I have a fastmail address and one at my domain with zoho, now I would probably recommend runbox or posteo
While I think we are on the same page about a lot of things, I disagree that you should pay for something you were already forced to pay for (which is another reason why Microsoft is a problem). You touched on a lot of points I have made myself about (D)ARPAnet and Tor. Both were paid for by taxes.
More than that, they need to behave as a business if that is what they are trying to do. Meaning, provide a consistent and available product for people to purchase and use. This should be done without any exclusionary practices. CoC’s show that they don’t want to do that, or don’t pay attention to the societal landscape and are ignorant of the purpose of CoC’s.
The former removes the consent of the people to participate in the economy in a fair and informed way, and the latter is a further slap in the face. Pretend to care about privacy and security with the caveat that it only applies to their allies.
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Like you, I was using Proton mail to handle personal things and was well aware what their origins were. When I discovered they went ESG/DIE to get funding for their other services like storage and VPN, I promptly deleted my account. Thankfully I did not go through with paying for their services. Unfortunately, this is how a lot of these “privacy and freedom respecting,” companies are behaving (think BRCC). The easiest path to the most money because competition is no longer necessary when they get subsidized by government grants because they pretend to care about what color their users are, what’s between their legs, and who they want to have sex with.
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Yea this one was new to me, I need to read through that, I wasn’t aware of that. Thank you!
My belief is that people are capable of making their own decisions with a reasonable level of maturity. I just provide information so people are more informed about those decisions. Therefore, I would never tell others to do (or not do) something. What works for me may not be practical for others given the amount of risk they are willing to mitigate versus the types of services they want to use. Hopefully that is clear.
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For non-technically inclined people in my circles, including elderly family, I have aided them in setting up GPG including walking them through how to exchange keys and helping them to get set up with each others keys, so they know and learn those processes.
It is then up to them to use it, while you cannot force anyone to change their email behaviourisms, when the option is there and available for them to use they don’t have any real excuses not to use it and I make a point of always encrypting my emails between my contacts who use GPG so that they get used to working with their email this way, familiarity by practising, by doing.
For emails and contacts that do not implement GPG, which in my case is usually incoming from companies then there is not anything you can do about that as they are not using it.
If any email happens to have a contacts GPG public key in the email signature/footer then you can take the opportunity to verify their key and begin using GPG with that contact.
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Interesting opinions about the email client. I have a question which one is good in terms of privacy and has free options (accounts). What should I choose tuta, protonmail, or some other that I haven’t heard?
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I had not heard of Tuta until the day after I completed my change over to Proton. That took several days of work. For right now, it’s Proton. I may change over later, but I can live with this for the time being.
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Looks like it’s its own app (AppImage download). This, to me, is something proprietary that interfaces with email, not email.
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You mean tuta tutanota (tuta)? I read the forum about it last year and it was said that tuta is a bit better. Eventually I will have an account on tuta and a backup on protonmail
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Earthlink.net: I’ve had this since 1996. Utterly reliable and on medium setting, the spam filter is both pretty good and not hyperactive (I don’t see much spam, and I rarely have to rescue someone from the spamtrap). It is not free (it’s up to $16/mo. just for the email – 8 mailboxes and you can also generate 5 disposables) but I keep it because it is so reliable. And as I have always had it autoforward to another account, I have a running check on that going all the way back. Has a blacklist function that works, you can block entire TLDs if you want. (I have.)
Via my own domains hosted with IONOS: I’ve had this account since 2003. I have their unlimited business hosting which comes with 2000 mailboxes for … I think it’s now $12/mo., but they have cheaper options. Also pretty reliable, tho the spamtrap can be hyperactive (and whitelisting doesn’t always work), and once in a while they’ve been briefly blackholed. But I look at the issues people have with other hosting companies, and any urge to switch evaporates. Live humans on phone support, who know their business. I manage my own mailboxes through the hosting control panel.
GMX: owned by IONOS. Reliable (I have a friend who’s used it since 1998 with zero issues) and doesn’t give me any grief, tho I only use it on my phone (much better interface than whatever came on the phone). I’ve had this about 18 years. I did once neglect it for several years and lost the account (it’s not six months, it’s something like two years) but my username was still there, so I just logged back in. I just checked it for the first time in 3 months and… no spam. None.
Proton: I use this once in a blue moon. Not entirely convinced it’s not a honeypot.
AOL mail: free, and pretty reliable. Filters the shotgun spam very well, but gets a lot of hello-you-subscribed spam (tho spam management is much easier than most). I’ve logged into the account maybe 3 times in 20 years and it’s still there. No ads with UBlock.
Gmail: Had this since beta in 2004, and I remember they said flat out they would parse your mailbox for keywords. They stopped saying that once they became wholly an ad company, do you believe them?? Gets spam like nowhere else (whatever filter they have doesn’t work). I mostly use it to keep all the snoopy garbage in one place.
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Earthlink oh man that was the OG 
Shame on me I forgot they were even still around.
Ugg I have the same junkmail email from the early 2000s (yahoo 
) and it gets hundreds; and quickly thousands that get past the spam filters alone. I haven’t tried TLD blocking but they always email from random domains so not even sure how that would work?
I got all these emails before I was considering these issues; so I have gmail “personal” for F&F and “office” for logins. I recreated them in iCloud at one point thinking Apple cared more for security ().
Thank you for the IONOS and GMX suggestions, adding to my notes. Your AOL usage made me less self-conscious about my yahoo usage ha ha. I attempted to log into my old AOL account the other day and it looks like it was purged at some point.
Okay helpful to hear how you did that thank you. I may have further questions down the road on this topic.
I had no idea that Proton had adopted a weaponized CoC, and implemented anti gun/knife policies. I was considering signing up for a paid package with VPN and so on. I guess I’ll keep using the free email, and go with Mullvad for a VPN provider.
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Softether is supposed to be decent, as well.
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That seems pretty interesting. I’ll have to do some research on it, test it out, and so on.
For now I’ve been using Proton’s free VPN.
A brief perusal if Softether gives the impression that users can set up their own VPN server…
I look forward to playing with it, and if there are servers in a few countries with decent bandwidth…the sky’s the limit. In my neck of the woods, unless you’re willing to pay thousands, you’re pretty much capped at 50Mb/sec down and 10 up, I’m not sure how useful that would be as a VPN server. Something to mess about with for a while, anyway.
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For a while I was getting bales of spam from India. Earthlink’s blacklist lets you do some wildcards. I discovered that I could block *.in and suddenly I had no more spam from India. (Naturally if you need to speak to folks in India, you can’t do that.)
I have an ancient Yahoo account too, tho it probably thinks I’ve died. Every five years or so it sends me a threat to commit sepukku, I log in just to keep-alive, and we go our separate ways again. Yahoo is and has always been very unreliable (someone who knew what to check said it’s due to a server misconfiguration) – every so often a bunch of Yahoo accounts will simply fail to send or receive to large blocks of the email world, and this goes on for several months. No errors, no bounces, that email just vanishes. That has been happening since they were new, and most recently 3 or 4 years ago.
I think AOL does do mailbox purging if it’s neglected long enough.
I think the record goes to Novell’s email system. I had an account back in the 1990s. Two corporate owners and 25 years later I had some reason to log in and tho the email part is gone, there was my account, still active.
Privatemail.com is what I have been using for some years. They originally offered a free account but it wasn’t sustainable and they axed it, but let me keep the free account. I chose them because they are in America as I am and I like to imagine storming into an office building to complain to customer service somewhere I could theoretically drive to if anything ever goes wrong.
The email works fine, lots of encryption features I haven’t ever learned to use. There was a time I wanted to upgrade but that process was so broken I just gave up.
I hope they are still working on expanding their business.
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I agree with your stance, but what do you think about Andy Yen’s controversial post endorsing Republicans?
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I think that what people do on their personal time is their business regardless of their societal status or political stance. The problem is trying to use it as a marketing tool for a business. It doesn’t add any value to the product other than it may have people that are productive and want to create something that works and that people want to use. Then again, it may not.
This is a huge problem with those locked in their respective tribal echo chambers. Both sides are grifting on the societal issue of the day. It’s making money and people are just jumping straight into it without applying an objective method to logically challenge the person’s position or their own. As a result, you get people that say they think YT is a slimy platform that censors people, but they are happily willing to stay on it and make money from it. Sure, some have their own sponsors operating outside of YT’s monetization, but anyone that was going to change their minds about what is going on in the world by looking at all the information in totality has already done so. This is true with both sides of the false dichotomy.
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Interesting, sort of a broad answer.
Also, I just noticed the CoC is a template created by the Stumptown Syndicate. Seems to be a org based in Portland Oregon, the city I live in. This city is the worst for that kind of false culture. Maybe I should investigate deeper…
Is there a well written CoC I could try to indoctrinate them with?
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