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?
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.
posteo.de Mail, calendar, contacts. Wonderful.
In wish they would allow custom domains.
Im happy user of https://www.migadu.com/ - they are located in Europe (Switzerland).
I have used mailfence for 10 years or so. Not non profit (I think) but should fit your other needs.
I will wait how the situation at Proton evolves I have recently prolonged so I am not in hurry. Right now nothing changes the fact that most of the services are still e2e and more secure than most alternatives, if that changes I have no problem switching. And I find encouraging that despite Yen being an ass there is actually good amount of employees that consider what they do in Proton their mission and they have passion for it and I hope Andy won’t squash that…
who knows if this will have any impact, but users are voicing their opinions here, asking Yen to be removed
I voted there too 😀
For me personally, this quote was insightful:
When someone shows you who they are, believe them
That being said, man, you’ve just paid them. Of course I’d also not just jump overboard all of a sudden.
Oh I believe them. But I also see that he built a fairly successful company focused on privacy (and security) and despite everything he has done lately they, the company, are listening to users (albeit quite slow) and they have no obligations to investors and that is one of their more important premises. So while I agree that Yen really needs to go, I still like Proton as a whole and I sincerely hope that whoever comes after Yen will be better and not worse than him…
mailbox.org is noteworthy too, but I don’t think I know any non-profit ones unfortunately.
Amazing service. They had a price increase recently I think. They never bother me and the service works great so no complaints.
price increase and yet still the cheapest i’ve seen for what they’re offering.
This. Very happy mailbox.org user.
Happy user of Infomaniak, they’ve been in this business since 4 years before the web existed, so I hope that translates to more staying power. And they’ve only grown every year since then, so far without selling out. The majority stake is owned by the non-profit Infomaniak Foundation.
Any love for disroot.org?
Now, they are experiencing a disk issue at the moment and one of the admins had a death in the family. But before that, I have been testing them thinking that I might start using them.
I’m using them already! Actually mentioned in the post body, too:
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.
But I’m also wary of continuity in case of financial struggles, hence this post. Maybe I should just wait out the current struggle with the failing disk and hope they will continue to operate on donations as they successfully have been for years and years… In any case, I’d like to know the alternatives, too.
Duh… reading is hard. /s
I think that they are in a good place financially. I seem to remember a page on their site that showed they are above water, although without a terribly big budget. I bought my first domain many months ago, and thought about moving it to disroot, since they do catch-all emails out of the box. But, still going to wait for them to get their disk situation ironed out.
I will say I had a ticket open and reached out to mappeth via xmpp, and it was a positive interaction. So, I’m still leaning towards disroot as a matter of just helping the scrappy little guy.
I’m considering thundermail, though it’s new and not perfect. Data is hosted in the EU, they don’t market your data, and it’s managed by the thunderbird subsidiary of the Mozilla group. Some basic things like E2E and at rest encryption are either half-baked or missing, but their project plan looks promising and they include calendar and contact sync as well.
