If you’re giving those companies personal info (name, phone, address, CC) they can track you regardless of what emails you use with each of them.
And if you’re not giving them personal info I don’t see how that works. Yeah so I register on both random site A and random site B with aliases @tfyuhegddssgvd.com, so what? How are they going to find out about each other? What will they tell each other even if they did? And why risk a GDPR violation for such silly reasons?
Proton is in the process of removing their PC bridge in favor of a custom app. After they’re done you won’t be able to migrate your email away from their service anymore.
Which is ironic, when people are trying to flee from Google. Out of the fire and into the frying pan…
It’s in restricted beta currently, only available to a small category of users, and still lacking features. They say it will launch early 2024 but it looks more like mid-year to me (at best).
Point is, it won’t happen very soon, but it will happen
For YouTube, it’s probably not possible to not use its content, but you can try alternate front ends like Piped (and its wonderful Android client, LibreTube, if you’re on Android.)
For Gmail, not sure if this works for you but I set the vacation feature to reply to every email I receive notifying them of my new email. I switched to Vivaldi Webmail (Proton doesn’t let you use 3rd party clients w/o a subscription plan btw, I’d switched to Vivaldi first so not a major thing for me) but Skiff (paid) looks good, Kagi Search is planning an email service, Tutanota has an email service, and I guess you could self host. While you transition, use a client that lets you have a unified inbox (K9 works on Android) and just have both logged in.
The only thing i have done so far is use imap into thunderbird…. All this is valuable. I want to use a self hosted solution but at the moment its all a surface level thought. Thanks a lot for this comment!!
They’re not doing like proton and close basic stuff like IMAP and SMTP as a way to force you on the official apps
I especially love the feature where you can bounce emails based on domains, keywords or TLDs. My spam folder is finally empty. IMHO bounce back spam is much better, as the spammers get a response that the address is invalid and hopefully stop wasting their limited computing resources on that address.
Zoho is not open source, but proton is a “fake” open source that is mostly used for marketing: they opened only the UI, which communicates with a proprietary protocol to a proprietary server - useless. They also reject or ignore any pull request on GitHub.
i started with the mail basic (10 euro yearly for 10gb) but then because i switched from “secondary email that forwards to gmail” to “primary email that imports from gmail”, i had to move to the more expensive plan
I mean, that’s going to be a risk you take with any hosted service. I currently self-host my contacts and calendar, but I have no interest in hosting my own email again.
I don’t self host my email either. I got my registrar, DNS and email separate from each other so if any of them goes bad I can switch with minimum fuss.
But that makes it all the more important to be able to download all your mail from your provider.
Proton currently has two proprietary things you can use to download, a “bridge” PC app that pretends to speak IMAP, and a download tool. The bridge will be discontinued after they launch their propeietary PC mail app so that leaves just the proprietary download tool, which only does .eml. format.
That’s a very broad question that depends a lot on your usage. My needs may be different from yours.
I’m currently using Migadu because:
Unlimited domains, mailboxes, accounts and aliases for a flat fee. I’m managing accounts for myself as well as family and extended family members and it comes out much cheaper this way than services that ask $5-10/account.
Very nice management interface with all the bells and whistles but with reasonable defaults and easy to use.
The company is based in Switzerland and the mail hosted in EU (France).
Standard email service with everything you’d expect (the regular protocols, spam protection, webmail, full compatibility with clients etc.)
They’re not doing like proton and close basic stuff like IMAP and SMTP as a way to force you on the official apps
The reason Proton cannot do IMAP/SMTP is that they cannot read your emails which is required for both. That’s a feature, not a bug.
PM works with any app as long as the app implements their custom protocol for which there are at least two FOSS implementations as a reference.
proton is a “fake” open source that is mostly used for marketing: they opened only the UI, which communicates with a proprietary protocol to a proprietary server - useless
While I’d also prefer their back-end to be OSS, it’s not nearly as critical as the clients.
As a user, it doesn’t make a difference. I’m paying for an opaque service either way.
All the interesting stuff (E2EE, zero access storage) happen in the clients anyways. The BE is fairly uninteresting; it’s a mail server + zero-access encryption + Proton account handling. If you really wanted to build a mail service similar to Proton, you could build that yourself and probably would have to anyways.
i think instead the opposite. The backend is the real interesting part, and the only way that we can be sure that “they cannot read the emails” (they arrive in clear, saved with reversible encryption and they have a key for it - if you use their services to commit crimes they will collaborate with the law enforcement agencies like everyone else)
imap/smtp can be toggled with a warning, if that’s really their concern. As of now i have the feeling that’s instead blocked to keep users inside (no IMAP = no easy migration to somewhere else) or to limit usage (no SMTP = no sending mass email)
The backend is the real interesting part, and the only way that we can be sure that “they cannot read the emails”
While I’d still prefer it, OSS can’t really help with that because what’s really required here is remote attestation.
That is an unsolved problem to my knowledge; there is no way to know which software they’re actually running. Even if they published the source code, they could trivially apply a patch in their deployment that stores all incoming email somewhere and you’d be none the wiser.
Even if they published source code and could somehow prove to you that they’re running a version derived from it, you would still not be safe from surveillance as one could simply MITM all connections. See i.e. notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/.
That’s likely one of the reasons they do everything they can to make PGP accessible to every user.
imap/smtp can be toggled with a warning, if that’s really their concern
It’s plain and simply not how their service works. They’d have to build most of their service a second time but unencrypted.
It’s like asking Signal to build in support for IRC; it does not make sense for them to do that in any way without malicious intent needed.
no IMAP = no easy migration to somewhere else
You have IMAP access via the bridge. That’s what it’s for.
Zoho and PM have two entirely different reasons for existence. If you don’t want E2EE (assuming the other sender is on PM) then by all means, use Zoho. And IMAP isn’t E2EE compatible in the slightest, what they’re charging for is the decryption bridge that makes it work with an IMAP client. They had to come up with that, it’s not just a switch you flip at PMs end that makes IMAP work.
Domain naming authorities require identification for the registration of domains. You cannot purchase domains anonymously. You can pay Njalla and they own the domain, and they’ll tell you that you can control it, but you have no rights to it in any kind of dispute.
All my <TLD> are redacted and I still full own. in the .nz space there has to be a real contact person, and I’m ok with that as I’m a big boy that has been online for over 1/4 of a century now.
If you have Proton Premium point your domain to SimpleLogin and use it. Its included with Proton Premium. Its helped me root out 2 places so far that have sold my email address or were compromised and failed to disclosure.
if youre running a full domain, you dont even need to manually create alias' unless you need to reply/send as.
i've found i rarely need to do that, so you can literally just use an email address literally off the top of your head, have it all forwarded to a catch all and youre done. none of this extra service stuff. again, unless you require 'send as/aliasing'.
You cannot turn off the proton aliases, one of my aliases (those with +) got compromised and I’m still getting phishing emails on that one. You can create a rule for that mail but you cannot completely disable it. There is also Proton Pass which does the same as SimpleLogin and also stores Passwords. You should check it out as well.
My experience with Proton has been really great so far. Constant steady improvements to their services and UI/UX, I wish I had switched to them sooner.
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