Currently wondering if the black Friday deal for proton is worth it. Gmail has suited me fine, but I hear it’s bad for privacy. I’m on an android phone anyway, so switching email services might not even matter.
Yes gmail is bad for privacy. It’s near impossible to avoid it because even if your own email is hosted elsewhere or self-hosted, your correspondents are probably mostly on gmail, so gmail gets the contents of the emails that you send them.
I’m using fastmail.fm which is pretty good technically and has decent customer support that has actual humans answering your tickets, but is a bit on the expensive side. mxroute.com is a reasonable approach if you are up to some nerdery (you need your own domain) and want email on the cheap. I haven’t tried proton, which has too much marketing for my comfort.
On the client side I’ve been using K-9 on android and it is ok. There is another one (fairmail iirc) that is also supposed to be good. Both are on f-droid.org. I don’t have a google account and don’t install from google play. On the desktop, Fastmail has a pretty good web client, and Thunderbird is better now than it was til recently.
The deal is absolutely worth it, in my opinion.
I pay $8 per month. This gives me up to 10 email addresses on my account. I use my own domain name, and have no issues. The TLD for the domain I use is
.is, which works on 99% of websites. For the websites/apps/etc that don’t like the TLD I use, I still have my @protonmail.com and @pm.me addresses to fall back on.There is an option to have a mailbox password in addition to the account login password and 2FA.
I might get one spam email that makes it to my inbox in a month or even longer.
I can’t really speak to anything but their email service.
I want that family plan but 6 users isn’t enough and I don’t see any other suitable plans on their site.
I run my own domain (currently with Google Workspace) for 10 family members. Want to leave Google but no provider has options in that size except business pricing.
It can’t be the TLD that makes your address not work on the last 1% of sites. ‘.is’ is just Iceland, nothing particular about that would make sites reject an address.
I’ll keep that in mind for when it happens next 😉
I’m selfhosted for my email, but then again, I don’t email on my phone. The phone is to small for my aging eyes. I prefer a physical keyboard when I type, so I email behind a computer.
BTW I can read the email via K-9 mail on the phone, in emergencies. (But then again, it’s email, no guaranteed delivery)
I love proton, but the black friday deal is for their family plan and visionary plan, unless I am missing something. Both of which are way more feature and cost than I need.
I heartily recommend proton, but check their other plans too. The family plan with a discount costs 3x as much as the one I am happily using.
Proton is WAY better than Gmail privacy-wise. Tuta (formerly Tutanota) is a valid alternative
I moved to Proton from Gmail + friends, and I don’t regret it one bit. I’ve tried degoogling, and while that hasn’t always been successful, email and calendar have been two of the absolute simplest things to leave behind in Google.
One (quite unknown) perk you get with certain Proton plans is you also get access to SimpleLogin, which is an email proxy service. It’s great if you set it up on one of your domains, so you can create not just unique passwords but also unique email addresses for accounts you create online.
I use fastmail. It’s similar to proton. I would recommend it over Gmail any day.
Protonmail and SimpleLogin has been amazing. I have a Gmail account but rarely use it for anything but throw away accounts.
I use proton, with forwarding from old gmail account and from my domain email address.
I would like to use Proton but their calendar is only available read only when added to calendar apps, which is a blocker for me.
The Android App and Web App are great though. At least for my needs.
Dont you need a Gmail for android?
No.
Been a proton visionary subscriber for a number of years now. I am satisfied with it and do not regret leaving that part of the android ecosystem.
I did just get an email invitation for a photobackup beta program, so i am excited to see what that us about.
I use both. Gmail for all my personal and business communications, and proton for my atomic stability.
Your what
I use both. Sometimes some people or services I e-mail through proton, don’t really get through and it’s annoying. It forces me to use GMail so that we can communicate better. I did a 2 year extensional trial of Proton to discover that I infact don’t really store a lot of e-mail so I don’t even find being restricted to 500MB as bothersome though I do upgrade to 1GB to be certain. I never ever see anything I store through e-mail exceed even 100MB.
The one thing I’ll really accredit Proton for is that, I don’t need mobile numbers or anything to register. Outlook, AOL, GMail .etc want to through you in a frustrating web of an obstacle course where you’ve “got to have” a back up, you’ve “got to have” a mobile number, you’ve “got to have” all of these unnecessary things to register. Even with the understanding that those e-mail services once not have those requirements before changing over, presumably over service abuses, there can be better ways.
