this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Privacy
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A provider having more than 50 users and offering more than one service doesn't make them evil. Use Proton. They are the best, and they're not likely to disappear. If you intentionally seek out small services because you think being an underdog is some sort of privacy merit badge, you'll get "absolutely fucked" over and over again.
Also, you should consider paying for the products you use to encourage sane and user-friendly business models. But that's a different discussion altogether.
It’s not about “using an underdog”, I just like “do one thing and do it well” philosophy you know. I don’t need drives, calendars, vpn, password manager, in one thing. I want a simple email provider that’s it.
Yeah skiff wasn’t like that but it seemed not too push it as much, just “hey it’s there you can use it” not full on products. Maybe I’m just being stupid about it idk
You can simply ignore all of these other features. Proton offers an email-only plan.
True… People also recommend having your own domain so I can switch easily in the future. Having my surname seems a bit… un-privacy-like lol Any recommendations for that?
Paid subscription of Proton bundles SimpleLogin, an email aliasing service. So you can have your personal email with your surname, and when you want to sign up to some shady corpo site, you give them a randomly generated email address using SimpleLogin. All emails sent to that alias email will be automatically forwarded to your personal email. You can then disable the alias email anytime and stop receiving emails.
I have both, a personal domain with my name and also an anonymous generic domain. I use the anonymous one for 90+% of my online stuff, and use a random unique address for every service (you can set up a wildcard in proton, so *@domain.org lands in the same inbox). I would recommend that for two reasons: if you own your anonymous domain you can move your mailprovider anytime (as opposed to using some email masking service), using unique addresses for every service enables you to easily figure out which one leaked your address if you start getting spam. Just make sure to use a generic name for the domain and dont get an exotic TLD (just get a .com .org or something). Some of the non traditional TLDs may negatively impact your spam scores, and its easy to find a .com or .org when you can literally choose any domain name you want.
You can have your own custom email domain and for the use cases you want to be "anonymous" use simplelogin or addy.io on top of that.
Proton = No SMTP/IMAP support.
You can use Proton Mail Bridge to set up SMTP/IMAP with your email app of choice. Obviously, you’re still stuck with using the bridge app on your device in order to get it working.
Waiting for the day their business team devices the bridge is too much freedom you should get all locked-in.
If that were to happen, nothing is stopping users from exporting their emails elsewhere.
Yet. You're delusional, nothing is stopping people at gmail to move to another providers, yet they stay. And trust me gmail has a much better export and supports IMAP.
So your privacy-focused email provider recommendation is Gmail?
Obviously not, but just don't push proton. They're a company that resorts to predatory tactics and has zero respect for their users.
For what's worth Lavabit (back before Snowden) had much higher standards than Proton when it comes to privacy and still supported open protocols like IMAP and SMTP. What Proton is doing is pushing for vendor lock-in at any possible point so you’re stuck with what they deem acceptable because it’s easier for them to build a service this way and makes more sense from a business / customer retention perspective.
They support IMAP though their bridge but you will have to be on a paid plan.
The free plan is pretty terrible anyways so if you actually want to use proton you will have to pay.
Yes and you can't run a bridge on anything and they might discontinue it at any time and you'll become hostage. So much for self-hosting, independence and open-source solutions.
You can run the bridge on Windows, Linux and macOS. I wish that they had an Android app but I suspect that the aggressive power management on Android might make it a lot harder to implement in a nice way.
There is absolutely no indication that that will happen. Remember that only the paid plans have IMAP and Proton is essentially held hostage by their subscribers since they are their only income source. Their community would be very angry if they dropped support.
This has nothing to do with self-hosting. You are literally paying someone for hosting your email.
I agree that the lack of normal IMAP support is annoying. But it's a side effect to their encryption which is a good thing.
And it's not like proton is alone with this problem.
Tota doesn't even seem to have a bridge app. Fastmail changes extra for IMAP.
proton requires them to use their software and adds a footer with protonmail ads to all of your emails without an option to disable it without paying up
I think you need to read up on the reasons why services like GMail and Facebook are free.
yes but they shouldn't be hiding that fact deep in the settings
also I don't care about encryption and stuff if it prevents me from using my favorite mail client without installing their bridge software
Ads are harmless. The harmful things is JavaScript.
And their software doesn't even have an option to display HTML messages as it is plain text messages.
by software i mean the imap bridge, but i agree that the official client is pretty bad too