I’m in the process of getting rid of as much Google-related stuff as I can. Yesterday I already started with moving everything I had stored in Drive (backups and other stuff) to my Nextcloud and the like. Now I want to change my main email, the one I’m going to use for, my accounts here in the fediverse and so on. So I’m looking for alternatives.
At the moment, apart from Gmail, I also have an Outlook (from when it was hotmail), a Proton account (though in view of their CEO’s recent statements I may not keep it) and a new one on Disroot.
Which of the aforementioned services works best for a normie not well versed in cybersecurity like me?
Do you know of any alternatives I’m not aware of (I’ve heard of Tuta, but nothing else)?
Tuta is fine, but very basic.
The stuff with Proton… It depends on what you need. Just an alternative to degoogle your life, it’ll work for now, but they may slide into a more pro Broligarchy stance in years to come. For some people, they’re still a little too invasive for what they want.
Email is inherently insecure, so its best to lock down a few and just fluidly transition around as you need.
I am using Tuta and am very happy with it. I like the feature where you can send encrypted Mails to anyone and they’re unlocked via a password (i dont know if others have it). Important for me at least is, that they’re based in germany.
I’ve been tempted by Tuta, it seems nice but I’m torn over IMAP access
Yeah it sucks but at least they have a good Linux AppImage (sadly no BSD). Their Android client is also fine and is on F-Droid.
Honestly, I was going to say Tuta, but seeing how proton changed, I would now add the option of self hosting.
I am unsure how difficult or easy it is, but it’s becoming a very viable option now.
What happened to proton?
There’s been controversy over a founder’s public backing of the US Republican party.
Fair warning: it’s likely that your ISP will block attempts at self-hosting a mail server at home.
Any reasons why?
They don’t want their network blocks reputation lowered because some idiot is sending spam mail or has an open relay. Apparently some will allow it on request.
Personally my mail server is on a Hetzner VPS.
All the reasons. It’s a well known problem that it’s super hard to host email.
I’m also considering alternatives to Proton myself. I’ve seen the privacy-oriented communities give a bunch of options. Search “Privacy” and you’ll see them listed. Tuta probably isn’t bad as a paid account but the free app left a lot to be desired the last time I checked (no message search or sorting like Proton).
I’ve been using mailbox.org for a while, and I’m happy with it. It costs 1€ per month at it’s lowest. They have also been developing an open source video conferencing thing (included in the 1€), which from my experience is much better than jitsi.
I’m planning on moving to mailbox.org eventually. I was going to keep using an outlook.com until my 365 ran out but they are currently shoving copilot buttons all over the UI. I’ve been wanting to use my own domain anyway.
Mailbox.org works for me.
I just moved away from Proton to Posteo for mail and calendar and Addy.io for email aliases.
I use Fastmail with ten custom domains.
I was going to switch to proton but im glad I never out in the effort.
I’m really happy with Posteo. It costs like 1€/month.
I’ve thought about doing this myself but my GMail account is so ingrained in everything I don’t think I’d be able to untangle the mess.
Are there any big issues you see coming up with doing this, long standing accounts not letting you change email, etc?
Do you plan on keeping the old account around for a period to catch any services you might have forgotten about?
Be interesting to see a follow-up once you’re done to see what kind of pain it causes.
The process will not be abrupt but gradual. I will stay with an email service that seems to be the most functional for me and I will change one by one first the accounts and services I use the most and then the ones I use the least. When my old email is unlinked to most things in my life, I’ll leave it abandoned for about half a year or so, to adapt, and then I’ll delete it definitively (if it’s possible without anything exploding or Google sending a Drone to kill me lol).
When I switched away from gmail, I found it to overall be pretty straightforward. Whenever I would log into a service, I update the email. Any service I didn’t log into clearly doesn’t matter enough to me. My gmail is now a spam account for old shit I don’t care about.
had the same question. after some research, I’m planning to switch to posteo.de
Happy Fastmail user here. Has a lot of extra features.
I use iCloud as I’m in deep with the Apple ecosystem but opened Tuta and have been happy with it so far!
I’ve used posteo for years now. It’s a small cost and never have any issues with it.
