We’ve tried to ask questions and started the pull request 2 years ago, but still have not received a clear and concise answer despite meeting all criteria for inclusion. Other services already included clearly have concerns as we shared. The moderators have refused to provide an answer and instead flag our posts and insist we are self-promoting.
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Could you provide any evidence for your claims?
Well, it’s run by humans for free, except for the people who are hired, like @em and @jordan. It’s also by far the best-managed community I’ve ever seen.
Who is sponsoring it? Proton? Tuta? Lol.
This is another false claim without any proof.
Of course you can have frustrations and share them, but language like that, especially when talking about bias, will only hurt your company.
hile I do think they should be more careful in airing those kind of messages, their frustration is merited. I also don’t understand why they haven’t been given an adequate review by the main staff (assuming they have not iirc). Email is one of the first choices for privacy, and considering more options is beneficial for everyone meeting the criteria.
If there is some smoking gun why they shouldn’t be a recommendation, the staff should just post that. Otherwise, forward email has been very responsive and replying to most questions and concerns.
After 2 years of not being considered after answering every question, from staff and from every members, I’d also give up and focus my efforts elsewhere. If someone is striving for a recommendation, I’d assume they want to meet the privacy bar, and with feedback I’m sure forward email would make changes to accommodate.
I’m not qualified enough to evaluate them, but I don’t know why they haven’t been given a review and list of requests to change to be recommended. Even if the answer is as simple as “change your marketing” or “not strong enough to ProtonMail”, it’ll at least let them iterate.
To clear the air here, members can also flag your post and it be hidden for review if the members rank is high enough if I believe. You could probably chalk this up to a disgruntled forum user.
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But yeah, saying there is a bias to backdoored services is false. Open source has been discussed consistently on this forum. The entire forum is dedicated to privacy respecting services. Vent frustration, sure, but thems fightin words lol. It gives the impression that you think we all suck and recommend shit because you haven’t been recommended, which leads to question why you are even trying to be recommended if we only recommend shit not to say your frustration is invalid, but it begs questions.
I’d consider making a new Meta threat to voice confusion on what is necessary to be accepted as a recommendation.
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Hence why it could make sense that the team may want to put a service like Forward Email in increased scrutiny, especially after we were burned by Skiff. So I’m not as put off by the amount of time this is taking, but I agree that we are kind of missing out on a formal update from the PG team and I understand where Forward Email is coming from. Still, I disagree with how they chose to express their frustration.
Zero Votes Displayed: Despite 16.6k views and 422 likes, the thread shows “0 votes” - clear evidence of vote manipulation or suppression
People have a limited amount of votes, and there are lots of Guide Suggestions posts to vote for
Thread Buried: Original request was moved to “Tool Suggestions” category, effectively burying it from main visibility
That is the accurate category for the topic. Also, most people just look at recently updated topics, so visibility wouldn’t be affected.
Privacy Guides Team Misconduct:
securitybrahh and Catalyst are not part of the team, no offense but was AI used to make this analysis?
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I’m totally on board with this train of though. The requirements set out by PG are typically baseline requirements, not a means of auto-inclusion, and the team should be very careful. But with, transparency into why the decision is “no” would help, or if it’s a under resourced area.
But yeah, having forward email do things like this make me scratch my head. They have a very clear misunderstanding of how requests work on this forum - even if approved, and it can be shoved in a backlog not surfaced for months, let alone pending requests. Their product seems technically sound, but there are some strange things that surface in their style of comms.
Normally I don’t like to get involved in drama but I’d like to give my opinion on this in case the forward mail team ever comes back to this forum.
You guys have always given me the impression that you saw privacy guides as a marketing opportunity rather than a learning resource. I’ll compare and contrast your behavior with Tuta so you can see what I mean.
Both of you mainly post updates, blog posts, info/corrections regarding your product, and other things designed to “sell” your product. I’ll refer to this content as “marketing content” to keep things simple. It’s understandable that this is your main type of post. You need to get your name out there and assail any fears/concerns about your product to gain and retain your userbase. The thing that sets you apart are your posts that aren’t marketing content. Going through your post history I saw two posts that aren’t marketing content. They are as follows: Questions of reliability of email aliases - #4 by forwardemail
Both of these posts are borderline marketing content. The second one is the one I’d like to touch on in greater depth as it’s the post that cemented my feelings about you guys. One of your only contributions to this forum is to help remove a direct competitor. There’s technically nothing wrong with you having made a PR to remove skiff, but you also using the opportunity to attempt to have the PR for your product merged gives me turf war vibes. You’re attempting to “kill” your competition and move onto their streets.
Now let’s take a look at Tuta. They have three posts that aren’t marketing content.
Before you start screaming about how this is on their site, I’d like to point out that the blogpost is about an open letter signed by a number of organizations. It also explains the issue, provides links for additional information, and doesn’t have anything designed to sell their product as far as I can see.
Post two is much like the first:
And post three is a call to action regarding the fsf: The Free Software Foundation Europe needs your help!
All of these posts are about important issues that impact privacy minded individuals. They could’ve used any of them to try to sell their products. They didn’t. They posted them to benefit the community and to make people aware of things that may impact them. They treated the forum as a learning resource.
You’ve also exhibited a nasty attitude several times in the past which I’d like to highlight as it’s a perfect example of why I find you off putting.
The sarcastic first line is not appropriate for a brand account. You could’ve conveyed all the information without insulting the user.
Same thing here. The phrasing of your first paragraph comes across very hostile. You could’ve explained why that user was incorrect without insulting him by calling his opinion false.
Hopefully this is understandable, I wrote it while half asleep. If there’s anything wrong I will fix it later.
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Thank you for perfectly capturing how I was feeling reading through their previous comments in various threads. I was unfamiliar with Forward until their most recent post popped up and I caught up with the old megathreads about them as well, and this behavior was extremely off-putting to someone who could’ve been a potential customer.
Privacy Guides to me is a learning tool, just like you said, and it seems like they aren’t trying to position themselves as the sole arbiter of facts and recommendations about privacy and opsec, but rather a guide for users of various threat models to decide for themselves which recommendations fit their needs. There are tons of other services out there not formally recommended by PG that many users here find to fit their specific needs. So it was confusing for me why Forward felt the need to incessantly hound the PG team as if they felt entitled to a spot on the recommendation list, acting as if not having the PG blessing would be a fatal injury to their business, when clearly they’re doing perfectly well for themselves and others here were intrigued in trying their service regardless of the lack of formal recommendation by the team.
But the sarcastic responses to genuine questions and spreading outright lies about their competitors, and doubling down on those lies and ignoring people requesting to see sources of that information, and inappropriate overreaction to the alleged ‘brigading’ left a rancid taste in my mouth.
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I am not sure why you feel so entitled to be on here because you find your own product to be superior. I have read your posts and you are very good at attempting to discredit all competitors while promoting Forwardemail as a golden goose.
Niftylettuce LLC failed to copyright forwardmail at some time and shifted the git to Titanism (is this still Nick?) I think forwardmail is a bit more niche with a lot of promise but your attitude has been seen by several as semi-hostile in most approaches. When it is not hostile it is all marketing nonsense.
If this website was as important/critical to you as your contribution here shows, then why have you not engaged more politely including posts not strictly about your business? I have seen you have responded to quite a lot of questions and even those wreak of desperation. You call out Netflix as a player (a small player it seems) and with over 500,000 domains this is odd behavior.
Most of the people you call out in your git are not staff and have every right to not be happy or satisfied with any of your choices. The staff member who mentioned this was 100% correct that this market is saturated and did not state their only concern was GPG. Just because there are many who do not engage with you positively or swoon over your product, does not mean they are targeting you.
I am really disappointed in whoever is representing this company as all you are doing is isolating yourself from part of the community you are attempting to reach. You have provided a really nice detailed list of some pros (albiet biased) and no real cons. I have also not found the information you have provided to give any real benefit of using your service over another. You can go on all day about 100% open source (as you have) but that is not the absolute “you get approval” requirement. The number one is to have the community begin talking about your product naturally and push for it to be included, not for you t shill it every post.
I will clear some things up as I see some misunderstandings and confusion in the messages above.
First things first, the listing of Forward Email is not rejected, they did not get the “no”. As some mentioned we do indeed take time (especially after Skiff) to assess tools on voluntary basis. Like Skiff, Forward Email has been putting a lot of pressure on the community and team members to get included. That was the reasons their thread got locked as it did not bring new discussion items. Yet we determined that an audit was necessary. The audit was also announced but never delivered. Yet we do see a quite different design in how they handle the encryption and thus there is the question if that will be as good. Besides that personally I have some reservations about the usability as the UX is rather not the same as Proton or Tuta. So that’s to sum up somewhat of the status.
Now Forward Email was allowed like any other brand to keep posting product updates in the showcase category. This often was received quite spammy by the community. In both threads Forward Email tagged our team members constantly and they had been asked not to.
Besides this all Forward Email has been spreading false information on our current recommendations, mainly on Tuta and Proton. Generally them putting into question other recommendations in the same category is a violation of the Conflict of Interest Policy. Forward Email has now multiple times public and non public, without evidence, accused other providers of having a backdoor. This is not just a red flag for Forward Email but also a violation of our Community Code of Conduct. It leaves me with no other option than to suspend Forward Email from the forum, but note this last action is taken after they themselves announced to not participate further.
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Yeah, it sucks since their product seems pretty good, but they did tend to focus on bringing others down to elevate their product. Their product seemed to speak for itself, but they still occasionally three in random unnecessary punches to competition.
Seems like this was the main reason of suspicion.
I understand why they have been banned and yet I can’t help feel like the frustration from Forwardemail is somewhat warranted. It has been almost 2 years since they came to this forum asking for a review as they believed they met the minimum criteria. Whilst their conduct hasn’t been great (recently in particular) much of their engagement with the community has been positive and they even implemented some features requested by users here.
Their marketing does involve bad faith comparisons but unfortunately that is quite common and multiple providers recommended here fall guilty to this. This should be part of the marketing criteria for email services if this is something this community wants to stop. Marketing in general often comes across as spammy, maybe self promotion should just be banned in this forum?
I appreciate reviewing these things take time, however I worry it hasn’t been very clear for Forwardemail what the situation is for them. I really hope instead of being put off this forum we can continue to encourage companies to come here and improve their services to meet an objective minimum bar. Expecting them to wait an unknown number of years without a clear response seems unreasonable to me.
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We like to give opportunity to new companies and projects to showcase their ideas even if they cannot be recommended yet. Finding the right balance there is hard. If you want to discuss this further may be best to do in another thread.
Please note that there have been some staff interventions with Forward Email and private communication between the team and owner of Forward Email. I think we have been quite clear that we are hesitant due to for example the lacking public audit and the marketing behaviours. The arguments given about our criteria were also constantly disproved by forward email as if they should not weigh in. A lot of fallacies were used like for example about open source versus having a public audit.
We take as long as needed to be sure of recommendation especially on something critical like email services. Forward Email has been informed of that from the start. Generally Forward Email made significant improvements based on community feedback here, however there are also quite a few issues that were not addressed. The behaviour is not tolerated and surely has made the team more hesitant.
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Just hopping in here, do keep in mind that the minimum requirements are just that, the bare minimum target we expect a service hit before they can even be considered.
There are a lot of other factors which can come into play. Running a site and a community like this also comes with trust and a bit of gut feeling.
We were burned before with Skiff, they reached the requirements and worked with us for a long time before they finally where listed, and then pulled the plug and sold the company.
If we would have listened more to our gut feeling back then, they would not have been listed. I hope you can take this context into consideration as to why we take a lot of time with critical services like email, and software like browsers.
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Ok, that’s fair and not something I was aware of. I’m not defending their actions, they have been difficult in many of their conversations specifically when discussing the sites requirements.
I am of course appreciative of this and is what gives more credibility to PrivacyGuides over other similar sites (that and the community). My main concern with the email providers section in general is my reply to the below.
I get this and whilst I understand that everyone is more cautious after Skiff I worry that it is having an overly large impact on the recommendations in this category. Personally, despite what happened, I don’t think there was anything wrong with adding Skiff, they met the requirements and at the time were doing everything right.
I would rather services were listed objectively rather than gut feel even if in that one case it was a mistake. Doing things by trust or the feel of the company make this category closed off to any newer providers, which I wouldn’t be entirely against but I think it should be in the requirements if that’s what is intended.
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Sucks to see Forward Email banned from the community. The only reason I haven’t moved over myself is because of laziness, truth be told. I do think the product brought something new to the table, and the team seems to have had stable success that something like Skiff didn’t have. Sad to see them go, but I understand the decision from the PG team on this
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The issue is that when people take on a service that we recommend, it is already a big step for them.
When they finally move over and get burnef because the service shuts down(which is especially a hassle with email of all things) they will start to lose trust in the privacy space, and be less likely to trust alternatives in the future.
Why move away from reliable gmail if you not sure the alternative is around in 2 years.
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I fully agree, maybe this is a discussion for another thread but I still think there must something that can be included in the email provider requirements that will satisfy confidence in their reliability. Maybe minimum length they’ve been around, profitability or funding status, something along those lines.
We can emphasize with the struggles of newer startups and companies. It is a tough cycle of “not gaining enough trust to be recommended by others, furthering the lack of trust”.
However, it takes time and storm cold facts to break that cycle. You don’t earn always earn a recommendation even if your product is great, even excellent. Some of that can be caused by manpower issues at PG, but I argue that patience is more rewarding given the importance of our mission.
Now, I wonder if everyone here would appreciate a more transparent method of determining how and why an addition to our forum is made. Personally, I do agree that our process can seem confusing from an outside point of view.
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Given some of the discussion it is probably good to mention that there is a difference in the decision of suspending the brand account from the forum due to policy violations caused by their behaviour, and a pending decision for including Forward Email on the website. Obviously they impact each other and it does complicate matters but it is not necessarily the same. I however personally would not want to use a service that spreads disinformation about other companies in the privacy space.
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