Privacy setup without Proton

Questions
1

Hello everyone. I’m trying to create a privacy setup without Proton and I need some assistance.

First of all, why not Proton? I’m preparing for a near future scenario where VPNs are going to get banned or heavily regulated in my country. Our government is very restrictive with the internet and has already started preparations for implementing an ID verification mandate for VPN providers. What is being different from most of the other countries, the government will be the one collect information on which apps and social media profiles you verified, and they will log usernames and VPN subscriptions in a government database under your name(they openly stated that). Regardless of which Proton service it is, on bank receipts it shows up as “Proton AG.” Now, this is a problem for me because knowing how things work in my country (with the least number of brain cells possible), it is not a distant possibility that either my bank account will be blocked or the police will pay me a visit at my door solely for paying for a very very scary mail provider also happens to be a VPN company, even if I don’t use the VPN. No, I cannot pay anything with crypto either, because that is also banned and heavily regulated with know your custmer standards where I live.

So I ended up reviewing my alternatives for what the Proton ecosystem provides. I aimed to segregate my services instead of being locked into a single ecosystem.

-Mail: While this one was supposed to be the easiest on the list, I was heavily disappointed with my alternatives. I want to abstain from self hostingthis one because I still think hosting your own email requires a lot of effort and maintenance, and unfortunately, I don’t have the time and energy for that. First, I paid for a monthly subscription with Tuta; at first, everything seemed okay, but then I noticed that I wasn’t able to receive certain emails from various services (especially local services I need to use). Also, the UI is… very Tuta. I also tried the paid Mailbox.org plan, and it was worse for me than Tuta I couldn’t even receive banking emails that I need most. For Tuta and Mailbox.org, I got the feeling that I’m going to miss certain emails without knowing. Posteo is the one I haven’t tried yet and I will give that a try too.

So in the end, I still have a question mark about what I’m going to do for my mail setup. For now, Tuta is the best contender, but for my case, it still feels unreliable.

-Aliases: There is no question here addy.io is the way to go.

-Drive/Photos: There are very good alternatives here, but unfortunately, I’m on budget because of the exchange rates. I’m open to paying less with lesser convenience on this one. Ente and Filen are both good options, but honestly, I’m thinking about getting myself a cheaper non bigtech drive storage option and encrypting my files with Cryptomator. But the problem is, I have around 300 GBs worth of images and videos in my gallery, and I don’t know how manageable it will become with Cryptomator and no thumbnails. I’m open to suggestions here, especially on self-hosting (outside of my home).

-VPN: As I mentioned, the main reason I’m trying to get away from Proton is a possible future where paying a VPN company (or one that also offers/is associated with a VPN service) becomes criminalized. All of the issues I mentioned are also valid for Mullvad. It is possible that I cannot pay them with my bank card, anonymous pre-paid cards (they don’t exist where I live), or crypto. Also, ISPs here are blocking VPNs with DPI, and honestly, it is a very fierce cat and mouse game. Even Proton’s stealth protocol occasionaly fails. I can only think maybe I’ll rent a VPS and host my own VPN, but I’m not sure how private that is going to be (from the VPS owner) aside from just bypassing restrictions. So yeah, I’m pretty hopeless on this part.

-Password Manager/Authenticator: I don’t have any problems here because I wasn’t using Proton Pass in the first place.

I’m open to all help and critique. Thanks in advance.

2

Use cash.

3

Mullvad takes cash in the mail. However, given what you’ve described, connecting directly to a VPN from your local IP may draw unwanted attention. The VPS self-hosted VPN idea is good. You’re then trusting the cloud provider over authorities in your own country. You can look into confidential computing (e.g. AMD SEV-SNP) to try and make what you’re doing on the VPS more private from the cloud provider, but that adds complexity, and, potentially, cost.

300GB isn’t very big, but bigger than many cheap VPS’s have access to by default. Cryptomator+any other cloud storage you have access to should work. If you have family or friends that don’t mind a used 1TB USB drive attached to a cheap computer and wireguard/tailscale might be cheaper in the long run than paying for cloud storage if you don’t already have access, but that’s work.

4

It’s just one of their issues.

Send cash or buy a voucher via ProxyStore (mentioned above).

In this case, you should generally stick to what works for people around you, provided it doesn’t compromise your privacy more than your ISP already does.

5

This opened a whole new world to me, thanks. I don’t know if I’m allowed to send money in cash due to my country’s regulations but I will check that out!

6

Actually, after making this post, I did some research and found that a Hetzner storage box combined with Rclone and encryption would be a good enough solution for me(and cheap), since I mainly use the cloud for backup purposes anyway. As for VPN, getting one with voucher codes is a good idea.

7

People here generally use GoodbyeDPI and it’s variants. But I would like to hide my ip as well.

8

That’s too bad. I was going to suggest you talk to @anon97142090 and ask if you can buy some of his Proton credits via Monero.

I personally think there should be a way for users to sell to each other digital services that they bought and haven’t used, and do it anonymously. Things like Proton gift cards and Proton credits.

This is also another reason why Proton should sell their gift cards on the Proxy Store and other similar platforms. It would allow people like you to protect your privacy and maybe even save your life.

What do you mean by this? You never received them, or did they go to your SPAM box?

If it’s the former, that is concerning. It would suggest that that local website you use do not trust Tuta. If it’s the latter, creating auomated filters might help. Also, I would recommend using aliases that are forwarded to our Tuta address rather that receiving them there directly from websites. Other than my alias provider, no one knows my Tuta address.

That’s fair. They need to work on both their UX and UI. But at least you can pay for Tuta completely anonymously via the Proxy Store.

I have never tried Posteo, but I love that they don’t link you payments to your account.

Another service you can pay for anonymously via the Proxy Store. I highly recommend it!

If you’re on a budget, I would go with Filen. Thumbnails for videos cannot be a priority. Make sure your files are titled properly so you can find them easily…I just remembered something.

Filen has yet to implement global search which means that you can locate files via search, unless you are searching for them directly in the folder they are located. If they are nested in one or more subfolders, search won’t help.

I can imagine that being an issue for you. In which case, if your budget is getting close to the cost of a Proton Unlimited subscription, perhaps that is your best option for now, even if it’s just temporary.

9

It would be great if this forum had some sort of marketplace that allowed users to sell gift cards, unused credits and things of that nature for the different privacy services. It could create a niche little market where someone who is okay with exposing the fact that they pay for privacy services could be a proxy for someone who would rather stay anonymous. One person gets a service, the other gets crypto that they could turn around and cash out at a reputable exchange if they wish.

Maybe this is a feature people should request. As long as there is a disclaimer saying that the trades are peer-to-peer and in no way affiliated with Privacy Guides, it might be something they could consider.

10

Mailbox.org actually got decent documentation for each of their spam setting Customising the mailbox spam filter settings | Knowledge Base: Knowledge and help | mailbox

But even with that, not receiving mail at all, ie the provider silent reject are the risk with literally all provider. They all have shadow rules under the hood completely out of you view to reject blatant mass spam, spoofed mail etc and those shadow rules would sometime introduce false positives too. The mainstream popular gmail, outlook, icloud etc probably silent reject billions of mails daily, even legit ones. There are few mail provider out there that exposes their low level reject logs to users but is niche rare, and rarer to even be privacy respecting. Something like postale.io see the mockup logs in their demo panel.

11

I don’t necessarily think this is something PG should take on, but I think such a place should exist. And it should exist for small payments ($10-$20), not just large ones ($50-$100+).

12

I’ve tried plenty of email providers, and I’ve never seen one block more legitimate emails than mailbox and I’m far from the only one. Inbound deliverability is a core competency of any email host, and they’ve proven they either don’t know how to or simply don’t want to handle it properly. But hey, at least you can encrypt your mailbox or whatever

13

Exactly. Not even in the spam box. And for the record one of my banks has BBVA in its name.

Honestly, their UI is still better than Mailbox where you can somehow access to your account settings from 2 different menus at the same time on the main page.

I just checked them. I really like how they aren’t pushy about their plans. They let you pay per alias, which adds up to just literal cents per alias. The only caveat, I suppose, is their zero-knowledge method, though I believe you can still enable it using a plugin.

EDIT: you can pay for additional 2 aliases per 0.10 euros.

Posteo account including all features described: 1 EUR per month.
Additional storage: 0.25 EUR per GB per month
Additional alias addresses: 0.10 EUR per month (two are included)
Additional calendars: 0.10 EUR per month (three are included)
optional S/MIME certificate: 3.65 EUR (1 year validity)

Considering everything they probably are at the moment. But I would like to prepare my exit plan in advance.

14

VPNs will get banned that’s for sure, most privacy mails are boing detected/banned as well. You can’t create accounts using temp mails or tuta, they are just rejected. Regarding proton alts, you can either use atomic, duck or some others but I still believe proton is go to.

I have bunch of proton throwaway emails for every account and so on, same with gmail. I verify them with non-vpip numbers for more trust.

Regarding VPN alternative you should explore mobile proxies, there are some providers that have encrypted solutions using Open VPN/Vless Xray protocols. It basically acts as mobile VPN, mobile IP shares CGNAT so it’s basically impossible to detect them. One downside that they are more pricey. On the top of that you don’t get proxy/vpn detected, so you treaded like a normal user. Latency and speed plays big part as well.

Regarding auth: enteauth is one of the best options atm, also psw manager bitwarden.