When called out on it, they then doubled down on this dogshit take: https://archive.ph/quYyb
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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I use Proton mail, any recommendations for alternatives?
If encryption is a must, then use Tuta. German company, privacy focused, open source all around, no surveillance, free tier with encryption available, encrypted calendars, accessible paid subscriptions with actually useful services.
I'll add another rec for posteo.de, I've used it for about a year and been very happy with it.
It's not encrypted. You can't compare that to Proton or Tuta.
I didn't compare it to them. Besides, what good are they when no one I'm communicating with uses encryption? Unless you actually have people who are willing to use the same provider you do, or do the PGP thing to encrypt/decrypt it themselves, Proton and Tuta are no better than any others in that regard.
I'm talking about your email inbox being stored in an encrypted format on the provider's server. This is what Proton and Tuta do. They encrypt all incoming Emails with your PGP public key before storing them in your inbox.
What you are talking about is different, and it doesn't need to be supported by the provider. You can always manually encrypt outgoing messages, no matter which provider you use. These are not the same things though.
Posteo
Keep a proton for situations where you can actually use the encryption. Most of the time the encryption is as useless as a VPN.
Also keep in mind all it is is pgp with a directory lookup. I think proton made their pgp directory lookup more open in the last few years, so it may not have any real benefits.
Better idea: Use Tuta and always have the encryption. Recommending unencrypted email services in 2025 feels like a bad joke to me.
Can you elaborate on the uselessness of a VPN?
This is common debate and there's plenty of angles to it. VPN companies are definitely guilty of fear mongering in their advertising and trying to market them as an easy way to achieve privacy or anonymity, which is false. Tom Scott's video covers this well. This overview is also pretty good at explaining what it is and isn't. If you don't trust your ISP or are using public/free wifi, VPNs can be useful. VPNs aren't inherently trustworthy either, though, especially free ones that might be harvesting your data. Even a well-intentioned VPN that doesn't retain logs can rent servers that government entities can (theoretically) bug to get your data (if they really wanted to).
Do you know of a reason to trust your ISP?
It's all contextual I think. I'd rather use my ISP than use and support a bad VPN. If you're using your work's wifi using a VPN could get you flagged.
Almost every site is https, so it's already encrypted. DNS lookups are encrypted. So what a VPN does is prevents your isp from knowing you visited a specific website. There was already no way for them to know what you got from that website, the only additional security was knowing you visited.
If this is a concern, a VPN isn't useless, but for most that isn't a concern.
VPNs are also good for torrents and bypassing rate limiting.
Posteo!
Of course a vegan would suggest Posteo as they’re the closest thing to a vegan email company as they have a vegetarian canteen.
Muahahahahaarrr, come join our cult of vegetarian canteenism
I like disroot, but you have to do the encryption yourself. I use Thunderbird
PGP or other PKI.
Don't trust people you've never met to give a shit about you