Anything better?
A couple months ago, I would have said Proton. But…
Here we are.
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.
In bed with fascists
And not subtly like banks were back in WW2. Straight up endorsement.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Not all providers let you use your own domain.
Not all providers deserve your business.
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 will always recommend Posteo. https://posteo.de/en
I have also been very content with Posteo.
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.
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
One of the biggest benefits with Mailbox.org is that you can create lots of aliases and trash mail addresses. Killer feature for me!
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.
if you distance yourself from every company that has a dick executive, youre going to need to go off-grid. good luck.
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
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” …)
I think the more punchline phrasing for it:
Fascist = wants to have control over you.
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.
How about Tuta mail with a custom domain? They have unlimited custom domain addresses which is pretty nice
Just leaving my vote for fastmail. They are wicked.
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.
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
mailbox.org and posteo are my recs
Really liking mailbox.org so far!
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.
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
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.
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.
