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?
Is the impression I’m in a minority and a lot of folks aren’t fans, but I’ve been absolutely satisfied with Tuta for email and calendaring, and with a private domain attached I have virtually unlimited email accounts. I choose to pay 36 Euros per year to that vendor, over the alternatives.
I am using Soverin and they are neat, private, no ads, no tracking and hosted in Europe.
Wrote a blog post about it: EU made email, feel free to check it out
Looks quite good to me actually! I like infinite aliases stated right away. The price seems reasonable. I’d wish they’d have inbound encryption with user-provided PGP keys though - a feature I’m looking for, personally.
I’ve settled on switching to startmail. Its pretty cheap, based in the Netherlands, offers aliases, (which are important to me for keeping emails organized and privacy.) and allows emails to be pgp encrypted. The pgp encryption is honestly a better feature than proton’s encryption since you can communicate with people who don’t have a proton account and still keep emails secret from the provider. (cough cough)
Also it offers IMAP support so I set it up with thunderbird, and I don’t have to bother with plugins or anything like with proton. I’m honestly more happy with startmail than I was with proton so far, although its only been a few days.
Thanks for the response! Do you know if startmail has inbound encryption? That is, I give them my locally-generated public key, and they encrypt all incoming emails immediately as they arrive?
mailbox.org is noteworthy too, but I don’t think I know any non-profit ones unfortunately.
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!
This. Very happy mailbox.org user.
Im happy user of https://www.migadu.com/ - they are located in Europe (Switzerland).
Migrated to Fastmail about a year ago, away from Proton. Mostly to have an alternative that was easy to use for my partner too, but its honeslty the vest mail experience money can buy imo. Has a lot of nice features and the UI is excellent.
Also the developers there really seem to care about what they do. Love reading their blogoosts about how they store the data, or how they’re also hwlping develop the new open standard JMAP.
Fastmail is a failsafe option worth the penny.
Thank you for the response! It was interesting to read about them. However, it’s also notable that they don’t offer inbound encryption with user-provided GPG keys. For me that part matters. Again thanks for the response in any case!
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.
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.
