So, I’ve been de-googling, and moved my email and calendar to Proton, and I’ve been using their VPN for a while as well. I really like it, and it works extremely well for me.
But I am slightly annoyed by Proton’s choice to stop posting to Mastodon, and their CEO’s Trump comments. And I do like Tuta’s support for the Fediverse, and their better open-source implementation. But I’m wondering if it’s worth it to bother switching again. I tried making a ones month payment to try out both, and my card doesn’t want to pay for Tuta (It’s finicky about stuff outside the US).
So would it be better to just stick with Proton? Or try to manage to go over to Tuta?
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Indeed. That tweet was just the icing on the cake. I agree that Proton is an issue in that it is far more vendor-locked-in than a standards compliant mail service, but in addition to that, over the years, they have very much over-sold the degree of security their system provides (military-grade encryption anyone?). Read any honest security researcher’s review of Proton and it’s full of caviates about a system where they both hold your keys and provide you with a web interface. If their marketing was more reasonable, I would maybe trust them more.
If you absolutely need end-to-end encryption and have the ability to direct your correspondent to a particular service (like Proton), I wouldn’t choose Email at all. If it had to be Email, you are looking at PGP or S/MIME in a client, but an e2e messenger that is hard to mess-up and has some metadata protections will be far superior in practice.
Proton is better. It supports PGP, the search function is nicer, and there was a third reason I can’t quite seem to remember.
You could give Tuta a try if you like, though.
Disroot. It support encryption with lacre and you can use your own PGP keys with all clients
Personally i would go for Tuta, but try both!
I use both, but honestly I feel that with a #tuta I have more privacy.
I’ve been asking the same question. I am trialing both and while I love Tuta, Proton seems more polished, I can set mail rules for tags, and seems smoother. Over all the suite for Proton is more robust, but Tuta’s price is hard to beat.
mailbox.org simple bring your own encryption
Doing PGP is fucking annoying
in thunderbird its pretty easy js import your keys and press encrypt and who for and with gui frontends like kleopatra its pretty fast and easy
You should consider getting yourself a domain and linking it to your email. That way, you don’t have to continuously switch email addresses. You can just switch service providers and point your domain at the new service provider and keep all of your same email addresses.
With that said, there’s a good potential that Proton is going to be adding the ability to pay with Monero in the near future, and Tuta can be paid for with Monero using proxysto.re.
I went for Tuta and never regretted it. First as a free user, later I decided to subscribe to the old premium plan, where I pay 12$/year, mainly because I wanted to use a custom domain.
I also made a free Proton Mail about a year ago as a secondary mail account but I rarely use it. They are just way too pushy when trying to sell me their premium plans.
Proton’s CEO comments on Trump: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
I use Proton and I’m happy with it. Tuta seems a great option but it’s less complete if you need the full package.
I recommend to buy your own domain.
Own domain = rip privacy in many cases
Why so?
This domain will be linked to your identity, so USA will know your identity if they want to, and all emails under that domain will be associated to you (doesn’t really change anything if you weren’t going to use aliases anyways)
Yes and no.
The domain registry knows the identity of the domain’s holder (ok, authorities can easily ask), but it’s impossible to associate a single email to a person with certainty. I can give you an email with my domain, for example.
I also do not see much difference with a fake account on Gmail (or whatever). Of course, it’s relatively anonymous if you only use it to register on a website or to send an anonymous email once, but if you use it regularly you will be identifiable anyway, just with a few extra steps.
If only you or your relatives use the domain, it’s pretty easy to link all the addresses. It’s pretty fair to assume that if a search doesn’t give anything, the domain is probably personal or used by a few people at best
My point was that using a custom domain makes you less anonymous than being on the regular proton domain
If you do not use aliases, it won’t change much, but at least your identity is not directly tied to the domain name
It’s a fair point, but anonymity is not the same as privacy. Normally I only need the latter.
Just by avoiding gmail-like providers nobody crunches all the activation emails to build my profile. Using aliases on @mydomain I can separate the identities a little bit. Of course it is still possible to assume that all the emails from @mydomain belong to me, but I can accept that risk assuming that nobody wants to follow me specifically (why would they?).
Rule 1: know your enemies. I only need to protect myself from the ads-industry and that works on volumes, not on quality. Two emails are very likely two different people for them.
If you truly want anonymity then you’re right, but life becomes much harder.
+1 for Tuta. I have a free account with proton but I pay for premium Tuta. They have deeper ideological connections to the open source world and release many of their apps on F-Droid. Proton has only released their VPN app on F-Droid and seems to have no interest in any further activity there. Basically I think Tuta edges ahead in the morals and heart department, though they are a smaller company with less resources.
Agreed. I have tried Proton for a year and am about to pay for Tuta instead.
I do not like either, as you get locked into their app ecosystem. No standard imap and no self-hosted archive is no freedom for me.
I went with puelymail.com, one of lesser known cheap standard mail providers, and am very content for a couple years already.
It depends what you want
If all you need is zero access encryption then Tuta is fine but if you would like to use OpenPGP more like u did in Proton then maybe mailbox.org and posteo would be better choice imho
Proton is fine, the whole ceo comment situation gets way overblown. Tuta is also great.
But if u just want a convenient ecosystem go for proton.
