This guy can be pretty harsh at times, but he’s clearly very knowledgeable..
However, not all providers have a recent review, and his priorities are skewed heavily to the “paranoid” side of the tech world. For example, he considers being able to mail cash to a provider a significant pro. The overwhelming majority of users aren’t mailing cash to pay for their email.
Overall, it’s good info that’s worth sharing.
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Hmm, looks like proton isn’t too bad. Unless you are living in a cave using tor and bots you are tracked.
I enjoyed the read. I’m a fastmail user and I didn’t pick it for real privacy but because it’s not Google. It’s better than Gmail, more features, looks better, faster etc.
I don’t know how any email provider can provide real privacy since they have to scan for spam, malware, and so on.
Fastmail is part of the 5 eyes surveillance network as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
Yeah, his requirements for an email provider are well above what most people need.
Email is not a secure means of communication in most cases. If the recipient isn’t encrypting, then your communications to them are vulnerable anyway. And in the vast majority of cases, they probably aren’t.
Really, the best thing about getting a more privacy conscious provider is not giving all your data over to Google.
Yeah and getting away from Google is worth so much actually. People don’t seem to realize how important it is to simply not use Google and block their tracking scripts (on the web), and don’t use their free email service, naturally.
Yeah, I switched to Posteo mainly so all of my emails aren’t scanned by an advertising company.
The main thing I dislike about the encrypted email providers is that I can’t use my own client, I’m stuck with whatever features they want to give me.
Exactly my reasoning. Get away from Google and advertising (though they said they are not using Gmail for that), get a better interface, masked emails. Fastmail is great.
Thought this comment he made was odd about Proton mail.
The site is filled by beautiful black screen without JavaScript enabled.
Like yes, its a bit difficult implementing local encryption or decryption without js enabled.
Has some good messaging, I’d say most of his comments are pretty widely known concerns or limitations.
Like obviously web apps still rely on trust from the host, but it minimizes the attack surface massively.
Seems a bit nearsighted to accuse every service of malice and then completely ignore that tutanota fixes lackluster pgp encryption by also encrypting the subject line.
This works virtually identically between both providers, except that Tutanota encrypts both the message body and subject line, whereas ProtonMail only encrypts the message body. This doesn’t pose a huge risk if you use the former service. Just make sure that your subject lines don’t contain any sensitive information. source
Not sure if this is entirely true, it is possible Proton mail is encrypting everything at rest (with the users public key) and only following PGP mail limitations during transit.
Like for example plaintext emails are encrypted at rest on Proton mail, what isn’t ideally (compared to e2ee) but still minimizes the attack surface.
Actually for reference this is exactly the case
Message storage All messages in your Proton Mail mailbox are stored with zero-access encryption. This means we cannot read any of your messages or hand them over to third parties. This includes messages sent to you by non-Proton Mail users, although keep in mind if an email is sent to you from Gmail, Gmail likely retains a copy of that message as well. Password-protected Emails are also stored end-to-end encrypted. Subject lines and recipient/sender email addresses are encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted.
Cool, thank you for clearing that up!
I do like Tutanota’s approach to encryption, but communication outside of other Tutanota addresses is less secure than PGP. It’s just a symmetric, password-based scheme.
Since you will probably deal with a lot of non-tuta email providers, it’s a hard sell for me. In network, though, it’s good.
Second issue I had with it was the email client. I like my third party client and it’s built into my workflow. Tuta doesn’t support third party clients because they consider the storage of emails on your local drive a security risk. (That’s only true if your hard drive isn’t encrypted, and setting up encryption isn’t all that hard to do)
Great article. I was looking for a way to start degoogling myself. It seems Disroot and Riseup are their favoured services and Riseup requires an invite.
Any recommendations for mail apps (on android) to use with disroot?
K9 probably: https://disroot.org/en/services/email
Ah, didn’t see that page, thanks! I will give both their recommendations a try (K9 and Fair).
I use K9. It went through a rough patch a few years ago with the UI, but it’s much better now. Mozilla is involved and K9 is in the process of becoming the Thunderbird app.
Enjoy!
That dog looks like Loukanikos, the beloved riot dog from Greece.
Interesting read. Makes me reconsider my choice of Proton ha ha
Laugh all you like, I’ve had the same AOL email address since 1997 and haven’t had problems with leaked information or spam. It doesn’t cost me anything, so I’m just going to carry on using it.
I’m glad you like it, but I’m just going to point out that Yahoo, which the AOL privacy policy page refers to, has probably the single most invasive email policy of any major provider.
Yahoo analyzes and stores all communications content, including email content from incoming and outgoing mail. This allows us to deliver, personalize and develop relevant features, content, advertising and Services.
They allude to telemetry, and use additional tracking even when not signed in. I hate saying this, but even Google has a better privacy policy.
That’s kind of the point for a lot of us who opt to pay for an email. When email is free, it’s because your data is the product.
That’s a shame, though being in the EU I wonder how much they’re legally allowed to keep.
I guess I should make better use of my Proton mail account
I wish alternative services like Proton weren’t so expensive for their family plans.
Any idea how old that article is? Couldn’t find a date but the mention of Windows 7 tells me it’s not recent.
I still have my
netscape.netaddress (AOL) and all the others (Yahoo, MS Live, Outlook). Also a second GMail address that was created/converted when TheBat service shutdown.I use Thexyz and Purely Mail for normal use though.
It’s got updates from earlier this year. It appears to be updated periodically since it was first written. Some sections are old, while others are fairly new.
Proton has been completely reworked recently and it’s now a quite good looking app/website.
can use any email provider other than G, just make sure you isolate email. For example, use personal stuff for mail 1, use work related to mail 2 and anything else to mail 3 or so.
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I’ll be honest. I have no idea what you are saying. Is “boof fresh links” new slang?
Boof is slang for stick it up your butt…
Learned that from Brett Kavanaugh.
Jesus, we have a Supreme Court Justice named Brett…
