Been looking for an alternative to gmail and out of all the ones I’ve looked at protonmail seems to be the best one.

  • @ruio1818
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    42 years ago

    It depends what you want/need email for. My view is that you should maximise privacy where you can, but that email should be considered insecure - you can never really be sure that the message you have delivered has passed through SMTP servers in a secure way, there is no contract requiring this in email.

    I wouldn’t use ProtonMail for your day to day email address, in my opinion it’s overkill. I think ProtonMail is well-intentioned, but I also believe a lot of what they have is snake oil - email is fundamentally insecure, and unless you’re using PGP all the time (this is flawed as well as while it’s E2E encrypted, metadata leaks are inevitable due to the way email works with headers describing author, destination, user agent, and other details) you can’t assume the content of your communication is secure.

    I would look into a paid email provider which has good support and a fairly reasonable and reputable commitment to privacy and security. I personally use mailbox.org, which is also very inexpensive; I have heard good things about FastMail, though I have never tried it.

    For secure email, I have heard great things about Tutanota. I would sooner take their word on matters of privacy and security over ProtonMail’s, but again you shouldn’t do this blindly. PGP while a great protocol is not and has never been practical for this kind of thing, it is at best good for signing your messages so recipients can optionally confirm you are who you say you are.

    • eisensteinium ☭OP
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      22 years ago

      Yeah, I’m aiming to maximise privacy but I avoid using email for anything sensitive. I was suspicious about Tutanota since they’re based in a 14 eyes country but after researching some more it fits my needs far better.

      I’ve pretty much accepted that the only truly “secure” communication is between two people whispering to each other in the same room but I would like to reduce my dependency on Google as much as possible.