What is your threat model? Western intelligence? Both are suspicious and cannot be proven to not be western intel cut-outs or compromised by them and given the history of western intel agencies subverting everything they can in the encryption space (cryptoAG, etc), well you can only trust them so far.
I’m not saying the NSA or CIA is going to rat you out to the FBI about buying some drugs from your dealer for personal use because they’re not. But email is not a very secure medium. The best way to go about it is to encrypt before copying the message over using something like PGP and keys you’ve shared via a secure channel (not email, not compromised instant messengers). Beware of course that most of the value intel agencies in the west get is via metadata, building networks, knowing who you talk to, who they talk to, what times you talk, correlating that with other surveillance data (cell location data, intel on protest participation, etc).
Someone else mentioned Yandex and Russian companies are not a bad idea but beware of expat Russian companies like Yandex that started there and mainly serve there, have most technical employees there, but conveniently moved their legal headquarters into the west within the jurisdiction, legal, and extra-legal powers of western intelligence (probably to avoid sanctions and other issues). I will say I’d sooner use a Russian service (even an ex-Russian one like Yandex) for privacy and security purposes than an American, European or western vassal state one.
Either is probably better than Google though. Honestly whichever fits your needs and budget, go with it.
Neither. Of course, both are far better than Gmail, but unless you’re self-hosting and using two-way encryption for all emails (in which case you might as well use something like Matrix), always assume that your emails are available to anyone
Neither seem really great. I’ve gotten shit for saying this before, but Protonmail comes across as a honeypot to me. For various reasons I also don’t trust the whole “Swiss hosted super private” marketing.
Here’s a deep dive into various email providers and an analysis of their claims vs. what they actually provide.
in the process of migrating from google to proton and I like it more. There’s no unnecessary request for personal information, no weird AI features that read your drafts and messages, no bs so far.
Privacy wise it seems better than the other mainstream options but my only motivation is to stop companies like Google from building an ad profile of me.
