this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
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That blows. I was genuinely looking into proton after the news that Google will use their shitty AI to scan Gmail. Fuck that.
Like is nothing private anymore? Soon in Europe all your chats will be monitored, email monitored, ID verification, age verification.
Fuck this new internet.
Heads up! Use a custom domain, don't full for the gmail trap again (it took me 3 years to get all my emails sorted out and I sacrificed some services where it was hard to change the email)
Get you own custom domain, and when Google, Porton, Tuta, ... inevitably goes evil, export and import your emails while keeping your sumu415@myawesomedomain.xyz email address.
Wait, I can use a custom domain but connect it to Proton/Tuta/etc?
Free plan: usually no.
Any paid plan: yes.
Check out Tuta or Mailbox.org
mailbox.org looks interesting. My 15 GB of free Google space is almost full (of photos) and I refuse to give them any money... Then again, my membership at SDF includes Nextcloud... hmm.
In this "personal data economy" hellscape we've created, harvesting people's private data is the default. Unless a product is advertising protecting your privacy like their marketing job depends on it, rest assured, they're doing the opposite. Any company that does not have an explicit policy against data profiling is actively doing it or is gearing up to.
Gmail has never been private. I remember them scanning my emails for auto correct like twenty years ago.
Proton has their own AI that they're developing, which yes, is private. Presumably this is a big part of what they're doing with their staff, and it makes sense, as they're going to need people who know what they're doing and not vibe coders if they don't want people to hate what they're making.
Their model has to be private thanks to the laws of the country where they're incorporated, but think of it like an AI version of Signal, where logs of your prompts and your data aren't retained. The Swiss don't fuck around with privacy, and I personally like that Proton doesn't get to decide this. Every single AI model you've probably heard of doesn't do this, either harvesting any data you put into it or destroying rare books and scraping the web illegally to train its models.
The downer here is that Proton's AI can't do some of the things frontier AI can do, but for most users that's not going to matter.
None of that info makes for fun Reddit rage-baiting, so I'm guessing no one mentioned it. Also, it should be noted that you should never, ever load a file or a prompt into an AI that you wouldn't want to become public, as servers can get compromised and data leaked.
For me personally, I have not used any AI product or service and trying my utmost to avoid any product or service where 'AI' scans my data. I use donotspy on my windows to stop all the shit that now comes with Microsoft as unfortunately my work requires a windows platform, Firefox because I can disable all that AI shit and have my extensions up and running.
It is nothing more than an advanced version of 'if.. then.. else' except it gets it wrong 48% of the time.
Today I had to find a new email client because EMclient also decided to add slop to their app.
As much as I appreciate the warning about uploading any file to any AI client, never in my fucking life.
Smart. Good on you for being mindful and taking appropriate precautions.
I have a Windows/Linux dual-boot and keep anything requiring privacy on the Linux side. For Windows, I use O&O ShutUp, which is an application that allows a user to easily shut off all of Windows' intrusive settings and delete Copilot.
As for LLM's, they're my last resort for anything, and I only really use them if I can't find the information I need on Mojeek or Marginalia-Search, not just for privacy's sake but because I have an ideological problem with their vast energy use and the economic and environmental impact those applications have.
But none of it's foolproof, so I always just keep in the back of my mind before doing or saying anything online: Would I want this to go public?
Maybe take a look at fastmail.com
Fastmail is very good, and now offers the option of storing your data in the EU instead of the USA, but it doesn't offer end-to-end encryption like Tuta or Proton.
You can always use DKIM and DMARC for authenticity, standard TLS for the chain and PGP for the encryption if you are really concerned. They offer true oauth+MFA on all connection methods (most use plain text for IMAP still) Storage at rest is more important if it's about being data mined and privacy like the original post than perfectly non-interceptable in flight comms.
Also apparently no custom domains
I use my own custom domain with Fastmail, plus it offers email aliases too. I can send emails under several different addresses that I own, and collect mail from other mail services in my Fastmail inbox. It's really not lacking for features.