A while back I started on this journey, and as most people did, I’ve had my ups and downs and went through the learning curve, I’ve now reached the point of so much knowledge that I truly know, I dont know shit. People of Lemmy I come to you today because idk what to do, I recently made a free account with proton, their subscription is fairly cheap so idm paying the monthly tier of 15GB so I can have control over ending it whenever I please instead of being locked in for a year. Now, I heard about Tuta but never dived much into it, i know Proton has had its controversies (Don’t be shy of reminding me of what they were), but what are my options here truly for a proper FOSS email provider? I can negate the free part for a reasonable price, but truly private AND secure is a must.
Self Hosting isn’t an option yet for personal reasons unless it’s completely free.
This might be an unpopular opinion in this community, but here it goes.
Privacy doesnt really exist with email. Yes, Proton does support encryption, but nobody but Proton uses it. When your bank sends you an email, its plain text, and its pretty much guaranteed its sent from an outlook or gmail server. If they want your data they can get it whether youve got proton or not.
As for me - I actually still use my universities email. Its on outlook, but, hardly anything is sent to it, it never gets flagged as spam, and it doesnt cost me anything and will hopefully be there forever.
Your opinion is not unpopular here.
For those that don’t know, yes, when Proton or Tuta sends an email to an unsecured provider, it is on the open… if you want it to be that is. You have the choice to tick if you want to send the mail and attachments encrypted or not. If you choose to send it encrypted, they have a link they have to introduce a password to get in. I use this multiple times with somehow sensitive data. At least their email provider won’t have the data… now, the recipient may place then that data in Google Docs and that is game over; but that is your party’s fault, not your email provider.
Came to say the same, the only benefit I see in proton and other providers is not having my email monitored by Google but that’s it
Google alone is enough reason for me haha
Nah that’s a pretty common (and correct) take. Never email something you wouldn’t want to see come up in a court case. Secure email can limit exposure somewhat though. Unless it’s the government it may be impossible or at least harder to put things together about you from other email addresses. At the very least every email is not being scanned by Gemini and used to train it. And the more people that use privacy respecting email the more private it is.
Yeah, as long as it’s not Google, it works. The real trick is to find a good email aliasing service (I use Addy.io) so when email are exposed in a data breach you can just turn it off and avoid spam. Also good for when your trying different emails out because you just have to update what the aliases send to.
Never actually thought of it that way, like how no matter what you do, since most of your family uses META, you’re indirectly hit by the crossfire
Right ya. You’re best bet if you want to achieve privacy is to pretty much stop using email as much as possible. Proton is fine, and it is better than say using outlook or gmail, but barely.
Privacy doesn’t really exist in what way? In a sense that the layperson should be concerned or just a person of interest in a diplomatic position?