Like it or not, email is a critical part of our digital lives. It’s how we sign up for accounts, get notifications, and communicate with a wide range of entities online. Critics of email rightfully point out that email suffers from a significant number of flaws that make it less than ideal, but that doesn’t change the current reality. In light of that reality, I believe that an encrypted email provider is a must-have for everyone in today’s age of rampant data breaches, insider threats, warrantless police access, and targeted advertising. If I can get access to your emails, I can get a range of sensitive information including where you bank (to craft more convincing phishing attacks), information about pets (I get notifications each year from the vet for my cats’ annual checkups), calendar reminders, news announcements from family, support tickets from services you use, and more. In a worse case scenario, if I get access to the account itself, it’s trivial to simply issue password reset requests for nearly any of those accounts, have it to sent to said compromised email account, and gain access to a wide number of other accounts you use – from banking to shopping and more – for any number of reasons. So this week, let’s look into the top encrypted email providers The New Oil recommends and their features to help decide which one is right for you.
TLDR: Proton and Tuta
Let’s see what europes e2ee ban will bring. Proton is one of the “high risk” services mentioned in the bills debate. Might not be too long before you have to host your own mail server if you want privacy in europe.
I’m probably going to downvoted to hell with this… But didn’t people say Proton might be a government Op, even Tuta was mentioned as a honeypot in a recent Court case, so they released a blog post titled: Tuta is not a honeypot…
Idk… my guts tell me, if something is too good to be true, then it’s not true… Proton offerings are amazing for a free plan… And their clients looks good and they sponsor YT channels… I used to be happy to see an Open source project succeed as a business, but the concept of honeypots, made me rethink my view
Yes, and both have proprietary clients. I have proton and I’m in the process to moving away mainly because I can’t use their calendar and contacts natively in Android. Not sure about Tuta, but I never liked them.
Well do you want privacy or do you want convenience? You can’t really have both here IMO
Didn’t Proton release some kind of adapter to solve this issue and allow for IMAP?
Yes, Proton Mail Bridge. I use it with KMail, works pretty well, I’d say.
Edit: I think this client is only for desktop, however. Android users will have to find another option.
Same calendar doesn’t give notification unless I open it. I’m just looking to replace Google.
I get notifications some times, but mostly I get them at totally random times. It’s very annoying.
Mailbox.org too.
The guys who decided to block GrapheneOS for no reason and don’t provide reasonable explanations nor fix the issue… yeah right.
What, source?
How would you block an OS?
And btw there are some reasons why GrapheneOS may be criticised
Mailbox.org missing, pass
Why isn’t posteo.de in the list? They are like Tuta, but with some more features like IMAP/SMTP.
A lot of lists for private alternative email services start and and with Proton, seemingly. Services like Posteo, Mailbox, Hushmail, Fastmail, etc are frequently overlooked. It’s a shame because many of these other services are great and Proton is one of the most expensive and not suitable for everyone. I’ve been with Posteo for years and I have nothing but praise for it.
Has anyone tried self-hosting on a NAS or similar? I’d be interested to hear the practicalities of it, I imagine it’s not exactly set or forget, and the realities of the enshittified internet present some obstacles, like ending up in spam filters etc.
A mail server is often mentioned as the first thing you don’t wanna bother with hosting yourself
I did some more research after your comment and it does indeed sound like it’s not for the feint of heart.
Spam seems to be one of the biggest challenges, both incoming and outgoing. For incoming, it’s a constant arms race with spammers to circumvent spam filtering techniques. But at least that’s something you have control over, you can just turn off your spam filtering and ensure you receive all important email. The real problem is ending up in other people’s spam filters, which you have very little control over once you’ve decided on your mail server domain/certificate.
The crux of the issue seems to be that SMTP is ancient insecure tech designed for an innocent era when email was for universities only. We desperately need a more secure open source email protocol designed for the modern era, but capitalism isn’t having it - instead we’ve got corporations wrestling for control of the next big thing with proprietary protocols… Discord, Slack etc. And big tech companies that continue using SMTP (Gmail, Outlook etc.) simply treat any servers outside their sphere with a high level of suspicion.
