Hey guys,
Maybe someone could give me some advice, but most likely it will just be my whining about not having a really great email provider (for me).
First, all the things I really like about Proton that others don’t offer:
- offers email aliasing service - most of my emails unfortunately have no E2EE and go through an aliasing service, so I feel safer if I only have to trust one company (not the case of all eggs in one basket since both services theoretically have access to my emails), also I kinda like the simple-login “implementation” in protonmail, but it’s still far from perfect, so no big deal.
- PGP support - I know PGP isn’t really great, but it’s really the only encryption standard I could realistically use.
- zero-access encryption - oh yea, it could be EDIT: hypothetically bypassed by proton. And the emails are stored unencrypted on the other (senders) side’s big-tech servers anyway. But still, I like it and it’s better than nothing.
- email client support
- nice UI - but yea, not that important to me
I liked Skiff (at least on paper). Shame it’s no longer an option.
Tuta is great, but no unlimited aliases, no PGP, and no custom email client support. Also, their reddit mods seem crazy (I hope only reddit mods ).
Mailbox, Posteo - I haven’t tried them yet. Probably don’t have email alias service either and have their own problems (mail spoofing drama etc.)
Ok, so why don’t I want to use Proton services?
When I pay for email and simple-login, I feel like I am literally being robbed.
I would pay: $48 mail + $30 login /12 = $6.5 per month
But if you click on ProtonVPN pricing and choose 2 year plan unlimited (no 2y plan in mail tab ) it costs $8 per month
So basically people who pay $1.5 more than me get VPN, Pass and 500GB storage?
Ohh, if I pay $6.5, I feel like I am sponsoring these things anyway, but getting nothing out of it. I’d rather donate the money to some other FOSS project.
And no, I don’t want their crappy VPN (linux user here), Pass or Drive. And I don’t need more than 15GB for mail.
ok, but that is probably just my problem.
Then there are the classic Proton things like:
- no automatic contact sync on android
- no Fdroid repo / dependency on google play services
- aggressive, awful and misleading marketing (tbf I’d say, it’s slightly improved over time)
- not releasing calendar source code
- and probably more…
But then I saw an interview with Andy Yen. Well he explains a lot of things.
And even if I don’t agree with some things, I could at least hope to get what I want one day.
Then the Proton Docs were announced … the amount of money and time it had to take… when most of their services are not even in a decent state!
And then I read about Proton Scribe. That was the last straw.
Literally a product based on scraping other people’s content. By Proton, privacy by default…
And what do you think?