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.
Others have already said similar, but it depends on what you mean by “private” and “secure”. Yes, proton is e2e but that only is true if you’re emailing another proton user. And yeah, Proton can’t read your emails, but as soon as you email someone else outside the ecosystem, it’s as good as public.
I’m not saying thou shalt not use proton! But I had a subscription and cancelled. One part because the CEO vocally supported Trump and the doubled down when called out. Another part because I got tired of the proton ecosystem being inaccessible outside its own walled garden because of the e2e.
So I switched to Fastmail and couldn’t be happier. Is it perfect, no, but what is? It works well, it’s reasonably priced, they’ve been around forever, and I can use it with apps/programs outside of what they provide.
When it comes down to it, your email will never be truly private unless you only communicate with people who are just as concerned about privacy.
Could you tell me why fastmail, like pros and cons
Pros, it just works the way I’d expect it to. What really makes me happy with it is how they enable you to use it outside their ecosystem if you want to, so like caldav, SMTP, etc. Those either don’t exist or are much harder to do in proton because of the encryption.
They have a mindset of enabling you to use your data the way you want to: recently they added an api for interfacing with LLMs, which lets you plug one into your email/calendar but only if you want, and then it’s something you have to turn on. If you never want to have AI near your data, that’s the default. In this era of “we made email better by integrating AI into it that you didn’t ask for” Fastmail gives you the option, but doesn’t force you.
Not unique, but they have a great masked email creation that can be generated from elsewhere. Currently I have them generated in Bitwarden when I create a new login (Bitwarden problems are a different thread).
Cons, it is hosted in Australia which does have better protections than the US, but is still part of Five Eyes. Your data isn’t encrypted on disk, but is encrypted in transfer as is standard these days. They are transparent about the fact that they could see your data if they wanted, but they state their principal is to have a very food reason to do so, otherwise they say they’ll respect your privacy. They also say their business model depends on not scanning your data and selling it because people would jump ship if they did (true) but all of that is taken on faith.
Ultimately, unless you self host, you’re going to have to trust someone. And the headaches of Proton’s ecosystem being so locked down just so I could say they couldn’t read my email, but gmail could as soon as I sent it, didn’t add up for me, which is why I switched. I like the convenience and it works well, and the price is reasonable.
Thank you so much.