Hey everyone,
I know there are a lot of questions about best email providers, but they usually boil down to general questions about privacy and reliability. I have specific questions that I could not find answers to.
I’ve had a Proton Duo plan for my wife and me for about 2 years now. My wife has low tolerance for tech that is not user friendly and works easily. It took a while to migrate all our emails and passwords to Proton and a lot or accounts to passmail aliases, but now we are happy with how the service works.
We both also have our own domains for our main email, and I recently bought another domain to migrate our aliases to. The reason behind this is to ease future migrations if whatever service we use enshitifies. I know that privacy is reduced by using my own domain for aliases, but it’s a consequence I accept to avoid being tied to a single service and to make migration easier in the future.
For that reason, I’ve been burying my head in the sand about what has been happening at Proton. However, with recent news of Proton’s partnership with ETH Zurich and of Proton re-evaluating employee performance based on their AI usage, I can no longer look away.
So here is the ask. I want to migrate to one or more services to specifically replace the functionality I described above. Here are the features that are important to me:
- Services that support multi-user accounts, where I can be the admin and manage our domains.
- Ability to assign domains for specific user accounts.
- Ease of use for users to create aliases on the fly within the password manager.
- European hosted and privacy focused, with good encryption.
- Preferably open source clients.
My domains are hosted by Infomaniak, and I’ve considered them, Tuta and Mailbox.org for email providers. Not sure about the best alias generator, but I heard good things about addy.io
I already self-host a lot of services, so for password management, I was thinking about Vaultwarden with an integration to an alias generator. For the few services I host that are accessible outside my network, I use a reverse proxy (NPM), with Authentik for authentication. I am thinking about setting up NetBird as well.
Finally, I am ok paying a reasonable amount for the services.
If I am way off base, I am also happy to hear suggestions about better ways to set things up.
Thanks in advance
So, I guess I will be the one to say it to everyone-
Every single group will likely eventually use AI. If you want to fully minimize it, you should just buy a mini pc and a domain name and set up your own private mail provider with OSS. That is what I would honestly suggest.
not to shit on your take, but like if even half of what this cretin says is accurate, that’s is pretty fucking far from a pro/contra AI issue.
I don’t trust proton for anything of importance and am occasionally using them to register to unimportant stuff and this latest revelation hasn’t changed my opinion one iota. if you’re depending on them for anything, start looking for alternatives (plural, always) like right now.
There’s a difference between using AI where useful (though I still think it’s unethical), and baing job performance on tokenmxing essentially. For me it signals that Proton’s leadership cannot be trusted.
That being said, that was just the last straw. The biggest issue for me is their partnership with a university that supports Israels genocide of the Palestinians.
I considered hosting my own email server, but I do not trust the uptime of my setup for something as important as email. Maybe in the future with some hardware and networking upgrades with redundancy.
I understand your opinion on the matter, I just unfortunately think any corporation you try and use will eventually be revealed to be supporting genocides or data brokering, or some other horrible thing. For profit groups will always cave to money, and money will always be at someone’s expense. So that’s all I got for you. Sorry.
I get what you are saying, but for me it’s not reason enough not to try. That is why I am trying to set things up in a way that makes it easier to migrate.
This is a good way to get blacklisted by email providers. Not discouraging it but your mileage will vary greatly on this endeavor.
Care to explain? If you are just using the email as an email, it should be fine…
Some things you might face: