Mullvad Using Gmail

Site Development
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From what I’ve seen that Simplified Privacy spams a lot, in fact I’ve deleted a few of their posts on our lemmy sub because they were prolific with the blogspam posts.

There isn’t really anything extraordinary about using Google Workspaces, it’s not GMail and has a entirely different privacy policy to gmail. Neither product “scan” your emails to serve you advertising.

Proton uses Zendesk for their support, and that isn’t E2EE. These emails are likely not used for anything particularly sensitive.

There are totally legitimate reasons for businesses to use Workspace, or MS 365 (like the ones we recommend), as there are fine grained access control options that “privacy providers” simply do not have.

In particular PGP encryption per mailbox, would be completely inappropriate in an organization where a manager might need to review what employees have been saying to customers, ie things like Google Vault. Another reason would be transfer of data when an employee leaves, or if they are fired etc.

That in itself is completely untrue, the logging policy relates to logging of what you’re browsing over the VPN, not if you’re asking support for help with payment processing, or to get connected or whatever.

That doesn’t prove anything, it’s just a whois record for the domain.

In this case they’re talking about the MX (Mail Exchange) records for the mullvad.net domain which indeed are the ones used with workspace.

TLDR: nothing to worry about, this is just more degoogling nonsense. If they were using salesforce or some other platform nobody would bat an eye lid. (Like proton doesn’t get strife for using Zendesk) or some other SaSS platform.

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I don’t think they are lying you could always make an MX lookup to see what provider they used. Some of privacy services use Gmail because it’s the best product for managing business email.
But I still think they of course should have used their own email servers.

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Which in practice means they’d have to charge more, to manage, that, also if you want high availability, it makes sense to just use Google for this. Self hosting would not provide all of the infrastructure around management around it, so they’d need to find a product to do that as well.

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There is really no way to know, they could just have proxy in front.

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I think Proton has email solution for businesses, but I also kinda understand that they (Mullvad) doesn’t want to be seen using services of their competition (even if its a little bit different space - vpns). But it is a pity that they have to compete so hard.
Maybe Mullvad is even preparing its own private email service. Who knows.

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Individuals who advocate for Gmail must comprehend that Google is primarily an advertising company, and the rest of the business revolves around the advertising business. Using their services or any degree/part there of, is handing over a fist full of data to this company, you become part of the marketing product. Make no mistake that this is their main purposes, Apple is now doing a similar thing, ad revenues are skyrocketing.

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Mullvad is using Google Workspace, aimed to businesses, which has totally different architecture, security and privacy policies compared to Google Mail, which is a personal product. There are lots of privacy laws in place, forced by many governments and agencies, checked frequently and audited, and also used by a lot of companies.

Please educate yourselfs before attacking companies with torches and pitchforks.

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It doesn’t compete with Google, nor does it offer anywhere near the functionality required. In part this can largely be because it is difficult if not impossible to implement with E2EE. A manager should always be able to see email on the company server. Google Workspace also has a wide variety of other routing rule options, ability to have your own DKIM keys (not protons) etc.

TLDR: Workspace is not gmail

None of the rest of your post makes any sense, GCP is very clearly a different policy to consumer products. The reality is companies like Google and Microsoft have a very large array of products and services aimed at different audiences, and as such they have different goals.

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Mullvad blog:

Our support emails are now moving to self-hosted and Mullvad-owned hardware.

From now on, our Support Team can be reached at a new email address: support@mullvadvpn.net

Emails sent to the old address: support@mullvad.net, will still continue to function until we announce the shut-down of that email address.

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This seems a bit fast… I hope they didn’t rush this out because of the backlash

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In the blog they say their email server was audited pre-production which is probably a good sign that they did not rush it.

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Let us hope this is a solution that is deemed stable in the future. And not so costly as to having to raise their prices to an uncomfortable level.

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Honestly I have enough to worry about thinking about what I am doing online and what services I am using.
Expanding it to what the service I am using is doing online and what services the service is using that I am using :wink: (my opinion) is just pure brainfu.k.
Might aswell stay off the internet all together then.

Aviods all possible problems.

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No doubt they did this to get ahead of some other VPN company using it as adversarial marketing material to an overly paranoid clientele that generally doesn’t understand the concept of a threat model.

TLDR it’s Mullvad’s attempt to get ahead of an already nothing burger.

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Eh. I applaud the change. Glad to see it and was surprised when the news came out.

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When the simplified privacy piece came out, someone in the comment reached out to Mullvad and they already said that were testing their new in-house email service

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Yeah, good luck with this :slight_smile:

Truth is that, in modern times, you, sooner or later, will connect/be connected to internet one way or the other. This is unavoidable.

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Irony my friend, very much of irony :slight_smile:
I was getting at something else:
If one (which is not me) will worry about what services the specific service he wants to use uses (in this case Mullvad), maby just stay off the internet. (Sarcasm as well)
No offence in this statement at all to anyone its just that:
The internet is a place where one in short has fun and productivity.
Don’t take it to the paranoid level :slight_smile:
Do what you can and then use it.

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None of the rest of your post makes any sense, GCP is very clearly a different policy to consumer products. The reality is companies like Google and Microsoft have a very large array of products and services aimed at different audiences, and as such they have different goals.

Reminded me of how Microsoft has its clone of Azure for the US government. Don’t… live in the US I guess? I mean that’s a pretty solid advice, but certainly not for the Microsoft reason.

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These are mostly compliance things and this agreement would also cost a lot of money. A support address for a VPN provider is mostly going to be dealing with people who are having trouble with getting connected, or asking about billing queries perhaps.

In any case Mullvad has always had a PGP key.

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