Note 0: Please do not vote for a email provider if you are using only the free version, this will skew the statistics.
Note 1: If you pay for more than 1, please select whichever you consider to be your ‘primary’ or favorite.
Note 2: If you like, state the primary reasons you chose the Email provider you chose, and state your biggest complaint or frustration about the Email provider you chose.
*Note 3: If you pay for and prefer an email provider not listed above, please let us know below. We won’t bite. I’ll add it to the list above (edit: I am not able to so late. Just say it below, or upvote the first post which says it)
(thanks xe3 for forgiving me for copying the format of their VPN post without asking)
(edit: I forgot to substitute VPN for email in the above notes)
I pay for Fastmail. I mainly use email for the unavoidable: receiving sign up and purchase/subscription confirmations. I don’t think I have much to gain from encrypted email services, as I don’t communicate over email with anyone. And in the extremely rare occasion I would, the other part would use Google or Microsoft. So the emails I send to them and the emails they send to me would be unencrypted in privacy-abusing services anyways.
I used to subscribe to Google One plan, for years. Is this also count as Gmail? But I recently moved to Skiff. The UI and UX designs suite my taste very well. The only thing left is their half-baked PWAs.
However, I think if I have to pay for an email, I would use Proton. The pricing is very competitive (~2x cheaper than Skiff) and also comes with VPN, etc.
I paid for ProtonMail visionary years ago. I don’t use ALL of the features, but I did use custom domains (3) for a while. I could change them at this point since I have Simplelogin now, but I’ll wait until the domain expires.
However, my kid is nearing the age where they will use an email, so they will be using Proton whether they want to or not .
I’ve almost convinced my partner to move from Gmail and yahoo. I’m sure they’ll finally pull the trigger but you know how that goes.
integrated calendar when appointments arrive in mailbox
blocking tracking images/pixels
cleaning up tracking urls
support for my local language (important for my family)
Really, really simple auto import and forwarding from Google was really helpful when switching my family.
support for both labels and folders as I am an organized type.
hosted in the European Economic Area for compliance reasons of the companies my family has
Relatively good support when bugs appear
I use SimpleLogin (IMO the best alias service) which is included here and has unlimited custom domains and I use its OAuth service for other services I host for my family and friends.
Proton Sentinel — confidence in proton’s way of keeping my family secure.
Good spam filters from my experience
I am loving the phishing warnings that proton gives on spoofed emails. This surely is a great signalling to keep users safe.
Relatively large company nowadays with seemingly well finances. Important so that I know it won’t be likely to disappear.
Native apps, this makes it a lot less hassle to help configuration for my family. (never used the bridge for family and directed them to web usage, but soon this will be the mac app)
snooze emails
SMTP (and now also auto forwar) supported. Which is useful for other apps I have for our family and businesses, like CRM, accounting software etc.
Things I still hope to see. I am listing these as these are considerable downsides.
Contact sync to Android and iOS
If you use the VPN, there is no option to combine it with something like Tailscale or NextDNS easily.
Option to attach documents from Proton Drive to emails. (like onedrive in outlook and gdrive in gmail)
Digital legacy support other than recovery phrase and document. Hope to see something in the fashion of Bitwarden. Preferably with option to choose what to destruct and what to give access to for legacy.
The primary reason why I chose Proton Mail was that switching to Proton’s email provider, along with using their VPN service, seemed like the easiest ways to start my privacy journey.
The reason I will continue to pay for Proton Mail is that SimpleLogin Premium is bundled with Proton Unlimited, which is the plan to which I am subscribed. This was not a consideration when I initially paid for their email services, as Proton’s acquisition of SimpleLogin did not happen yet.
My biggest complaints about Proton Mail are twofold.
Their app for Android relies on Firebase Cloud Messaging for push notifications, which is a topic of renewed interest due to the article posted in this thread.
As I noted in a comment in a different thread, the Proton Mail app for Android does not include the anti-tracking features that @ph00lt0 mentioned in their comment.
While your second point is true (it will come to android btw. The beta app has this in the pipeline)
The first point is of no concern for Proton Mail. Just like signal proton does not send the raw contents over FCM; it only uses it to notify the phone of the notification, decryption happens locally only.
I have accepted that email is not private and most of my emails will be scanned by big tech companies on the other end no matter what provider I use. As a result, I prefer email services that are fully standards compliant rather than locked down ecosystems. I have been using MXroute for the last year or so and have been very satisfied. It is affordable, reliable, and has push support for iOS. The management interface is not pretty, but I rarely need to touch it now that it is setup.
Depends on what kind of regulation @ph00lt0 is trying to satisfy. Bilateral agreements exist with a bunch of other countries, not just Switzerland. If we are talking about GDPR compatibility, not just Switzerland but also countries like Japan, Canada or Argentina (among others) would qualify. At that point, why even talk about EEA as a requirement?
My favourite email provider and the one I’m using right now is mailbox.org
I would love to use Proton Mail, but I will never do because of their unethical pricing and marketing in general.
They also promised that they will make their apps available on F-Droid and that they will come up with a way to deliver notifications for people who don’t want to install Google Play Services and rely on FCM. They have been promising this for years, but it didn’t happen.
If you’re not an iOS user, or you’re someone who doesn’t want to install and use Google Play Services, then you’re out of luck. The majority of people use iOS or have Google Play Services and these people are where almost all the money comes from, the rest of the people who want full freedom and want to avoid proprietary, monopolistic, privacy invasive, and freedom restricting software such as iOS or Google Play Services aren’t prioritized because they’re a minority that provides very little value to Proton.
mailbox.org allows me to choose any client I want on any operating system I want, they also allow me to have full control over my private PGP key and I can keep it offline locally without it ever touching the cloud.
The APKs on https://protonapps.com/ do generally work. Just not very ideal as updating would have to be done manually. (For the “Mail” application specifically they just link to their GitHub at Releases · ProtonMail/proton-mail-android · GitHub so you could use some solution that notifies you of new releases there, and “VPN” is on F-Droid main repo, but Calendar, Drive and Pass indeed it’s very bad.)
+1 for just offering standards-respecting protocols.
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