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Best email providers and Proton replacement? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by vas@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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What do you folks use instead of Proton and Google? Ideally I'm looking for:

Non-profit.
European-based if possible.
Paid is fine.
Low-risk. E.g. unlikely to disappear, unlikely to go bankrupt.

My reason to want non-profit is that it's the best way to align mine and the provider's incentives, I think. I'd consider for-profit as well, but it's best if it's a non-profit.

So far I like disroot a lot. But they are principled about being unpaid, so if the financial ends don't meet each other my emails will be in trouble. I'm donating to them, but I have my worries. I'm willing to pay a little if I know that my money will go for a quality service, for expansion of coverage (new users) and for open-source technologies.

Proton and their founder Andy are just a piece of sh*t in terms of upper management, so that's not worth discussing.

Posteo seems adequate. Tuta feels similar to Posteo with a bit more push for fanciness. Is there something similar but non-profit?

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[–] BiscuityCat@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I have been using Runbox for several years and I'm happy with them. I choose them because they are one of the few email providers that allow you to create aliases/identities.

They are not non-profit, but they say they take ethical (and other) responsibilities very seriously. They do use LLM, but again they say they use it only as a tool and it is used responsibly. They do take transparency seriously, so they have all this information written on their website.

[–] vas@lemmy.ml 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you! Depending on the use case, they seem to be pretty reasonably priced as well. One feature that I'd personally be happy to see but they don't seem to support it is inbound PGP encryption with a user-provided key tough.

[–] BiscuityCat@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

You are welcome. But I have never heard about "inbound PGP encryption". Does that mean they would encrypt inbound emails with your key? Email is inherently unsecure communication (unless encrypted before sending), so I wonder how much security/privacy does that actually provide.

[–] vas@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 hours ago

Does that mean they would encrypt inbound emails with your key?

Yes.

Email is inherently unsecure ... so I wonder how much security/privacy does that actually provide

Indeed, the effect of this is limited. If the system is running properly, all new incoming emails are immediately encrypted - never even stored unencrypted on the disk. Which means that, if an attacker compromises the server, they would not see the body of past emails. They would, however, be able to intercept new raw incoming emails. Another aspect of this functionality is that it'd be near-impossible for posteo to do the evil thing and actually store the incoming messages without incriminating themselves badly if it's ever found out. That additional aspect is a political pressure for them to do their job very well.

In total, the email architecture is badly broken anyway, but features like that help a little bit.