Please suggest a good and relatively affordable private email provider. I am considering tuta, mailbox right now. I know proton has gone rogue.
I cannot self host one and the email provider must be somewhat reputable as I will be using this for my work portfolio. Anything with €1-€3 per month is encouraged.
Posteo ftw!
Tuta. Regardless of email provider, chose one that lets you use your own domain - that way it’s easier to change providers.
Proton lets you do that too.
I’ve been using Tuta for several years now, I didn’t know I could use my own domain!
Paid tiers only i think, but yes.
I am a paid tier… and I have my own business… this is really something I need to do.
Do it. It’s very straightforward.
- Buy a domain.
- Edit the DNS records to make your provider work with your domain.
- In Tuta (or even an alias service like Addy), create new emails using your custom domain.
- Done.
Whenever you need to switch providers such as if Tuta decides to support fascism like Proton’s CEO, you can easily switch to a new provider. Then add your domain to the provider, update your DNS records to point to your new provider, click Save. Done. And you won’t have to change your email addresses ever again.
This is amazing, thank you
I strongly recommend this as well. Swapped to Tuta and my own domain after leaving Proton. Having a domain for future moves is huge, I wish I had considered it sooner.
I like to dish out advice without actually following it.
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oh yeah, I have my own domain since Uhm 2004 and have switched providers about, hm, six times without problems. I never delete emails either (spam I do) and just use Thunderbird’s drag and drop to move MA mails from one server to another.
Tuta, Proton, Murena, Nextcloud Mail, or use disposable mails like Maildrop or Altmails.
Another mailbox.org user here. I did the same switch as @[email protected] around the same time and I can highly recommend as well. Setting up custom domains is also not hard and well documented in their knowledge-base. I am also using it for calendars and contacts with no issues at all. A plus of their premium (3€/month) plan, apart from custom domains, is that you have access to a series of other things (appointments, videoconferencing etc.) which are a nice thing to have if you need them (as an occasional teacher in academia I enjoyed having the options, especially since I could avoid Google/Microsoft stuff).
The only annoying thing is how they handle 2fa login on their website. I rarely need to login, but when I do I always suffer.
Did you try the new 2FA experience they have in beta? https://mailbox.org/en/post/beta-program-starts
That’s interesting, thanks for sharing! :) I will try it out, as soon as I will have the will to update all my configs with the new app password. Amazing news tough!
Consider one that supports MTA-STS. DANE is a plus but not widely deployed.
If EU, you have a lot of good choices. US providers are limited.
proton works, idc what one of the 5 owners say, it is impossible to avoid that type of people
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People keep posting this, like some kind of biased blog post on medium is supposed to be a gotcha moment that fixes everything. It doesn’t.
I still use proton, even after their terrible trump takes, but mostly because I have the legacy tier subscription and I haven’t found a better alternative.
you should take a look at the article linked by @[email protected] down below
This might make you feel better, it did for me:
Unfortunately, several of the author’s conclusions are drawn from either errors or outright lies, or simply things being swept aside. Several of Andy’s later posts are ignored, as is the amount he doubled down. Him using the official proton accounts to call his statements the official proton stance is waved away. It basically only examines the cleaned up, shiny final version of events proton would like you to pretend happened after they deleted everything, instead of what actually happened. Worse, it pretends that was the only chain of events that happened. It’s straight up gaslighting.
It’s a very, very biased article that doesn’t even attempt to do any kind of deep analysis and just tries to justify its stance by cherry picking, instead of actually looking at the facts and coming to a conclusion from there.
What’s one specific point that you think is an outright lie or has been gaslighted away? The linked post addressed my personal concerns, but I want to see if there’s something I missed.
For one, Gail Slater was only ‘tough on big tech’ for a few years in the very beginning of her career, and the entire rest of it has been spent as a big tech lobbyist for Internet Association. The most relevant lobbying being the opposition of a california data privacy bill that would require ISPs to gain customer permissions to collect and sell their browsing history. Needless to say, it’s pretty horrifying to hear a privacy company CEO call a noted anti-privacy lobbyist a good pick with those ‘credentials’.
Only two of Andy Yen’s posts regarding the matter are shown or referred to- the original post, and a later ‘clarification’. Every double-down, the ‘official’ statement he (supposedly erroneously) made, the deleted posts, all of those are not mentioned, yet the author spends a lot of time claiming that they went through ‘thousands of tweets and replies’ to find everything relevant, which in my opinion is gaslighty as hell when he then promptly discards all of them since they don’t match his narrative.
The biggest issue with the article though is that it makes a ton of assumptions presented as fact about Andy Yen’s motivations, which are then used as ‘evidence’ to discredit the evidence he’s pro-trump… and then assigns actions the entire Proton company did as justification for why Yen, himself as a person, is not pro-trump.
So the evidence he is NOT pro-trump is that the company he works for and doesn’t wholly control has done some some decent privacy stuff, and the proof that he IS pro-trump is either thrown away, not mentioned, or discard on the basis that ‘he totally said he wasn’t guys trust me.’
Thank you - I really appreciate the thorough response, that is extremely helpful.
It does make me feel a little better, but the fact that they doubled down and hasn’t gone out to clarify make me really disappointed. Because they are a non profit foundation makes it a bit more secure also.
In 2020, Proton complied with over 3,000 data orders from Swiss courts
That’s not secure.
Proton logs users IP addresses and shares with law enforcement https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58476983
I don’t care about that. I assume all sites keeps logs.
Like all others, as it’s a legal obligation. But they can’t give a lot more, as the mail themselves are encrypted.
As with any EU company, the Swiss government can compel them to keep logs for an individual user in the case of serious crime. You can use Tor as Proton recommends for that exact use case.
But by default Proton does not keep logs of IP addresses.
Switzerland is not in the EU.
They have extremely similar laws in Switzerland
“extremely” …switzerland knows ONE law and it is called money.
As legally required. Any company that wants to operate aboveboard needs to comply with local law - that includes Proton.
Any company that wants to operate aboveboard needs to comply with local law
That’s why you don’t run a secure email/vpn company from a country that’s shit for privacy laws.
Switzerland is one of the least shit so I fail to see your point.
You proton zealots certainly have your own hill
They may, as do morons.
Is that your choice word for me?
It’s an easy set up too. Ibdint agree with the CEO etc but Proton duo has been easy to convince my partner to give it a shot.
Posteo. Seems like it’s missing love here. Simple, out of the way, it just works.
I would happily consider Posteo but the fact that they don’t support custom domains is a deal breaker for me. That said, using an email aliasing service in front of it could be a solution.
If - for any reason - I want to move email providers, I don’t want to change my email everywhere.
https://mxroute.com/ if you need many different domains and email addresses but don’t need a huge amount of space, very cheap and just works.
But if you have issues the guys who run it are quite rough and brutal, so support wil be tough on you and expect you know a lot about protocols, etc.
I second mxroute. They are solid
can you expand on the guys being rough & brutal? can’t find anything about that in a search.
First hint is already on the FrontPage:
We do expect you to understand how to use email and how to configure your DNS to use our service
Second hint, the very aggressive way their documentation is written with big font, repeating and slight threats. See https://mxroutedocs.com/dns/dnsrecords/
Third one, their refund policy in the FAQs:
We do not offer refunds. Please do not sign up unless you are comfortable with your choice.
And there are quite many people writing about their encounters online with them, like:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/rbwqew/mxroute_are_they_rude_on_purpose_whats_been_your/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/mxroute/comments/1b1nk52/one_of_the_worst_service/
And so on. If you can handle working in open source you can handle them too. They are very direct which is off putting for some people, but they care deeply about their customers.
Their response from the second Reddit post:
When you sent spam from your service in May of 2023, we asked you not to make us regret giving you a second chance. […]
When you sent more spam on February 24 of 2024, we considered both interactions in our decision to terminate your account. […]
Don’t take my word for it, you already made the logs public so here’s the spam you sent from our service:Unironically the best advertising possible for their service. If they’re being rude to those who deserve it, let it bang!
I am using startmail at the moment with a custom domainand am pleased but I do plan on migrating due to the cost for adding more mailboxes. So I am reading along here but from my research recently I personally also found Tuta attractive along with mailbox for their price and feature set. What has proton done by the way? I have never really trusted the organization but has something happened recently?
Proton’s CEO turned out to be a Trumper with a Nazi dogwhistle username and a lot of Republican buzzwords peppering his vocabulary. Lots of people are defending Proton anyway because of sunk cost fallacy… or they’re just Nazis themselves.
I’m also looking to migrate and was recommended this service when I asked a similar question to OP. https://www.migadu.com/index.html
Unlimited inboxes. You’re just limited to inbox space, but you can have multiple domains.
I’ll be moving over to them when my current subscription runs out with my current provider
Proton’s CEO seems to be a right-wing jackass.
I’m using Posteo and have no reason to complain about anything. It pretty much just works. Few bells and whistles.
Do you use your custom domain or their own domain?
Afaik they don’t offer to use a custom domain.
I can second Posteo. Functional, affordable, FOSS, ecological and private enough for my needs.
Proton has not gone rogue.
The only thing that turns people off is that they cooperate with governments. Well, if you’re using it for your business you shouldn’t worry about that unless it’s illegal business, at which point you have bigger problems
They dont “cooperate with governments”, they follow the laws they legally have to. All the cases I can think of where they gave info to a government with a legal order to do so, they gave information that has to be logged in order for the system to work and the subjects themselves used poor opsec eg: their real names for accounts and recovery emails…
Some privacy extremists have unrealistic expectations when they sign up to these things without fully understanding how it works and then blame the provider for something they were completely transparent about from the beginning.
You’re right, they got called out as a “honeypot” for basic KYC and not having E2EE (which you can’t with email AFAIK)
Tutanota, startmail, protonmail, etc.
Email isn’t private. It was designed to be robust not private. Encryption never really caught on; and your counterparties using Gmail or some Microsoft server in the background will kill any expectation of privacy you might have.
WW II’s Gordon Welchman is worth reading about. Similar nasty end as Turing. Not as well known as Turing but a similar contribution before the encryption was actually solved.
Have used Zoho for decades. Dozen domains, three/four actual accounts. Don’t seem to have had any issues with them selling my info - use them with Addy.io. I don’t gain anything from this reference/comment.
Fastmail has been treating me well. Unlimited aliases and masked emails are really the only features I use, but it’s got sort of the classic suite of productivity tools you’d expect. I self host equivalents of these, but for a drop in replacement for most of the g-suite it’s good without trying to be more than it needs to be.
It’s great except it’s hosted in Australia. Not really privacy focused.
Yeah fair. A big part of my interest in it is that it split from Opera Software through a staff buyout, which to me says the people working there and maintaining it care a touch more than some companies. From the literature I consumed when signing up they seemed very privacy forward, and as a Proton VPN user I didn’t want all my eggs in one basket should Proton turn out to be a honeypot. That all being said, I agree with your point that they are subject to a legal system that doesn’t put users first compared to other countries, though for anything really sensitive I’m not really sure I would be using email to begin with, particularly not one I use for general clear net personal communication like banking and such.
100%, like you said, email isn’t really made for private communications. Even with me calling it out as not private, I do use fastmail as my main provider and like it.
