I have degoogled myself when it comes to email, running self-hosted email & calendar (not my own server). Did it two years ago, and up to now it has worked very well. I don’t miss anything from Gmail and have all the features it offered, plus some extra ones (like deleting email attachments via an email client – Gmail never deleted them, just archived them).
It’s good, however, always to have a backup email address that’s not connected with your hosting service. Up to now I’ve been using Gmail for that, but in view of recent developments, I just want to ditch the whole Google business.
I’ve seen that many people use Protonmail for this, and that’s what I’m considering. I’d like to hear about more possibilities and experiences though. Maybe there’s another provider that’s friendlier or more consumer/internet-freedom oriented?
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Proton and tutanota are good privacy options privacy guides has a good writeup. https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/
I actually didn’t like Tutanota. They’ve got good goals and the service itself was fine, but being limited to only using their clients was kind of a bummer. I get why they’ve got that restriction, but it still annoys me to have yet another app to check.
Yeah, 100%. It’s only reasonable if you want their full encrypted at rest design model. Every other service, including proton, keeps the metadata unencrypted: to,from,subject. This is done to make searching more manageable, but metadata is the prize.
Having used the tutanots app for a few years, it’s grown on me.
Email is a pretty insecure protocol as it is. From what I am aware, you can only get a certain level of security/privacy when sending cross domain emails, so we cannot get the same level of privacy as we would with Matrix or Signal. It’s getting the best security you can with a medium we and the world are unfortunately dependent on.
Agreed. We are talking only about the security of the email archive.
Partly off-topic: is that true even when one uses PGP? Email security and encryption is something I know very little about, unfortunately.
Thank you for the heads-up about the client restrictions!
I second this
Thank you for the extra link! Interesting guides there even besides email.
It’s a great resource. I highly recommend it.
Yep, i use ProtonMail as my primary email provider with my own domain. I have used them for almost 4 years now.
4 years, that says something about reliability. Thank you!
I found this one called Skiff, but I’m still vetting it. Seems too good to be true.
Uh, never heard of indeed, thank you! Let me take a look.
I’m very security minded and email is a really tricky one. I’ve moved search and browser easy. I moved from Android to GrapheneOS. Email I am more reluctant because I have had it a very long time. I have been trailing Proton Mail for about 8 months now and have been very happy with this. I’m now at the place to migrate most of my activity towards it. The only hesitation I have is probably banking, which may lag behind, but it is always about taking steps on this journey. I am in a weening process ;).
It’s a big and stressful transition and people will go at whatever pace they are comfortable. As long as we all work together and support each other through this journey, awesome.
I don’t know enough about Proton alternatives so I am more reluctant. Proton is a combination of credible yet trustworthy that works for me, but as I say, everyone has different levels of comfort.
Having your own domain name makes changing email providers much easier.
My transition was quite smooth, but everyone has different circumstances. It wasn’t a problem with banking in my case, I just changed my email at the bank. But probably your bank works differently?
In my case the good thing is that my email is hosted and handled by me, so I need something like Protonmail just as an emergency email in case my hosting server is down. (Sure I could use Google that way, but I just don’t want to.)
There’s Tutanota as something similar to Protonmail. (just bringing it’s name to you for further look into, don’t take this as a recommendation)
Hey, I appreciate the honesty! I’m looking into Tutanota right now, thank you for the heads-up :)
I’m using fastmail with my own domain name. If fastmail ever goes rogue, I’ll just switch to a different provider and keep on trucking with the same email. I also use Thunderbird, so I’ve got all of my past email downloaded already. It probably doesn’t really matter which email provider you go with, as long as it supports custom domains and you keep a copy of past emails.
That’s great and that’s what I did as well. It also feels safer to have old email just in my computer (with backups of course) and not somewhere in the cloud. I only keep a year of past emails in the server, just for reference. Will check Fastmail, cheers!
As others have suggested Tutanota and Protonmail: I personally prefer the first one. More user friendly for my taste.
Thank you! I’m exploring it right now and I agree on the more friendly feeling.
