I want to change my main email. I’m using gmail right now. Which free email host do you trust and recommend? Hopefully one that I can open from the phone and the desktop, instead of from the web.
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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.
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ProtonMail? Tutanota?
Tutanota’s free plan is pretty good. You get a decent amount of storage space included. You do have to use their first-party email clients, but they are open source and work well.
they don’t allow search on their free tier last time i checked. that put me off. did that change?
They don’t allow search for mails older than a certain amount of time (1 month or something)
Posteo
Some domain registrars offer some e-mail plan when you get a domain. I know I got a domain with 2 mailboxes for like 10€ a few years ago (it was OVH but I’m pretty sure other providers offer the same kind of deal).
The thing is sometime the web interfaces are not very good but you can use any other mail client AND can use a custom domain name for your address, that’s cool.
Then I ended up hosting my e-mails myself but if it wasn’t by curiosity I would have stuck with the offered plan.
Disroot or riseup, ones of the best you can find, but please donate when you can
In December 2014, a judge in Spain partially justified prolonging the detention of seven alleged anarchist activists by citing their use of “extreme security measures” such as Riseup email, the judge’s act has been criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).[17][18]
I highly suggest avoiding services geared towards activists. No technical benefit other than supposition about your operations. Also a favorite of targeted attacks and surveillance.
Disroot.
You should be able to use any email client.
Disroot
I’ve been using Protonmail, but can’t recommend them due to how open sourcing their stuff seems to be a secondary concern to them.
I’ve also tried Tutanota a little, and might transfer my stuff over there at some point if Protonmail does not take their privacy aspect more seriously, in regards to open source specifically. Tutanota, at least from the surface, seems to tick all the boxes.
I’ve seen people complaining about lack of features in the free version of Tutanota, but it bears reminding that you want to be paying with your money for these services. I’ve been waiting for Protonmail to hit F-Droid to start paying for the service, but it might just never happen.
The serve side is not FLOSS.
Good to know.
Same here. I used to pay for the Plus version until I found out Tutanota has a client on F-Droid and the free tier works nicely. Another thing is that I can bulk export, which is something I can’t do on Protonmail unless I pay for a plan.
The only thing I don’t like about Tutanota is that everything is enclosed on their apps, so you cannot use any external clients, and I rely a lot on Thunderbird. And while I can connect Protonmail through the bridge, I still need to pay for it.
In the end, I’m slowly migrating to Mailbox. It’s not free, but I like it, offers a bunch of features I use and I can connect it with external clients.
They have said that they make sure things runs well and have been audited before open sourcing to minimize vulnerabilities. They have done it before and I don’t see the stopping.
Disroot, Elude and Riseup.
deleted by creator
i’ve been happy with protonmail for several years. i know i should self-host but i’m too lazy
How daunting would it be to self host email reliably?
MIAB, iRedMail, MailCow…
Don’t use free email, with cloud software if it’s free than your the product. I’m not some GNU bible slapper but genuinely you should
This means you can still get emails if your email provider locks you out by switching providers and vice versa.
For free users on @hotmail, @gmail, etc, if Google locks them out even by mistake they are screwed, and it does happen, like to terraria’s lead dev and the partner of a Google employee.
Remember, email is rarely ever encrypted and it’s worth paying for your privacy
Providing a basic email service with small storage/traffic allowance costs in the order of cents per UserMonth.
From the business perspective, giving something for free can basically be considered a marketing (advertising) expense – essential for building a successful business.
If you get the free storage/traffic/feature allowance in the sweet spot, it’s useful enough that free users stick around and you get a good reputation, yet juuust constrained enough that users who want that little bit more convenience or features will consider a paid plan. And word-of-mouth advertising is super effective – all the happy users will recommend your paid service to family/friends/acquaintances who happen to be looking for a service provided by them.
Another benefit free services can provide to the business (especially in early stages of developing a system/business) is real-world testing at scale of your infrastructure and processes with real users.
Thanks, you and @fleurc@lemmy.ml reminded me that indeed there are some goodies out there.
For me personally, I do want the extra reassurance from the fact the company is profiting off me without reselling my data and I encourage others to also do that, but I am willing to believe there are free services that do respect privacy
Not everything Free means you’re the product, do research on the email provider, do research on the company. Relying on “You’re the product” is going to be complicated, also paying for anything doesn’t make you less of a product, just look at games.
Set up your own emails or procure an Open-Source provider
For many people email is not really that important. While I agree that it would be better to fully own your email address (domain) it’s just not that important. If I don’t have access to my email, I’ll let my bank know that I use a different mail.
I would pay protonmail 10 bucks a year for my mail address just to support them but they don’t offer that. I only need it for sometimes amazon and who knows. But it’s certainly not worth 50 bucks a year - unless you own a business that highly depends on it. I don’t use it for communication with real people. Just websites that need to prevent spam or want to communicate with me for notifications.
I think you are forgetting that
If privacy is important, use PGP or selfhost your email. But the amount of work that is needed is not worth the trouble for an average person.
The chance that you need to recover your account us so tiny that you can neglect it. And if you know that you’re doing shady stuff withyour email account, just selfhosting won’t be enough either.
The domain does not provide extra privacy, but it does not ditch extra privacy also.
buttman@gmail.comvsbutt@man.comare two emails addressed to you, but no one knows who you are.Rather, it provides a framework to be a digital nomad, switching email providers at a whim while not needing to do account recovery. An @protonmail can’t do that.
In the later half
I essentially read the “what’s the point of privacy if you have nothing to hide” argument. I don’t do drugs or run a torrent tracker.
mistakes do happen and especially with services featuring a free tier, they have so many users they don’t have time to double check their actions or care about providing good support. I already provided two examples of pretty notable people getting banned from Google for unknown reasons and still not being able to get their account back.
Closer to home, let’s look at Lemmy. As it’s still small, the admins interact with the users and think twice before banning. Reddit on the other and is the opposite, because they quite literally have a million times more people to worry about.
I use ProtonMail, Calendar, Contacts, Drive (beta), VPN, they have a free version of everything for casual users and paid for heavy users. ProtonVPN is located on fdroid and ProtonMail includes everything else. There are Apps for iPhone and Android plus can be browser accessed. Everything is locked down and encrypted. Drive is a work in process.
I’d go with setting up or using someone else’s Nextcloud or you use Protonmail. Everything comes at a cost, your only option to be truly private is to not exist.
Ctemplar
mailfence