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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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[–] vas@lemmy.ml 1 points 14 hours ago

Thank you for your response! This was one of two main contenders for me. What I've found about mailbox is that they have medium-strength stance on open-source (using, but not using only this). They likely support inbound encryption with a user-provided PGP key ("PGP-encrypted inbox" https://mailbox.org/en/prices/#compare-all-features--2). They are reasonably priced and upgradable with some additional payment to have VoIP support.

The other main contender for me was posteo, and after thinking and reading over the last 2 days, I've decided to go with them. In particular, I've liked:

Very good docs, saying what exactly they do. I could read all the details I wanted to know.
Strong stance on open-source: "our product offering exclusively uses open source software and free protocols, for security reasons. We only use Javascript which has open source code."
Sustainability, e.g. they only use permanent contracts for employees. (And many other points that resonated with me.)
They don't have calling support, but I consider it even better actually, because I want my emails to be very reliable, cheap and de-coupled from the rest of things. Calling I can honestly self-host just fine, since I don't have to worry much if stuff breaks or changes (as opposed to email, which would better be stable for me).

Again I actually value having read about mailbox as well - it's a very good alternative!