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Proton Mail is the world's largest secure email provider. Swiss, end-to-end encrypted, private, and free.
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Proton Calendar is the world's first end-to-end encrypted calendar that allows you to keep your life private.
Proton Drive is a free end-to-end encrypted cloud storage that allows you to securely backup and share your files. It's open source, publicly audited, and Swiss-based.
Proton Pass Proton Pass is a free and open-source password manager which brings a higher level of security with rigorous end-to-end encryption of all data (including usernames, URLs, notes, and more) and email alias support.
SimpleLogin lets you send and receive emails anonymously via easily-generated unique email aliases.
I was hard considering it but if I do it then it would cost me way more.
Tuta ($3)+Simplelogin ($4)+Mullvad ($5) = $12
A proton unlimited plan costs $10. Also, when I was on a vpn plus plan, they upgraded me to unlimited so I'm only paying like $6.50 or something.
I left and glad I did. It was a needed wake-up call. All-in-one is inherently risky. I'd rather support smaller, more focused products. If one doesn't fit my needs down the line, it's way easier to switch.
No, I've not switched. While I disagree with his comments, that does not make me switch.
I am fine with using services provided by companies whose employees or leaders I don't 100% agree with all the time.
I don't like his comments, but honestly... I haven't had the energy or time.
When I have one, I lack the other.
Do I want to? Yes, in a sense. I have an enterprise grade server I could self-host a lot of services on, and it sounds like a fun project... but getting that all done? A task. Getting cooling, noise reduction (fucker is LOUD), and such installed? A bigger task that takes more money than I have available right now. All that jazz.
No. I'm tired of making my life inconvenient the moment someone says something stupid.
No. Because changing email providers is a royal pain in the ass. Changed from Google to Ctemplar and from that to proton a year later after ctemplar went down.
I am not going to use smaller email providers because of that experience, and proton still seems to be the best of both worlds.
I absolutely hate that i am supporting a CEO like that with my money but I'm not in the mood to migrate anytime soon. Took me more than a whole weekend last time.
I know this is lazy of me, but no. I was going to, downloaded tuta and everything, but I just switched this year and finally have it where I want it. I have my stuff forwarded from my old emails, and most of my important stuff has the email. I also failed to vary my programs, so it's also my VPN and password manager. Even just getting starting with the email was giving me a headache.
And, honestly, the vpn is better than mullvad (to me). When I was attempting to switch, I started with mullvad, but it was so much slower. And I had issues on sites I normally had no issues with. I'll keep the resources and maybe start transferring little by little as time goes on.
i have free proton accounts as am not loggin in to close them because lazy. but i havent really used it anymore...maybe for trashmail stuff. mullvad is cooler and 1$ rootboxes anywhere also. disroot,riseup and so many other mailproviders are cool too. i dont get why proton is so relevant to some. did you guys buy a lifetime package or why?
I highly-valued the cohesion and simplicity of having a suite of tools provided by a single vendor and all on a single bill, despite how often this turns into a vendor-lock-in strategy
Proton was part of my attempt to de-Google, precisely because it offered email (with custom CNAMEs), calendar, and storage, and because they open-sourced their clients and tools
Despite the UX and feature set being quite bare, I was okay with justifying this with the added privacy (which was a nice-to-have but not a deal-breaker for me)
It seems like all the alternatives are either less open-source, have even fewer features, are even less cohesive (indeed, I'd have to select entirely separate solutions and give up all integrations) or seem to have even fewer resources for development and project sustainability
I pulled the trigger and decided to leave. Not only because of the recent actions from Proton, but when I started looking for alternatives I quickly realized how deeply integrated I was into their eco system and how difficult it was to make the switch. That's personally not something I like. I guess this goes back to the saying, 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket'.
I'm now a happy customer of:
I know fastmail isn't the perfect privacy option but works very well for me. They own all their own hardware and use encryption at rest. They help develop open standards such as Jmap to replace imap. . This, to me says a lot about the people behind the company and is something I appreciate.
For those looking for a more private email solution then Tuta is a great option too!
Best of luck out there folks 👍
Unless you're somehow looking for tonnes of storage, I don't think you need cloud services. I've set up just my 3 devices (phone laptop PC) to sync with each other using Syncthing. And that's plenty of space for just personal stuff (including photos). And it's so cheap (only the cost of the devices you're already using, and no subscriptions). It's something I wish most people did because of how prevalent Drive has become, even though it doesn't seem like it's necessary for a lot of use cases. You're situation might be different though, just a suggestion.
I don’t think you need cloud services
I have 1TB of Tresorit in case my house burns down.
Makes sense if that's something you're worried about. I just meant that it seems to me like people immediately jump to cloud storage without even considering use cases and options. I wish I'd known about this setup that I'm using now a long time ago so I thought it'd be good to put the option out there.
Well Sync is not a backup, but I get what you mean. On top of that I do have my own Nas 😅 so using that with at least another separate offline ssd should be good enough.
I'd moved from Bitwarden to Proton Pass only 6 months ago, so moving back wasn't too much of a difficult choice (both services have great import/export and Bitwarden even offers self-hosting)
I'd just go Keepass. Password managers don't need cloud to work. And Bitwarden could go rogue too.
There are a few alternatives in mind for me. Mailbox, posteo, disroot. Disroot is the only one among these with a free email. But posteo and mailbox do have cheap tiers. Posteo doesn't have support for custom domains last I checked.
That's just email. I've already not been using proton for almost everything else. KeepassXC for passwords, Addy.io for aliases, Syncthing and offline storage across my 3 devices instead of any Drive. VPN I rarely use so free proton is enough for that. Mullvad exists on the off chance I need it for a while (it's a constant price per month how many ever months you choose, and you can just "top up" with some amount and it will last you the appropriate number of days).
Mailbox and Posteo doesn't have their app in F-Droid 🤔
I know Tuta has, and just looked up Disroot, they also have...
You can use Thunderbird with Mailbox and I think Posteo too? Does disroot even have an app? Even their official pages directed me to other clients like Thunderbird
A sociopath libertarian idiot.
The L part is the kind of person I want in charge of my encrypted data. Telling the government to fuck off because he legitimately can’t comprehend how government is a good thing.
I haven't left, but now it's something that's on the cards, which wasn't the case beforehand.
I only recently linked my domain to my ProtonMail account, so if I do switch it should be relatively painless given I'll transfer the domain too, and the original PM address has become more of a lost cause anyway due to spam.
I still like and trust Proton and won't be switching. They've built up enough good will. Hopefully they don't keep burning through it though. I'm still sour over the lack of feature parity, linux support, reliance on Google for notifications, etc.
I've got Keepass for password manager and Mullvad for VPN, and both have worked out really well for me so far. What I haven't been able to find is a good alternative to Proton Drive. For aliases I use Firefox Relay.
Yes, I canceled my Ultimate account. Andy can believe whatever he wants in private, but publicly stepping outside of non-partisan policy advocacy at this exact moment in time was a red flag, doubly so because he espoused his personal politics through an official business account in his response to the Reddit thread.
Email/calendar went to Tuta, AirVPN for VPN, BitWarden for passwords. Everything is encouragingly smooth so far.
Fair warning: Tuta's email import is very new and only available on the more expensive tier at the moment (not sure if that's permanent). I didn't have any problems, but there were some issues a few weeks ago.
I do think people are over-reacting to Andy's words and assigning him political views he didn't express. He didn't endorse Trump or the Republican party at large, and definitely didn't "go full MAGA" or express Nazi sympathies. His statements about Democrats I partially agree with and partially disagree. His remarks about the priorities and actions of Republicans, though, were pure tailpipe-huffing fantasy. Being able to say these absurd things in public--under an official business account no less--shows poor judgement and implies he might believe other absurd things he isn't willing to say publicly.
Another factor in my decision: Proton's privacy policy specifies they can modify the policy at any time with no notification to users, and deems continued use of the services as agreement to the updated terms. The updated terms they didn't notify you about.
That being said, no service provider is perfect. I don't think Proton stores enough data to really be a concern if they turned over everything they have. But this whole thing is based on trust. Even with their clients being open-source software, you're trusting that they always serve the same browser scripts that they published. You trust that the password you provide at key generation or login isn't ever passed back to their servers. You trust that they don't keep unencrypted copies of your emails, files, or VPN activity. You trust that they aren't going to modify their privacy policy and quietly undo protections you thought you had.
The way Andy responded was enough to question my trust in the company with him at the helm. I didn't leave as a heavy rebuke, just as a "do better". There are plenty of other companies which provide equivalent services. That's the risk companies take when a major part of their market is ideological people: if you chafe their ideology they're more likely to put the effort into leaving.
I still use protonmail since it's hard to move mail instances after giving so many people my address but I've reconsidered my plans to switch to their vpn or paid plans.
Set your emails up with your own domain name. Never have this problem again.
I’m working on getting off it, planning to self host. It’s unfortunate, because I was all in and working to degoogle, so it’s all a mess right now
I left and canceled my plan. No alternative yet as I was migrating from Google.
I've left and canceled my paid subscription. Addy.io + Posteo. I like it way better.
Addy.io absolutely amazing.
Yup, addy.io is amazing. Used to selfhost it but the price is so low it's not worth the hassle. I have a domain at addy.io and a second at a normal hoster. If I'm not happy I can easily transfer the mails and change mx records to a new location.
I'm backing stuff up and waiting to see how this plays out until March before deciding. The only reason I didn't immediately quit is because it's just one board member and he's not American, so I'm leaving towards him not understanding how bad things were getting. It was also before the Musk Nazi salute so he gets that tiny benefit of the doubt. Still, it was insanely dumb what he did, and did erode a lot of trust in Proton.
No, I literally just moved to proton like 3 months prior to the comments and still in the process of moving my less used services to the new email from my Gmail. Not really willing to do it all again so soon. Maybe if something else happens which is more serious, but a single event is a bit much to make such a large decision in my opinion. If it's systemic and continues to happen then yes I will think about moving.
honesty seems like a overreaction, if proton's goals and actions don't change I'm fine with staying (even if I disagree with trump). it's one person on the board not the entire company as well. however I have considered leaving proton due to bad linux support and no de-googled notifications. afaia proton is the cheapest for what I use it for (vpn+mail+email aliasing+drive (barely using it due to no Linux client)), please tell me if I'm wrong. protonvpn has port fowarding support which I use to host servers sometimes.
As a Linux person, I, too, am somewhat tired of being treated like a second-class user. Having no Linux client for Drive is a real pain.
This is the single-most annoying thing with Proton for me. Give us a Linux client for drive already... 😭
I also left my plan, even refunded the amount, since my renewal was set on January 1st.
Main reason I used Proton was their VPN, especially their wide range of servers and countries helped me. But now I don't need that many individual country servers anymore, so I settled to Mullvad, mainly because their prices are very competitive and they are considered "trusted" (even though I kinda miss port forwarding, I'd rather not have it, than trust in AirVPN or other smaller services).
I used their mail for a little while, so migration was rather simple. I currently test out Posteo, when I am happy with them, I might stick to them.
Same with Drive, I didn't use them, mainly because they do not have proper Linux support (no, rclone isn't sufficient).
Thankfully I didn't use them as my password manager (and definitely not as a crypto wallet service) :D
I am currently still using their stuff since my husband and I just purchased a longer subscription as a bulk purchase, but we will not be renewing and I am actively researching alternatives for the VPN and emails.
The emails is the more difficult part for me, because everyone suggests hosting your own on your own domain, but to me that just seems like a great way to have any site you tie your email to to be directly linked to your house. Unless I am massively misunderstanding how that would work, in which case any resources would be greatly appreciated.
You don't have to self-host email (which is a pain) with a custom domain. Most of the providers will let you point your domain's email at their servers, with a few DNS entries. The major (IMO) benefit of that is that your email address is decoupled from your email provider, so changing providers in the future doesn't require you to tell all your contacts.
I was looking into proton as an alternative to Google. I am no longer looking at them because of Andy's comments and doubling down. I feel like I'm giving enough companies with questionable ethics my information and money without giving it to them too. If the company wants to come to a consensus about making a public statement that separates them from his comments I'll consider those when they happen.
I canceled the night of and moved to a combination of Mailbox and Tuta (trying to diversify a little). I also provided a colorful reason for terminating to make sure they knew exactly why.
So far they each have their quirks, but overall I like them. I also set up two domains for email so that the next switch won't be as jarring (since I can just keep using the domain addresses).
I already used Mullvad for VPN, so that was a non-issue.
I downgraded from the Ultimate plan because I don't really need the VPN. It hasn't exactly achieved much because now I just have additional credit on my account.
If the CEO hasn't been replaced by the time my annual subscription comes up for renewal I'll migrate elsewhere. It's a pain because their email and calendar are half decent but I'm really not impressed with the company's failure to take responsibility.
I am still with proton since the owners being pricks doesn't change the reasons why I like them for my email: They have made it clear what they will and won't give to authorities and I can act accordingly.
That said, I did look into going mullivad+tuta but decided against it. Since tuta requires you to use their desktop client if you want an "offline" copy of their emails and that just seems like a mess when they inevitably do something shitty and I need to wait for "support" to get back to me for why I can't download my emails and go elsewhere. Whereas I can just keep the bridge running and open thunderbird every week or two with proton.