this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Privacy

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Anyone know if em client has any privacy pitfalls?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

From what I can see, it just appears to be a standard email client. So I don't know why you would use this over something that's open source. And with something like Proton Mail, this would not work if you are a user of that service.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I am using eMclient for several years now. I would have loved to use open source, but experience of using Thunderbird was unbearably sluggish and glitchy. Other options for windows were simply lacking. EM is far from perfect too, but still better. I hope to retry Thunderbird in upcoming years to check if things under the hood changed much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Just took the opportunity to try Thunderbird again and had to downvote myself :) I guess my previous frustrations were related to initial sluggishness while downloading and non-compacting loads tens of thousands of mails from gmail. It still takes some time, but after downloading and compacting my data, search seems to be very responsive.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I no longer consider any email app to be okay for privacy if I can't build it from source code. There are just too many opportunities and incentives for someone to exploit it. That could be the developer, or the maintainer of some obscure code library, or a company that buys one of them out, or an attacker who found a vulnerability. We no longer live in a world where it's reasonable to think we'll get privacy from communications software that we can't inspect.

Thankfully, we also no longer live in a world without options. There are more than a few email apps with nothing to hide. :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I'd consider the server first. If the person you're emailing uses Gmail, then Google already has the contents, so privacy on the client doesn't help much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It looks like it has exactly the same pitfalls as every other proprietary email client.

Not that open source email clients are all much better, because email isn’t very private. Even if you encrypt your messages, a lot of metadata leaks. Most encryption solutions don’t even encrypt the subject line, because it too is stored with the metadata.