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?

  • MikeGrey@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    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

    • vas@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • vas@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      3 days ago

      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!

  • BiscuityCat@lemmy.world
    2·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • vas@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • BiscuityCat@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 days ago

        You are welcome. But I have never heard about “inbound PGP encryption”. Does that mean they would encrypt inbound emails with your key? Email is inherently unsecure communication (unless encrypted before sending), so I wonder how much security/privacy does that actually provide.

        • vas@lemmy.mlOP
          2·
          2 days ago

          Does that mean they would encrypt inbound emails with your key?

          Yes.

          Email is inherently unsecure … so I wonder how much security/privacy does that actually provide

          Indeed, the effect of this is limited. If the system is running properly, all new incoming emails are immediately encrypted - never even stored unencrypted on the disk. Which means that, if an attacker compromises the server, they would not see the body of past emails. They would, however, be able to intercept new raw incoming emails. Another aspect of this functionality is that it’d be near-impossible for posteo to do the evil thing and actually store the incoming messages without incriminating themselves badly if it’s ever found out. That additional aspect is a political pressure for them to do their job very well.

          In total, the email architecture is badly broken anyway, but features like that help a little bit.