Basically any company that you give money to is going to be lead by arseholes. By definition. The only easy way is self hosting but that has its own difficulties. (And even then it’s still hosted by an arsehole)
I have found if you choose providers that do things like run on 100% sustainable energy, you tend to find the places where leadership’s morals overtake their pockets. There are a few mail providers like this.
GOG published a letter with neo Nazi imagery, knowingly said it wouldn’t be okay in Germany, and sent the email to everywhere else. After a huge outrage they gave a meaningless apology without any real comitment to investigating how it happened or how they would ensure it never happened again.
Yeah and their defense was: we knew before that it looked bad, so we didn’t send it out to German speaking newsletter subscribers… Which recognised that they knew it looked the way it did, before they send it out. And even then the biggest question they never answered: Why send only that one symbol double? you know, the one symbol that “on some devices on some fonts” makes it an SS symbol, where the “intended” symbol doesn’t have any meaning or reason being doubled?
I want to like GOG, but that whole affair did not portray them from their best side.
Or you would need to specify what specific thing your asking for a link.
The German QA did notice it, but the feedback didn’t get send back correctly is their standpoint. Taken alone, sure, that happens. But with all the rest? no, I don’t believe it.
I’m asking for a source that makes it undisputable they chose not to send the email to Germans for the reason of SS looking symbols, which seemed to be the claim
This genuinely looked like a mistake, where was it reported they didnt send it to German users? I only saw that it was a German QA team that noticed it.
Article linked elsewhere seems to indicate it didn’t go to German users because the German QA team found the issue before it was sent, but due to an internal communication breakdown the issue didn’t make it back to the international team before the emails had already been sent. GOG immediately apologized for the mistake and changed their internal processes to catch these types of mistakes sooner.
It very much reads like an honest mistake, and even then it only impacted a subset of GOG users because it’s entirely dependent on the font used to render the email subject. The actual Unicode character used was a curved S (a letter from the Greek character set), but certain fonts render it looking more like the infamous SS symbol.
Thanks for posting this. Fucking Lemmy man. That reads like a genuine mistake to me… not everything is a conspiracy lol. If you just read the thread here, you’d believe that GOG were some underground Nazi apologists or something.
No, it was a fucking dog whistle for one simple reason: why use the last symbol double? If all of them were doubled or single? Sure, I could believe the mistake angle. But only that one symbol doubled where it doesn’t make any sense to double the “intended” symbol? I don’t believe it. That are too many coincidences necessary for me to believe it.
Just discovered that principle, while it’s true for many situations, it’s really effective because not everthing nor always everthing is simpler, the principle itself seems to be simplifying things; in the end, that principle is the same thing that bring us to many right-wing ideas which we heavly criticize
Is there a source or proof on that? Or is it just that you didn’t find it right now on their website?
The big drama was during their “2026 sale”, where they used GenAI promotional art for the event. They also seem to have refused to confirm using GenAI, and at the time made no promise/commitment to stop.
Legitly the only way i would ever dare to even attempt self hosting email again is in 20 years when ai can do it entirely for me using the power of a single AA battery. No sane person self hosts email!
no, but many of us have done it in the past and I do have all the DNS stuff already setup – It might work if I did it now, but spam is a ever growing mountain
Email is pre-installed with YUNOhost (Debian-based server distro), in case anyone is interested. I have it installed on a cheap VPS and highly recommend it.
Do not run your own email server - highly recommend using your own domain though. Use a provider that lets you BYO your domain. Just make sure you get your MX records correct with your DNS provider, most email providers have documentation for this.
The hard thing about email is getting all your contacts to use your he address, it is not migrating your email history. So owing the domain is the most important thing you can do.
You do not have to own your email server, if you have the domain you can go wherever.
You do then have to defend your domain name, which means making sure it will not expire and is locked.
One thing on anyone wondering for migrating mail history, Thunderbird works fine for this, Outlook actually also does is it, I want to say a bit better. You don’t have to regularly use Outlook, but if you map both the old and new account you can drag and drop mail between them and it just works.
As others say, buy a domain so it’s easier in the future.
But one thing what helped me was relay email addresses. Whether that’s Addy, Simplelogin (now owned by proton so probably not), Firefox Relay, or another. When you sign up to shit, buy something, etc, use one of these email addresses. When you eventually move to your new email address, you can cutover all those accounts to the new one by changing the settings for where it forwards email to.
You can also use your own domain with a catchall and make up your own whatever@yourdomain if you’re ready for that.
I started with cloud backup, it’s going reasonably. I’m using something called Jottacloud which so far has been solid for me and has a lot of different types of backups. Migrated some-odd 25000 photos, slowly getting through the rest of my stuff on google drive. Soon I’ll be below the 15g and switch to free it’ll be great then I can work on the rest of degoogling
It takes so much work and feels impossible the entire time especially while all the rest of life keeps happening. One step at a time I guess
I started with considerably more, down to the last 50g now, basically tying up loose ends and organizing all the “will organize later” as I move them to my new service
It’s very simple. Buy your domain for the next ten years for under $200. Then find an email provider where you can bring your own domain. Namecheap has always been good to me. Maybe also Hetzner in Germany?
Hetzner provides email with their cheapest webhosting package at €1.60 a month.
Namecheap is a little more pricey than I expected. You pay $89.28/2 years with a promo code - Renews for $143.76/2 years
You don’t need your own server to have the benefit the person you’re replying to is pointing out. If you control the domain, you can just point your DNS at another provider. For example, you can move your catch all inbox in Tuta to a mailbox.org plan with a catch all with a simple DNS update. Then you don’t need to change your email addresses anywhere.
I didn’t say anything about “owning the name” other than just buying a domain in general (which you’d also need to do for something self hosted). I am simply saying that using providers that allow for catch all can give you privacy while also giving you the ability to jump ship.
My primary domain, for example, is not memorable, and it does not have ease of verbal transmission. It’s a string I randomly generated.
What is this endeavor? Control? Your own domain gives you control. Privacy? This is dependent on your provider, VPS, or otherwise. SMTP is generally blocked on residential IPs, so you’re going to have to trust and give up control and some level or privacy somewhere. Having a domain gives you the ability to self host if you desire, and if you don’t want to do that, then having a domain gives you the ability to easily change mail providers if needed, without the need to change hundreds of accounts.
Honestly if your using tuta tho its no different then proton. Both are crap for different reasons. One has crap privacy enforcement and the other is ran by a dick head.
Seriously it baffles me that anyone thinks a german company is remotely trust worthy for security. Its a fucking joke. Any country that has a deal with five eyes should just be assumed its compromised up front. If theres no out side enforcement of security then any promise of it from the inside is worthless.
E2E encryption doesn’t matter when you can’t trust the actual host in the first place.
E2E encryption doesn’t matter when you can’t trust the actual host in the first place.
Not referring to Tuta specifically, but isnt that the point of E2E encryption? That you have assurance even if you don’t trust the host? Unless they don’t demonstrate and publish what encryption mechanism they use of course.
Your not entirely wrong. It’s mostly the fact, that even with e2e your still relying on their word that they aren’t doing something shady or do something stupid. There’s no external force keeping them honest.
One is none two is one. Someone’s word is good but someone’s word, and another keeping them honest is better.
If your going to trust someone else it’s better some form of equality in the deal. As a consumer to a corp that’s basically impossible with out a legal enforcement layer.
I was using Tuta to mailbox as an example for this very reason: you can move your catch all inbox from Tuta tomailbox.org, since it also supports catch all. I’m trying to highlight the benefit that using a service with catch all functionality adds, which is flexibility and easy migration. It was not meant as a recommendation to use Tuta.
I think I’m going to start using my own domain, so I can change hosts if needed without having to change email addresses. This seems like it’s going to be an issue we’ll always need to be prepared to deal with.
$1/month for a custom domain. One last migration. And then moving platforms is much easier because you don’t need to change the email on every service.
The only reasonably future proof solution is to get your own domain, and redirect emails sent to @yourdomain.com to your email provider.
Then you can freely change providers in the future but your email addresses stay the same. Doing that costs very little and doesn’t require any self hosting, just buying a domain. Looks professional too.
The mx server ip will be from the email provider with thousands of whitelisted domains. You get lumped in with the rest and cosidered safe. Spam filters use Bayesian statistics, the logic is not what you expect.
No, your emails are still sent from your providers servers and are signed by Proton/Tuta/Gmail/whatever you choose to use. Your domain is the from: field but it was sent by the actual email provider with all the trust behind it.
I never ran into something requiring a Google/Apple address. Some may require a Google account, but you can create a Google account with any email address. You don’t actually need to use Gmail on your Google account.
If you’re willing to run “mail-in-a-box”, with full control of the DNS for your domain name, it sets up all of the security DNS records to not get flagged as spam.
If you’re unwilling or unable to let mail-in-a-box control the full DNS for your domain, mail-in-a-box still has a page that will list every DNS record that needs add to your un-self-hosted DNS. It is many many DNS records, for best spam protection.
My other concern was receiving spam.
But the default spam filter in mail-in-a-box felt immediately noticeably (but just anecdotally) better than the one built into Proton. Which surprised me. I had assumed that I would give up some spam filter quality by self-hosting.
Custom domain without self hosting still requires you to use an email provider, could even be google. The only problem is if you self host and don’t rely on trusted proxies, at which point it depends on the reputation of the IP/Domain etc.
Yeah, it’s taken me a similar time to migrate away from Gmail and I’m not keen to repeat the process. But if this is what Proton’s code quality control is going to be like going forward - employees forced to push improperly-tested code because of their unhinged CEO - I’m going to have to go through the whole process again. Sigh.
Same exact situation. In fact I’m not even fully done migrating away from Gmail although most of my stuff is on Proton now. sigh I guess I’m starting all over again soon.
Looking at AirVPN, but not ready to pull the trigger on that yet.
Still looking for a calendar. Thunderbird has one but it’s not on mobile for some reason.
The big one is mail. I was the same as you migrating from gmail so I’m learning my lesson now. Set up Thundermail today and have 3 custom domains set up. Spent hours today swapping out account emails. It’s rough, but I did it to myself. I knew going full Proton ecosystem was a bad idea, but at the time I just wanted out of Google. Take your time.
People may not like the idea of what I’m about to say but here’s a thought from someone who also found self hosting to be overwhelming at first and now self hosts everything but email. The learning curve is flatter than you probably imagine it to be if you are doing normal things with mostly default settings. I recommend docker containers to start. Find something you want to host and just follow the directions in the man pages. You might not understand everything initially but you’ll quickly pick it up as you change the handful of variables in a docker compose file to fit your setup. It will also help you get used to how to structure your files and folders in a way that makes things flow easier. Everything in docker can be done in the terminal which also takes away a layer of complexity.
I moved to Linux a while back and only discovered docker after setting everything up. Haven’t got around to learning about it yet, Linux itself was a lot of info lol. Do you use docker containers for like every app you install? Like if I start with an old laptop and try syncthing, should that be installed in a docker container?
I use it for every server app I install. Mainly because it easier to migrate applications between machines. Docker gives you a consistent build environment so you don’t have to worry about having 12 versions of Python installed and they are all wrong and then when you find the right one it breaks something else (this was never a common problem for me but it is annoying when it happens.) So, using docker-compose (recommended over cli commands because you can see all in one place what everything does and where it goes) you just edit the compose file to fit your scenario and build it. It is pretty easy and fast. When and if you decide you want everything accessible from the Internet you can read a few guides and knock it out in an afternoon. The reverse proxies can also be run as containers. Here’s the page for the sync thing container. To use it, install docker, create the folders the container calls for, edit the compose file as necessary, go to the folder the compose file is located in and run docker compose up -d and your build will start
Problem is that any vpn not in switzerland is basically an explict step down. Trusting a company that is in a country that has no enforcement means your trusting the company it self entirely to stay honest. At least with proton, no matter what the idiots at the top want. They still have to comply with their local laws.
That alone keeps proton above airVPN if your using a VPN for privacy reasons. It always will, no matter what. The entire country would have to change its laws for that to change.
Now if your just using a VPN for routing purposes or something that security is not a high piro. Then air VPN is fantastic.
Yeah, I’ve been struggling with this. I’m thinking when my mail gets sorted I’ll go down to just the vpn subscription for now. Keeping one service isn’t perfect, but perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good. keeping 1 of the 8 services is way better than all 8 lol.
Flexibility and diversification is annoying to manage but tends to be the best situation over all.
Proton does things right generally speaking, it’s just ran by an absolute idiot.
So you also have to weigh are your morals and expectations here reasonable to your own acceptance level. Vs your own requirements of the service at hand.
There are plenty of reasons to need a VPN that the extra security and privacy guarantee are beyond worthless. And in those cases staying in proton doesn’t make since if your morals go against the company.
While if you absolutely need that privacy and guarantee switching is a very real risk.
Plenty of people like having privacy but for some it’s actively a life or death situation. So you have to make that call. Where do you sit on that spectrum, and are your morals important enough to take the risk if your on the extreme end?
For most people who aren’t, switching is just a formality and technical consideration.
I’d recommend an e-mail provider that supports custom domains, so you can easily switch at any time. I personally use Purelymail; I’ve also heard good things about Fastmail and Migadu.
I’ve never quite finished moving all my domains to Proton from google, but I think I’m leaning towards infomaniak.com for now, on the Business plan with my and my brothers family using the service
Tuta mail and calendar has been a real easy switch. I imported my emails from proton and just started a fresh calendar because I could and it was a good excuse to clean mine up.
The iOS apps work well and the experimental flatpak on desktop has been totally fine.
I have very little complaints so far tbh. I’m not like blown away or anything but everything just seems to work.
I mean I believe you, but thoughts on this comment:
reddit
Proton monitors employees’ AI code generation"
This is also a distortion. Proton has a tool that labels which code is AI-generated and which is human-written, which is important for many reasons. It can’t be used to evaluate how much AI somebody is using. The design document for the tool states this clearly. This document is available to all employees:
r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence
The security point
The list goes on and on. Same with the security point. I have access to that chat. Andy never said don’t do pen testing. It’s true, he used shitty language and he personally apologized to the whole company. However in that same security chat he also said something 404 omitted: “The baseline is, we must do this plus be faster at the same time” in reference to security testing.
r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence
He agreed with the additional pen testing, and it was even recently implemented at Proton. What he didn’t agree to was it slowing down the pipeline.
About hiring engineers
This quote “this is the last year that we hire engineers” is also out of context. At Proton, the engineering and product management roles are merging and we call this new discipline “Product Engineering”. Proton also mostly hires product managers with engineering backgrounds. It means we stop hiring engineers who just code, and hire instead product engineers who also exercise product judgment that AI doesn’t have, not that we don’t hire engineers at all. I know this because I help with hiring for the whole company.
One last thing
I want to put a few words out there that aren’t about quotes or screenshots, but about my experience.
To be honest to you, we’re all in a bit of a shock after reading the articles written, and some of the criticism hurts me because it described a company I don’t recognize. Reading the comments on Reddit hurts me because so many of them do not reflect reality. Proton is not rushing into AI without concern for safety, it is actually being done very carefully.
If you’re deciding whether to keep using Proton, I’d just ask that you make that decision after getting the full picture, and not solely on the quotes that have been intentionally taken out of context. Otherwise, you are only hurting the workers that you claim to want to protect.
The thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50317991 raises some valid concerns about the Reddit post in question. It explicitly even says its been approved by the company, so idunno. 404 Media has done a lot of legit exposés in the last few years. I’m inclined to trust journalists over the guy posting on Reddit with permission from Proton. The screenshots apparently included show Yen telling an employee to do damage control with their personal account on reddit, which really makes things look even worse, doesn’t it?
For some reason your copy paste mangles the text, but the original seems to have some interesting context. I like 404, but it seems like they do as much click bait as anywhere else these days.
Internet journalism is about as yellow as classic journalism ever was. Its always been “click bait” always will be. lol
Gotta always take everything with a grain of salt and assume things are misrepresented either on accident or on purpose. Its a PITA but it is what it is.
Exact same situation with me. Going to start this weekend on self hosting email and then the transition process. I still have around 6 months left on my proton subscription, so enough time to move everything.
Its an explicitly worse alternative what are you on about. Its in a eyes country. Its literally an explicit step down on every level.
The moment tuta goes to shit there is nothing stepping them from going all the way. At least with proton the legal requirements of the country they are in means that no matter what stupid shit the dickhead at the top does. They are REQUIRED to adhere to a minimum standard.
Tuta has NO legal requirement to do that.
If you remotely care about privacy and enforcement of the standard of care around it. Tuta is like one of the stupidest places you can go.
I considered Germany a plus and they are one of the few options with total E2EE. I have not finished migrating yet, so what alternatives do you recommend?
Sorry, but you saying you’re tired after one switch is pretty funny. Many people here have gone through this several times for many different services etc. You have no idea what being tired actually means in this case.
Saying that others have it worse is putting the wrong person down especially when you dont know anything else about their life. We should be putting the companies and people that put us in the predicament in the first place down. They are the ones causing the problems. Not the commenter you responded to.
I’ve been putting it off, because it took me more than a year to migrate away from Gmail. But this is hard to ignore. I’m tired, fam.
Basically any company that you give money to is going to be lead by arseholes. By definition. The only easy way is self hosting but that has its own difficulties. (And even then it’s still hosted by an arsehole)
I have found if you choose providers that do things like run on 100% sustainable energy, you tend to find the places where leadership’s morals overtake their pockets. There are a few mail providers like this.
The biggest dickhead I know runs my server.
Could be worse, your servers could be ran by the same dipshit that runs mine! I swear nothing ever gets fixed on time!
I thought he ran my servers
shrugs
GOG is a good company we all pay for.
Give it a few generations for the selection pressure of the market / the temptations of new leadership to take over.
GOG published a letter with neo Nazi imagery, knowingly said it wouldn’t be okay in Germany, and sent the email to everywhere else. After a huge outrage they gave a meaningless apology without any real comitment to investigating how it happened or how they would ensure it never happened again.
The GOG that knowingly sent out emails with Nazi symbols in?
On some devices on some fonts
Come on man
Yeah and their defense was: we knew before that it looked bad, so we didn’t send it out to German speaking newsletter subscribers… Which recognised that they knew it looked the way it did, before they send it out. And even then the biggest question they never answered: Why send only that one symbol double? you know, the one symbol that “on some devices on some fonts” makes it an SS symbol, where the “intended” symbol doesn’t have any meaning or reason being doubled?
I want to like GOG, but that whole affair did not portray them from their best side.
You got a link because I can’t find that? It was their German team that reported it too
I would like to give you the primary source link to that other place, but since reddit is going choo-choo on the enshittification train and only allows logins now, here is a PCGamer article for that whole mess: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-nazi-runes-to-its-followers/
Or you would need to specify what specific thing your asking for a link.
The German QA did notice it, but the feedback didn’t get send back correctly is their standpoint. Taken alone, sure, that happens. But with all the rest? no, I don’t believe it.
I’m asking for a source that makes it undisputable they chose not to send the email to Germans for the reason of SS looking symbols, which seemed to be the claim
I’m sure they gave a level-headed, reasonable, rational response
Didn’t get one.
Talking about GOG the DRM-free digital PC game store.
Yes they sent an email with the subject containing two runes resembling the SS logo.
“They didn’t notice”, but somehow they didn’t send it to German users
This genuinely looked like a mistake, where was it reported they didnt send it to German users? I only saw that it was a German QA team that noticed it.
Article linked elsewhere seems to indicate it didn’t go to German users because the German QA team found the issue before it was sent, but due to an internal communication breakdown the issue didn’t make it back to the international team before the emails had already been sent. GOG immediately apologized for the mistake and changed their internal processes to catch these types of mistakes sooner.
It very much reads like an honest mistake, and even then it only impacted a subset of GOG users because it’s entirely dependent on the font used to render the email subject. The actual Unicode character used was a curved S (a letter from the Greek character set), but certain fonts render it looking more like the infamous SS symbol.
I’m not German and I didn’t get the twisted cross email.
What?
https://www.heise.de/en/news/GOG-apologizes-for-newsletter-with-SS-runes-in-subject-11321683.html
Thanks for posting this. Fucking Lemmy man. That reads like a genuine mistake to me… not everything is a conspiracy lol. If you just read the thread here, you’d believe that GOG were some underground Nazi apologists or something.
No, it was a fucking dog whistle for one simple reason: why use the last symbol double? If all of them were doubled or single? Sure, I could believe the mistake angle. But only that one symbol doubled where it doesn’t make any sense to double the “intended” symbol? I don’t believe it. That are too many coincidences necessary for me to believe it.
Yeah my thoughts exactly.
As the saying goes, always check and double check your sources 😉
Holy shit do people need to get educated on Occam’s Razor.
In this case Hanlon’s Razor might be more relevant ;D
Just discovered that principle, while it’s true for many situations, it’s really effective because not everthing nor always everthing is simpler, the principle itself seems to be simplifying things; in the end, that principle is the same thing that bring us to many right-wing ideas which we heavly criticize
Yes!
Not with the AI generated images they use
They no longer use it.
I open it right now and all I see is flashy text with game cover art in the offers/deals pages.
DRM-free is a big plus.
Is there a source or proof on that? Or is it just that you didn’t find it right now on their website?
The big drama was during their “2026 sale”, where they used GenAI promotional art for the event. They also seem to have refused to confirm using GenAI, and at the time made no promise/commitment to stop.
Yes go self host email, I’ll wait
Oh, I’ve done it… Won’t do it again, but I have done it.
Legitly the only way i would ever dare to even attempt self hosting email again is in 20 years when ai can do it entirely for me using the power of a single AA battery. No sane person self hosts email!
I self host email. Actually, I run a publicly available email service from my office, so…
no, but many of us have done it in the past and I do have all the DNS stuff already setup – It might work if I did it now, but spam is a ever growing mountain
No sane person uses generative AI.
Try stalwart, fresh 1.0 release from last week. Modern jmap and easy to setup selfgenerated dns-zonefile.
Setting up the servers and services is the easy part
Email is pre-installed with YUNOhost (Debian-based server distro), in case anyone is interested. I have it installed on a cheap VPS and highly recommend it.
Though, I learned my lesson and bought my own domain. So this pivot should be better.
I would love to chat this through with you. I have some domains but honestly, Iʻve been told so many times to not roll my own…
Do not run your own email server - highly recommend using your own domain though. Use a provider that lets you BYO your domain. Just make sure you get your MX records correct with your DNS provider, most email providers have documentation for this.
The hard thing about email is getting all your contacts to use your he address, it is not migrating your email history. So owing the domain is the most important thing you can do.
You do not have to own your email server, if you have the domain you can go wherever.
You do then have to defend your domain name, which means making sure it will not expire and is locked.
One thing on anyone wondering for migrating mail history, Thunderbird works fine for this, Outlook actually also does is it, I want to say a bit better. You don’t have to regularly use Outlook, but if you map both the old and new account you can drag and drop mail between them and it just works.
Likewise. I never plan to host my own email server. You can bring your own domain to Proton, at least.
ngl, I feel very burried by the effort to “de-google”. Like, Iʻm close, very close, and email is like the last thing to do (along with cloud backup).
As others say, buy a domain so it’s easier in the future.
But one thing what helped me was relay email addresses. Whether that’s Addy, Simplelogin (now owned by proton so probably not), Firefox Relay, or another. When you sign up to shit, buy something, etc, use one of these email addresses. When you eventually move to your new email address, you can cutover all those accounts to the new one by changing the settings for where it forwards email to.
You can also use your own domain with a catchall and make up your own whatever@yourdomain if you’re ready for that.
I started with cloud backup, it’s going reasonably. I’m using something called Jottacloud which so far has been solid for me and has a lot of different types of backups. Migrated some-odd 25000 photos, slowly getting through the rest of my stuff on google drive. Soon I’ll be below the 15g and switch to free it’ll be great then I can work on the rest of degoogling
It takes so much work and feels impossible the entire time especially while all the rest of life keeps happening. One step at a time I guess
heh. cute.
I started with considerably more, down to the last 50g now, basically tying up loose ends and organizing all the “will organize later” as I move them to my new service
It’s very simple. Buy your domain for the next ten years for under $200. Then find an email provider where you can bring your own domain. Namecheap has always been good to me. Maybe also Hetzner in Germany?
Hetzner provides email with their cheapest webhosting package at €1.60 a month.
Namecheap is a little more pricey than I expected. You pay $89.28/2 years with a promo code - Renews for $143.76/2 years
I did my own email server for a while using Mail in a Box. It’s not hard, but it’s a hassle.
Now I just pay like $36 a year I think for Purelymail. Works great.
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You don’t need your own server to have the benefit the person you’re replying to is pointing out. If you control the domain, you can just point your DNS at another provider. For example, you can move your catch all inbox in Tuta to a mailbox.org plan with a catch all with a simple DNS update. Then you don’t need to change your email addresses anywhere.
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I didn’t say anything about “owning the name” other than just buying a domain in general (which you’d also need to do for something self hosted). I am simply saying that using providers that allow for catch all can give you privacy while also giving you the ability to jump ship.
My primary domain, for example, is not memorable, and it does not have ease of verbal transmission. It’s a string I randomly generated.
What is this endeavor? Control? Your own domain gives you control. Privacy? This is dependent on your provider, VPS, or otherwise. SMTP is generally blocked on residential IPs, so you’re going to have to trust and give up control and some level or privacy somewhere. Having a domain gives you the ability to self host if you desire, and if you don’t want to do that, then having a domain gives you the ability to easily change mail providers if needed, without the need to change hundreds of accounts.
Honestly if your using tuta tho its no different then proton. Both are crap for different reasons. One has crap privacy enforcement and the other is ran by a dick head.
Seriously it baffles me that anyone thinks a german company is remotely trust worthy for security. Its a fucking joke. Any country that has a deal with five eyes should just be assumed its compromised up front. If theres no out side enforcement of security then any promise of it from the inside is worthless.
E2E encryption doesn’t matter when you can’t trust the actual host in the first place.
Not referring to Tuta specifically, but isnt that the point of E2E encryption? That you have assurance even if you don’t trust the host? Unless they don’t demonstrate and publish what encryption mechanism they use of course.
Your not entirely wrong. It’s mostly the fact, that even with e2e your still relying on their word that they aren’t doing something shady or do something stupid. There’s no external force keeping them honest.
One is none two is one. Someone’s word is good but someone’s word, and another keeping them honest is better.
If your going to trust someone else it’s better some form of equality in the deal. As a consumer to a corp that’s basically impossible with out a legal enforcement layer.
I was using Tuta to mailbox as an example for this very reason: you can move your catch all inbox from Tuta to mailbox.org, since it also supports catch all. I’m trying to highlight the benefit that using a service with catch all functionality adds, which is flexibility and easy migration. It was not meant as a recommendation to use Tuta.
I think I’m going to start using my own domain, so I can change hosts if needed without having to change email addresses. This seems like it’s going to be an issue we’ll always need to be prepared to deal with.
$1/month for a custom domain. One last migration. And then moving platforms is much easier because you don’t need to change the email on every service.
That said, I still hear you.
The only reasonably future proof solution is to get your own domain, and redirect emails sent to @yourdomain.com to your email provider.
Then you can freely change providers in the future but your email addresses stay the same. Doing that costs very little and doesn’t require any self hosting, just buying a domain. Looks professional too.
yes but doesnt that just get flagged as spam?
also many services require a google or apple address to be viable
The mx server ip will be from the email provider with thousands of whitelisted domains. You get lumped in with the rest and cosidered safe. Spam filters use Bayesian statistics, the logic is not what you expect.
No, your emails are still sent from your providers servers and are signed by Proton/Tuta/Gmail/whatever you choose to use. Your domain is the from: field but it was sent by the actual email provider with all the trust behind it.
I never ran into something requiring a Google/Apple address. Some may require a Google account, but you can create a Google account with any email address. You don’t actually need to use Gmail on your Google account.
If you’re willing to run “mail-in-a-box”, with full control of the DNS for your domain name, it sets up all of the security DNS records to not get flagged as spam.
If you’re unwilling or unable to let mail-in-a-box control the full DNS for your domain, mail-in-a-box still has a page that will list every DNS record that needs add to your un-self-hosted DNS. It is many many DNS records, for best spam protection.
My other concern was receiving spam.
But the default spam filter in mail-in-a-box felt immediately noticeably (but just anecdotally) better than the one built into Proton. Which surprised me. I had assumed that I would give up some spam filter quality by self-hosting.
Custom domain without self hosting still requires you to use an email provider, could even be google. The only problem is if you self host and don’t rely on trusted proxies, at which point it depends on the reputation of the IP/Domain etc.
Yeah, it’s taken me a similar time to migrate away from Gmail and I’m not keen to repeat the process. But if this is what Proton’s code quality control is going to be like going forward - employees forced to push improperly-tested code because of their unhinged CEO - I’m going to have to go through the whole process again. Sigh.
Fuck it. Let’s make an easy open source email host and all the corpse can wall us out and we’ll just email each other. Wait this sounds familiar.
What do you mean? That idea is brand new!
Same exact situation. In fact I’m not even fully done migrating away from Gmail although most of my stuff is on Proton now. sigh I guess I’m starting all over again soon.
I spent the day getting things set up to leave.
Pass went to KeePass, which was easier than I expected.
Drive is now replaced with Filen.io
Standard Notes is now Obsidian
Looking at AirVPN, but not ready to pull the trigger on that yet.
Still looking for a calendar. Thunderbird has one but it’s not on mobile for some reason.
The big one is mail. I was the same as you migrating from gmail so I’m learning my lesson now. Set up Thundermail today and have 3 custom domains set up. Spent hours today swapping out account emails. It’s rough, but I did it to myself. I knew going full Proton ecosystem was a bad idea, but at the time I just wanted out of Google. Take your time.
Baikal and any client that supports CalDAV, my friend.
Thanks, I’ll give it a look. Self hosting is a huge learning curve for me, I hate network stuff lol.
People may not like the idea of what I’m about to say but here’s a thought from someone who also found self hosting to be overwhelming at first and now self hosts everything but email. The learning curve is flatter than you probably imagine it to be if you are doing normal things with mostly default settings. I recommend docker containers to start. Find something you want to host and just follow the directions in the man pages. You might not understand everything initially but you’ll quickly pick it up as you change the handful of variables in a docker compose file to fit your setup. It will also help you get used to how to structure your files and folders in a way that makes things flow easier. Everything in docker can be done in the terminal which also takes away a layer of complexity.
I moved to Linux a while back and only discovered docker after setting everything up. Haven’t got around to learning about it yet, Linux itself was a lot of info lol. Do you use docker containers for like every app you install? Like if I start with an old laptop and try syncthing, should that be installed in a docker container?
I use it for every server app I install. Mainly because it easier to migrate applications between machines. Docker gives you a consistent build environment so you don’t have to worry about having 12 versions of Python installed and they are all wrong and then when you find the right one it breaks something else (this was never a common problem for me but it is annoying when it happens.) So, using docker-compose (recommended over cli commands because you can see all in one place what everything does and where it goes) you just edit the compose file to fit your scenario and build it. It is pretty easy and fast. When and if you decide you want everything accessible from the Internet you can read a few guides and knock it out in an afternoon. The reverse proxies can also be run as containers. Here’s the page for the sync thing container. To use it, install docker, create the folders the container calls for, edit the compose file as necessary, go to the folder the compose file is located in and run docker compose up -d and your build will start
Problem is that any vpn not in switzerland is basically an explict step down. Trusting a company that is in a country that has no enforcement means your trusting the company it self entirely to stay honest. At least with proton, no matter what the idiots at the top want. They still have to comply with their local laws.
That alone keeps proton above airVPN if your using a VPN for privacy reasons. It always will, no matter what. The entire country would have to change its laws for that to change.
Now if your just using a VPN for routing purposes or something that security is not a high piro. Then air VPN is fantastic.
Yeah, I’ve been struggling with this. I’m thinking when my mail gets sorted I’ll go down to just the vpn subscription for now. Keeping one service isn’t perfect, but perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good. keeping 1 of the 8 services is way better than all 8 lol.
Flexibility and diversification is annoying to manage but tends to be the best situation over all.
Proton does things right generally speaking, it’s just ran by an absolute idiot.
So you also have to weigh are your morals and expectations here reasonable to your own acceptance level. Vs your own requirements of the service at hand.
There are plenty of reasons to need a VPN that the extra security and privacy guarantee are beyond worthless. And in those cases staying in proton doesn’t make since if your morals go against the company.
While if you absolutely need that privacy and guarantee switching is a very real risk.
Plenty of people like having privacy but for some it’s actively a life or death situation. So you have to make that call. Where do you sit on that spectrum, and are your morals important enough to take the risk if your on the extreme end?
For most people who aren’t, switching is just a formality and technical consideration.
I canceled my renewal but I’be been putting off finding a replacement because what you said. It’s exhausting.
I use fastmail. Super happy so far.
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll look it up!
If I’d only put off de-googling a bit longer before I saw the news I could have skipped this hop. Oh well…
I’m eyeballing Tuta. Anyone have other recommendations?
I’d recommend an e-mail provider that supports custom domains, so you can easily switch at any time. I personally use Purelymail; I’ve also heard good things about Fastmail and Migadu.
I’ve never quite finished moving all my domains to Proton from google, but I think I’m leaning towards infomaniak.com for now, on the Business plan with my and my brothers family using the service
Tuta mail and calendar has been a real easy switch. I imported my emails from proton and just started a fresh calendar because I could and it was a good excuse to clean mine up.
The iOS apps work well and the experimental flatpak on desktop has been totally fine.
I have very little complaints so far tbh. I’m not like blown away or anything but everything just seems to work.
I mean I believe you, but thoughts on this comment: reddit
This is also a distortion. Proton has a tool that labels which code is AI-generated and which is human-written, which is important for many reasons. It can’t be used to evaluate how much AI somebody is using. The design document for the tool states this clearly. This document is available to all employees: r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence The security point
The list goes on and on. Same with the security point. I have access to that chat. Andy never said don’t do pen testing. It’s true, he used shitty language and he personally apologized to the whole company. However in that same security chat he also said something 404 omitted: “The baseline is, we must do this plus be faster at the same time” in reference to security testing. r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence
He agreed with the additional pen testing, and it was even recently implemented at Proton. What he didn’t agree to was it slowing down the pipeline. About hiring engineers
This quote “this is the last year that we hire engineers” is also out of context. At Proton, the engineering and product management roles are merging and we call this new discipline “Product Engineering”. Proton also mostly hires product managers with engineering backgrounds. It means we stop hiring engineers who just code, and hire instead product engineers who also exercise product judgment that AI doesn’t have, not that we don’t hire engineers at all. I know this because I help with hiring for the whole company. One last thing
I want to put a few words out there that aren’t about quotes or screenshots, but about my experience.
To be honest to you, we’re all in a bit of a shock after reading the articles written, and some of the criticism hurts me because it described a company I don’t recognize. Reading the comments on Reddit hurts me because so many of them do not reflect reality. Proton is not rushing into AI without concern for safety, it is actually being done very carefully.
If you’re deciding whether to keep using Proton, I’d just ask that you make that decision after getting the full picture, and not solely on the quotes that have been intentionally taken out of context. Otherwise, you are only hurting the workers that you claim to want to protect.
The thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50317991 raises some valid concerns about the Reddit post in question. It explicitly even says its been approved by the company, so idunno. 404 Media has done a lot of legit exposés in the last few years. I’m inclined to trust journalists over the guy posting on Reddit with permission from Proton. The screenshots apparently included show Yen telling an employee to do damage control with their personal account on reddit, which really makes things look even worse, doesn’t it?
For some reason your copy paste mangles the text, but the original seems to have some interesting context. I like 404, but it seems like they do as much click bait as anywhere else these days.
Internet journalism is about as yellow as classic journalism ever was. Its always been “click bait” always will be. lol
Gotta always take everything with a grain of salt and assume things are misrepresented either on accident or on purpose. Its a PITA but it is what it is.
I’m waiting to see if I’ll start using it.
Coincidentally I was thinking about cancelling just for the financial benefit since I will be making significantly less money soon
Exact same situation with me. Going to start this weekend on self hosting email and then the transition process. I still have around 6 months left on my proton subscription, so enough time to move everything.
Tuta is a good alternative. I am in the process of migrating there right now.
Its an explicitly worse alternative what are you on about. Its in a eyes country. Its literally an explicit step down on every level.
The moment tuta goes to shit there is nothing stepping them from going all the way. At least with proton the legal requirements of the country they are in means that no matter what stupid shit the dickhead at the top does. They are REQUIRED to adhere to a minimum standard.
Tuta has NO legal requirement to do that.
If you remotely care about privacy and enforcement of the standard of care around it. Tuta is like one of the stupidest places you can go.
I considered Germany a plus and they are one of the few options with total E2EE. I have not finished migrating yet, so what alternatives do you recommend?
Sorry, but you saying you’re tired after one switch is pretty funny. Many people here have gone through this several times for many different services etc. You have no idea what being tired actually means in this case.
Saying that others have it worse is putting the wrong person down especially when you dont know anything else about their life. We should be putting the companies and people that put us in the predicament in the first place down. They are the ones causing the problems. Not the commenter you responded to.
what the hell are you even fighting? who are you fighting with? this isnt the meaningless ‘we’re not the same’ bickering is it? give it a rest.
I’ve not really shown my hand, either.
For example. I had a Slashdot account before I had a Digg account before I had a Reddit account before I had a Lemmy account.
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written.
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