FYI you can't use thunderbird with the proton free tier, only with premium. Switched recently and that was quite a surprise to me.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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DeGoogle Yourself
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I feel like I’m the only person here who doesn’t want encryption in email, I just want something that works with any client.
There are a lot of privacy-focused alternatives, but not all of them are. Fastmail and Infomatrix are two excellent options that are more focused on convenience
I'm a bit confused why there's a profit share indicator on the legend when seemingly none profit share. Otherwise, this is very cool!
Sorry, that is a bit confusing. The other guides have companies with that indicator. Should have removed it here though.
Been using fastmail for over 10 years and it's fantastic. Two thing you should be aware though: 1st Australia is part of the five eyes, 2nd they have their servers (last I checked) in new york.
I considered switching from Proton to Fastmail, because Proton seems to run slow in Australia. Immediately stopped considering once I realized they delete your account if you don't pay for 6 months (and by extension, you'll lose all your connected accounts).
So if you're homeless, arrested, deported, or in a coma and come out of it you'll end up losing your entire digital life.
don't trust proton too much. ceo is a fascist.
It’s a real shame about Proton. Seems like such a convenient ecosystem, but with the CEO’s idiotic position, and the fact the Swiss government can and has forced them to log your IP, that’s too fishy for me.
Also, none of the ones I checked take Monero, which seems like the only actually untraceable payment method. Cash by mail is pretty good but still too traceable, and other cryptos are just so idiotically easy to trace that you might as well use a bank transfer.
I don't feel the need to be complete anonymous, like you. But I do know of a group of people, who made an arrangement for 1 person to pay for all services they use online. There's no real trail to any other than the one person. It works quite well for them, and they pay this person in cash...
i mean if you assume he meant it
Is there really a reason to believe he did not ?
i just think its rational to lie and cheat and kiss ass and bribe to actually defend encryption and digital privacy rather than try and win brownie points from twitter by #resist 'ing online.
i mean lord knows the orange man is easy to trick and bribe. 400m got qatar in the door and then convinced him to abandon israel lol. even less to screw over ukraine.
yes if you decide to inform yourself on actual information aka his social profiles and what he actually said and not some terminally online user's paragraph on reddit
You should use a VPN anyway if you're that worried about your Email provider knowing your IP.
I do ! But to be clear, since Proton can be asked to log your IP, you must use a VPN to even sign up for Proton itself in the first place to prevent them from ever knowing your real IP.
So being fully anonymous on Proton is pretty circuitous.
- Buy Monero with real money
- Sign up to Mullvad, which truly doesn’t log your IP
- Change some of the Monero for bitcoin
- Sign up for Proton while using Mullvad, pay with the Bitcoin
I was under the impression that only specifically protonMAIL logs your IP because of specific laws targeting mail providers while ProtonVPN is not required to.
https://protonvpn.com/support/no-logs-vpn/
" We don’t log which websites you visit We don’t log your traffic or the content of any communications We don’t log your IP address We don’t log your session lengths We don’t log or track any location-based information "
And that while the same applies by DEFAULT by all of their products
https://proton.me/legal/privacy
"2.5 IP logging: By default, we do not keep permanent IP logs in relation with your Account."
They can't definitively say they don't log IP as they are legally required to log AFTER a valid court order from the swiss government demanding them to log and release for a specific person/account in accordance with the swiss Criminal Procedure Code article 269 as ProtonMAIL is considered a telecommunications platform
https://www.swissrights.ch/gesetze/Artikel-269-StPO-2023-EN.php
"The public prosecutor may arrange for post and telecommunications to be monitored if: a. there is a strong suspicion that an offence listed in paragraph 2 has been committed; b. the seriousness of the offence justifies surveillance; and c. investigative activities carried out so far have been unsuccessful or the enquiries would otherwise have no prospect of success or be made unreasonably complicated."
If I'm wrong on this please correct me but this is my understanding and from the quick research I did to provide links and quotes it does still seems to be true to me.
Bolded my personal input text to make it more easily distinguishable
I've used mailfence's paid entry tier for several years now. Been happy with them.
They are on the "other excellent options" list, but wanted to give them a highlight.
There are so many good choices that it is hard to showcase them all - Mailfence often gets recommended
I'm neurodiverse and I can't see this properly due to colours and layout. Can anyone give me a hand?
Switzerland is still not part of the EU. Proton, Informaniak and Kolab should have the Swiss flag and not EU. It's not the same laws and they are not forced to apply GDPR to their policies.
Has anyone heard about disroot.org? Is it a trustable service? Am considering switching there
A free or very low cost service for hosting my catchall domain address
I just recently switched from gmail to Mailfence with a custom domain, and I'm pretty happy thus far. I looked into it for a while trying to find the best option, and Mailfence turned out the best for me. Tuta was too locked down for me and Mailbox just rubbed me the wrong way. Mailbox has had a known major security issue with custom domains for literally 7 years now and still has yet to addressed it, their webmail is extremely slow and buggy (would switch to German randomly), they don't encrypt messages at rest (which to be fair isn't too important, but a lot of other services still do it), and I've seen multiple reports of their support being sub-par. I feel like they're probably still fine, but I just feel more confident in Mailfence.
I wish there was a tool that allowed you to see all the shit you have signed up under your google account so it would make it easier to move
Aren't you able to see this in your Google account settings? I could have sworn I've seen a list of all the sites where I used "Sign in with Google".
Yeah that’s only if you sign in with google, and don’t just regularly sign up xD
This doesn't say anything about DMARC and DKIM. Ni should probably go figure that out.
Can't beat the pricing of https://purelymail.com/. I've been using them for a couple years now.
Ive never paid for a single email client in my life, so yes you can beat any pricing except for free.
If you want to de-google you should also look into murena.io as it also includes cloud storage and document editing.
...and USA-free phones: Fairphone (from Holland) with /e/OS (open source, France) https://murena.com/
This doesn’t really help. Which ones support custom domains? Have spam filters? Support “+” based addresses? Support DKIM/DMARC?
Not just “do the have an environmental pledge”
mailbox.org does all of what you asked for.
Do your own research. This is supposed to be a starting point.
There's a lot of cheap mail-hotels, and a domain name is not costly either. I pay maybe 10 $ a year for both, and the mail is completely mine. I use Thunderbird as my mail-client on both windows, linux and android. Never had an issue, it just works.
I think that the biggest issue for a lot of people is, that they have to spend a little money on it. They buy shoes for 100 $ without thinking much about it, but private communication they often want for free...
Fastmail is my favorite. I tried Proton but the android app is awful. Tuta seems decent, if a bit messy. But Fastmail got my money for 2 reasons:
- Not Google or Microsoft
- Email, contacts, calendar, notes, and files are all in a single app. Didn't realize I'd care about that until I tried it.
There is also „poczta interia” which is email provider. They support third party email clients and it’s free. Their official app has ads and interface is in polish
where does hotmail (Microsoft) and Yahoo fit in?
Garbage tier IMO. So much worse than Gmail in terms of UI and legit email going to spam or not being delivered at all. So if you're going to use a free one, just use Gmail.
Is there a european version of this?
self host is the best solution if you want total control of your emails
Too true. self-hosters represent!
How hard is that? And how secure would it actually be? Not criticizing just curious why more people don’t do it.
Every time I've looked into it, most advice I've gotten was that it's not a good idea.
It sucks ass. The following was my experience when I tried it- you may have better luck.
- I was bending over backwards to convince other email providers to accept my outgoing messages
- The spam. Good God, the spam.
I don't know about others, but I only have 2 emails, one with Google Mail and the other with Proton Mail.