Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I totally recommend tutanota. I use the free.
Can I ask how you deal with it? Free tutanota lacks even the most basic features i.e. offline mode/search. I switched to proton after a month, it was infuriating
I just use it for ordering stuff and for registering to newsletters. It's fine, but yeah sometimes you want to find older emails and it's a pain in the ass to do that, because of the search function.
I really enjoy https://mailbox.org, their custom software can be… esoteric at times, but the company and privacy commitments are top notch, and it has PGP built throughout natively, including an option to automatically PGP encrypt all plaintext emails you receive. I joined it originally as a cheaper alternative to Protonmail but these days I really prefer it.
Also, you can give it out email aliases for work or to other people without giving away that you're actually a conspiracy nut and privacy enjoyer. Much better when it's @mailbox rather than @tutanota or @protonmail
Or you can also not care what other people think. I think proton.me sounds pretty cool. I'm a physicist too so it kinda makes sense. Tutanota allows quite a few short domains; tuta.io sounds a bit funny but it's short enough to not be strange.
When I am forced to give my email for electronic receipts in shops though...it's a full on {shop_name}@handle.anonaddy.me. No issues or weird looks so far.
I tried it but the design just wasn't mine. I switched to protonmail then and it's a great value for the money. Vpn, password manager, files, mail, calender(, contacts)
Proton Mail
Proton just keeps getting better, it seems like they're trying to create a suite to compete with Microsoft.
Email, cloud storage, VPN, calendar and recently password manager.
I do wish their VPN client for Linux was a priority sooner (they're working on it now). Also, I can't get email notifications on my degoogled phone because it uses Firebase for push notifications.
Other than that, I love Proton. I pay for Proton Unlimited, I'm happy to support their growth for a great product range.
Could I ask how you find Proton's search capabilities versus Gmail?
I honestly don't use the search function. Our work emails are through gmail so that's what I primarily use, my personal email doesn't really have too much going on there so I don't really need to do any advanced searching, filters, etc
I'm a proton unlimited subscriber and it comes with proton vpn and simplelogin premium on top of the 500GB email inbox. I'm very satisfied with it. Signing up for lots of things with email aliases from simplelogin is very convenient and useful for cleaning your inbox of spam
Same here but I’m using Firefox Relay instead of simple login. Will check that one out though.
I've made the switch from relay to proton pass aliases. It's great but with relay you can block spam which is not sth that you'll get with proton pass
I'm a Protonmail user (on a paid plan) and like it. The bridge application works decently well on Linux with my desktop mail client. Their 24 month billing plan makes it $3.5/month.
Proton has a great free tier that may work well for you. I've used them for a while now and it's been great. They have what is probably the most feature-complete private email service out there (unless I'm forgetting something). The main nitpick I have with them is how little they focus on Linux, but that applies more for their other services than email.
Proton, Tutonota, or Disroot
Proton. Free tier is fine. Consider using your own domain, cost a few dollars extra.
I'm surprised no one's posted about Skiff.
I think the biggest reason is because it’s relatively new and less tested. Did get approved on privacyguides.org recently, so it’s probably worth taking the 10 gb free storage and give it a go.
Edit: One thing that might be seen as a negative, compared to Tutanota and Proton is that Skiff is based in the US.
After reading comments from their CEO on the protonmail subreddit I'm surprised anyone would use it in the first place. Also it's only E2EE with other skiff emails. They don't use PGP so their email encryption doesn't interoperate with other providers.
+1 on Skiff. E2EE intra- and inbound. Great service, greater support. Free custom domains setup (& catchall aliasing!!!). Comes with a Drive, Pages, and Calendar suite.
Got excited and then immediately sad while reading they were involved in crypto.
Skiff uses discord, so.. idk what I think of that, they also lack support for pgp and are in the us afaik
fastmail
I use proton and absolutely love it!
Not sure how many people know this but there is an i2p mail service too that can work with clearnet and inside i2p. The cleanet is @i2pmail.org and the i2p mail is @mail.i2p .
I have not tried it out in years but just wanted to make others aware in case it fits your use case.
I use Migadu but you need your own domain for that and also it is paid.
I also switched to Migadu recently, because Mailbox.org removed support for own domains from their cheapest package. Good experience (so far) with both.
Another vote for tuta here. Very nice service and having my email @ be tuta.io is very satisfying
Unless you're a seasoned sysadmin, hosting your own mail server is going to be more trouble that it's worth. It's a lot of work, and when that was a common thing (companies having their own mail servers) usually they had dedicated admin teams (when they bothered hiring more than one admin, that is) to run it. It's a lot of work.
I migrated my domain over to Protonmail a couple of years back, and it's the best money I've spent in a long time.
I've been using Fastmail for almost a decade now, and extremely satisfied by the service, privacy, features and price.
If you're interested in signing up for it, I have a referral link (the above one isn't it, I'm not that shady) you can use for a 10% discount on your first year.
Good luck with the search.
I can recommend StartMail. It's from the same company that develops StartPage
If you want access to some underlying knobs and buttons, but without running your own email server, then Migadu might be interesting.
Been using purelymail.com, they’re pretty cheap and trustworthy imo
I recommend Proton Mail if you just want a simple, no fuss email service. It's free with some paid options, but the paid options are super unecessary and pretty much useless if you just use email to sign up and send support emails. Proton Mail also blocks trackers and cleans links in your emails.