Hi all, a couple of years back I moved to Proton on a 2 year plan. Then the CEO started spouting Trump stuff. I cancelled at the time but the subscription is only now up for renewal.
I have moved everything across to Tuta recently, but I don’t like it, so I’m looking for further suggestions.
Why didn’t Tuta work for me?
- No function to auto-forward emails to another email address.
- No bridge or IMAP so I can’t connect to Paperless
- Mobile app is janky - when I swipe to archive, it sort of sits there for a while as it talks to the server. And just generally it feels slow like it’s waiting for the server for every action instead of backgrounding the requests.
- Web app is weird. It doesn’t even have an archive button, I have to use “Move -> Archive” making it slow to go through my inbox.
- Importing emails is only available on their most expensive plan. Weird to not want people to move to your platform? (it also couldn’t handle 15000 emails, I had to load them 1000 at a time)
Things I want:
- Must support custom domain
- Must support catchall
- Must support forwarding an email to another email address based on the “to” address
- Must not be run by dicks (e.g. Trump supporting CEO or Proton, union busting like Fastmail, and no big tech) - as close as possible at least
- Should have some method to connect to my self-hosted Paperless NGX (e.g. Proton’s bridge, or just IMAP)
- Should have emails encrypted from provider if possible - not sure if anyone other than Proton or Tuta do this.
- Should support GPG
- Should allow importing email history from previous provider
- Should have a nice web/mobile app or allow IMAP. Bonus points if I don’t have to use the Play store.
Honestly I’d put up with the janky app if Tuta had the functions I want, I mostly just want my money going to some provider that aren’t dicks, but having the provider not be able to read my emails would be a bonus.
Anyone got suggestions for me?
Proton and Tuta encrypt everything in the client so they have zero knowledge of the emails in your inbox, and because of this you can’t use standard email clients. So anything that allows a standard client isn’t up to the same standard.
But with that said, Mailbox seem to be explicitly no-US in their stack, and after all if 99% of emails are coming or going outside of the Proton/Tuta ecosystem then I’m not sure how helpful the extra encryption is. I’ll wait and see if anyone else has suggestions, and if not I might sign up for Mailbox for a month and see if it meets my needs. Thanks for the suggestion!
To be a bit more explicit, if Proton’s server receives an email that isn’t encrypted end-to-end (like the majority of emails aren’t), the receiving server in Proton’s infrastructure can read the contents of the email just fine.
They do encrypt the emails for storage / at rest then, but given that most email communication is with online services, businesses etc. that rarely support encryption, I always found the additional privacy claims questionable, as they are rarely applicable in practice.
Yeah but I guess they can at least claim they can’t access emails already received when the govt comes knocking? They would have to capture emails on receipt, and the govt probably just asks the sending company for it anyway.
Email is inherently not a privacy focused service. You’ll be hard pressed to find anything unless they’ve made it central to their business like Proton.
Well, if you do decide to try out mailbox.org, there’s another thing to note: their lowest price tier (1€/month) requires a yearly subscription. To do monthly it’s 4€/month
Thanks for the heads up. I would need the mid tier anyway as I will be using a custom domain and many of my needs are based around that.