If what you want is private/secure encrypted email that the provider itself can not even read, I recommend you arcanechat.me
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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A couple months ago, I would have said Proton. But....
Here we are.
I switched to Proton about 6 months ago.
Wish I had waited. Ah well.
Domains are cheap, buy one and then you can jump between whatever services aren't caught up in the outrage of the moment.
I did, but I already paid for two years (plus did a bunch of work to migrate files over). So I'll be here for a bit.
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Buying your own domain.
You can then use whatever provider, or host your email service... but at least you don't need to change addresses when switching anymore.
Just make sure your domain registrar is renewable from an alternate email in case shit hits the fan you don’t want to be locked out if something interrupts the service and bow your email doesn’t work and you can’t verify who you are… because… your email doesn’t work.
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disroot and autistici have been providing decentralised communication services (like email) free of cost for many years. They are both run by activists and survive on donations, and they don't spy on you or get any money from your data. Also they run freedom-respecting software, so all their code is publicly auditable.
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I will always recommend Posteo. https://posteo.de/en
Besides the lack of custom domain support Posteo is cheap and great. Stellar support team.
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Mailbox Standard compared to ProtonMail Plus:
- Cheaper (€30/yr vs ~€50/yr; if you don't need custom domains, €1/mo)
- More aliases (25 on mailbox, 50 on own domain. Proton has 10 TOTAL - why custom domain aliases are counted against Proton ones does not make sense to me.)
- Support for any number of custom domains AFAICT (Proton Plus supports only one)
- Trial account is not allowed to send emails, so fewer issues with services blacklisting proton.me and protonmail.com for spam (hasn't happened to me, but I have heard of some cases)
- Can use a regular email client (security tradeoff for E2EE messages - but there already were plenty of discussions on whether E2EE has benefits, especially sending mail to other services)
If you're using a custom domain, don't use Mailbox.org, see below:
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-custom-domains-spf-dkim-dmarc#comment-1524
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Proton, but I've been questioning that of late :-/
i get it... its still a quality service despite that one shithead exec
But the shithead exec is supportive of fascists which means privacy is secondary to the desires of the current regime. That's just a standard part of fascism. And if the current regime is allowing untested backdoor code to be inserted in the Treasury department and NASA and the CDC and most major social media to strip out protections for people they don't like, climate change, etc. Just imagine what someone who actually supports them ideologically would be willing to do.
if you distance yourself from every company that has a dick executive, youre going to need to go off-grid. good luck.
People on all social media really can't seem to understand that the choices aren't exclusively "everything has a perfect open source, non-profit utopia" and "fuck it, everyone is corrupt so it doesn't matter what service you use."
You are able to do what you can, where you can, to mitigate risks and try your best not to support fascists.
Then again, maybe people are just arguing in bad faith.
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I distance myself from companies run by people who say or explicitly support people who say that I don't or shouldn't exist. There are a few other things that make me distance myself from companies, but that one is a pretty hard line. (I'm gender "non-compliant" and on the Autism spectrum among other things that have been explicitly said don't exist, shouldn't exist, or need to be "cured"). Otherwise, I try to distance myself from any companies who explicitly collect and sell my information and other things that I find problematic, but that's not always possible.
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I was looking at moving to Proton as this all went down. Those plans are on hold.
After reading through it, I am having trouble figuring out how to read his comments because I wonder if there is some different cultural references or simplification going on between the Swis exec and American readers.
It was absolutely a stupid comment and was then the response was handed badly, but I don't know that I read it as aligning with Fascism.
This is the best writeup I can find: https://archive.ph/2025.01.29-213655/https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
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How about Tuta mail with a custom domain? They have unlimited custom domain addresses which is pretty nice
Mailbox.org
Everything is better ;-)
i.e. mailbox.org, posteo.de; there are also protonmail and tuta.com, but they don't have IMAP
I use mailbox.org, my 2 points for it were:
- it has IMAP support, so I can use whatever client I like
- for "normal" people it doesn't sound very strange.
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Perhaps an indirect answer, but I'm using a duck.com forwarder whenever i need to give any address, these days. On top of tracker filtering and random alias generator, once i change addresses I'll only have to update the forwarders destination.
I've been using Tuta for damn near a decade, and it's been great for me.
If you really wanna get started with your own domain I highly recommend just getting https://purelymail.com/ setup for the hosting provider. It's going to be way cheaper than just about anything and you pay for what you use. I've been on it for a few years and never had a problem.
This dude compare quite a lot of email providers in term of privacy. I do not necessarily agree with all its critics but it is a useful resource:
https://digdeeper.neocities.org/articles/email
I would recommend to buy your own domain in case you need to change again. That way, you're not trapped by your email provider and you can change in case you're not satisfied anymore
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tuta
As someone just barely scraping by month to month, I needed something free and Tuta was the answer. 1gb is not bad at all, and a good choice for someone starting their degoogle journey.
I'm actually busy setting up my own mail server. On my own infrastructure, using public static IPs etc. I'm done with all these other mail providers. I'm going back to the start.
Another one for Tuta, with addy.io as a proxy service. Nice integration with Bitwarden for making new accounts + it's simple to make rules based on the to address for easy filtering.
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Posteo + Addy.io + Thunderbird
I'm using Infomaniak Mail and am fairly happy so far. They are based in Switzerland and I get custom domain + 5 user accounts for 1.50 EUR/month. I've tried other providers but coming from Gmail I like that their webmail displays email conversation like Google does whereas most other providers just run rainloop or roundcube where threading support isn't quite the same.
Their android app is open source too and can be installed from fdroid. It can be a bit sluggish sometimes though, but K9mail/Thunderbird works fine too.
I've been using mailbox.org, and it's pretty great. It's cheap, it's private, and it works well.
I like the idea of e2ee email, but the way they all work it's pretty much a completely useless feature for most people, myself included, and I also like using Thunderbird. It's just not worth the trade off for something I'd basically never get any use out of anyway.
You can search lemmy for keyword email, and 99.99% of recommendations will be better than Gmail.
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Tutanota?
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