Hi All,
I would like to choose a new email provider, where security and privacy of the email is one of my main concerns (nothing to hide, but want to keep my data private, differently than what happens with the major providers). I have read maaany posts and websites guides but I am still confused.
I am happy to pay a euro or so /month, so I had reduced my choice to Mailbox, Posteo, Mailfence. The problem is that each of them has some flows that don’t let me go ahead with them!
Mailbox: uses PGP, so not straightforward to send encrypted emails (unlike with tutanota) and to have encryption at rest. No mobile app. Alias reuse after 90 days
Posteo: no spam folder. ALias reuse after 24 months
Mailfence : has no encryption at rest , no mobile app. Not sure about alias reuse
Have you got any comments on the above providers and /or other suggestions (except for Tutanota and Protonmail)? thank you, appreciated!
Why do you need a mobile app? It’s just email, all IMAP clients should work.
I have a mailbox address since years, never use the webui for checking mails, only for changing some settings, I access my mails with Thunderbird on desktop, Fairemail on Android. Both apps have builtin PGP, so you shouldn’t care what the provider supports.
The spam filter in mailbox is glorious, never got a spam there.
Well imap isn’t encrypted, right? That’s why one can or rather needs to run a software with proton called proton bridge to get imap locally
Yes, but for me standards are more important than encryption. I can encrypt mails with pgp, than they are end to end encrypted, imap doesn’t matter. I considered proton when I switched to mailbox, but usually I don’t send encrypted mails, because the reciepents cant read them, so I wouldn’t use the pros of proton.
How come that the recipients can’t read them?
If I send some proton encrypted email to a random gmail address what happens? On gmail side it’s not encrypted. So what’s the point for encrypting something only on one side? For PGP afaik we have to get the public key of the recipient so it requires some setup on both sides before the first mail. I wanted to say, usually I don’t send emails like this,I send them to mortals, who would freak out if I would start to speak about things like this.
Once I setup pgp in thunderbird, but I never had the incentive to setup again after a reinstall, because I never used it (I still have my keys saved though). For encrypted communication about important topics I use Signal, and I could convince my most important friends to install it.
Why the need for a specific mobile app for Mailbox? I use Mailbox in combination with FariEmail app on Android. It even supports PGP. Couldn’t be happier.
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I have my emails set up with Purelymail, they’re great if you don’t need the extra office suite tools and have a lot of custom domain addresses, but I’m also skeptical about the “single point of failure” setup as everything is run by one person and the entire service can go down with him. As far as I’m aware, there isn’t any other mail service that doesn’t charge extra for additional domains.
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After reading up on this some more it seems like he has plans in place to have his brother maintain the service if he can’t anymore, and even if he didn’t, the service should run until his aws subscription ends. Seems like not too big of an issue even for those who don’t use a client.
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I use posteo.net for 10 years now, and I am super happy with them. I don’t get spam, and I have never missed an email.
They choose not to use a spam folder system, and I understand their reasoning, and agree with them.
They sometimes get criticized for some other decision (something to do with certificates, if I remember correctly), but after reading their reasoning, I agree with them.
In my experience, they have now real downside, and I recommend them to everyone I know when they come to me with email problems.
Keep in mind posteo.net does not have DMARC which means anyone can spoof an email @posteo domain.
All of the other providers have this. Mailing lists can be used with DMARC.
Thank you for pointing this out. I am no way expert but trying to study and understand. I then found other negative comments regarding the lack of DMARC, while on posteo website they say: “We have a DMARC “none” policy for Posteo email domain names, since DMARC is currently not recommended for mailbox providers. Outbound DMARC policies are primarily “best-suited for transactional emails and semi-transactional emails” (dmarc-org FAQ). At the present, DMARC has implications which do not meet customers’ individual use of email.” link
The dmarc-org FAQ is interesting too. I understand that Posteo publishes thier DMARC record, if I am not wrong
I would appreciate your opinion, you seem competent! Thank you