Andy Yen’s values are incompatible with Proton’s mission. He advocates for poor security practices, supports fascists, and he verbally abuses his subordinates. As such, I can no longer in good conscience continue to financially support a company with such terrible leadership.
Unfortunately for me, my subscription just renewed last month on a multi year plan, but it does give me time to browse for and experiment with alternatives.
If you’re able, I encourage you to do the same and cite Andy Yen as the driving factor for your decision. We can’t let these tech bro fascists destroy what little semblance of privacy we have left.
Yeah, that’s very unfortunate. I just recently moved everything over to proton and I’ll be spending today looking for yet another alternative.
Please do share what alternative(s) you end up with and what you like about the providers. I had a look at mailbox, infomaniak and tuta for mail and airvpn as a replacement. I think I’l be switching to mailbox.
I signed up for tuta right now and I’m currently moving my most sensitive accounts over but I think I’m going to go with mailbox as well. It sounds good for around $13.50 usd.
I’m going to check them (mailbox) out first once I wake up a bit more. I already know I can’t afford tuta on top of everything else I pay for currently. Budget is about stretched to the max but I will update with which one I go with.
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I don’t know, the terms and conditions say that after a year of closing your account, they may give your email address to someone else. That sounds like a privacy disaster waiting to happen.
After briefly skimming their privacy policy and features, gmx doesn’t seem too bad. I’ll do a little more research tomorrow and its on the list.
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I’ve been using Startmail for a while now with no complaints
For email, have you considered Mailfence, Posteo.de, Fastmail
or Disroot?Disroot is currently not operational due to a server failure
I am a mailbox user and have no complaints. It just chugs away. I only use the mail aspect of it though
I’ve been happy with infomaniak. If you host a domain name with them, you get a free email too. I switched from Godaddy, gmail, and protonmail earlier this year all to infomaniak.
I’m also happy with AirVPN, but a lot more sites block it than other VPNs, so be ready to deal with that.
But Infomaniak is an entirely different product to Protonmail.
They offer email hosting and kSuite. It’s an alternative and more.
Protonmail is end to end encrypted. Infomaniak can be decrypted. It’s a less secure product and therefore not an alternative to Protonmail
But I agree that it’s a good product compared to like gmail.
Fair point. I think protonmail is only that way with other protonmail users, and I practically never send personal emails, so I honestly forgot about that feature. It’d be nice if other hosts could integrate with that.
I’m unaware of true feature parity alternatives then. I guess I just tend to use other communication media when I need encryption.
i finally deleted my ~20 year google account last week, finally migrating every single account that used that old email over to proton. and now, this
It’s still astronomically better than Google. People seem to be forgetting this.
True for now. But it seems headed down a path where it will be competing with Google in shittiness some time in the not so far off future (and I use Proton as well).
Better than Google in terms of ethics and privacy maybe, and not shoving ads in your face when you don’t use an adblocker. But it’s behind in features.
And unfortunately Google caters to the majority, who generally don’t care about privacy, even the ones who say they do but refuse to act on their words (and I’m not even going to comment on the “they have all my info anyway” crowd).
To me comparing Gmail to Protonmail feels similar to comparing FB Messenger to Signal. The former has more features and therefore is chosen by most people despite the enshittification.
This. The Proton suite is very convenient in my use case, I wouldn’t like to switch to all saperate services
It’s not better.
It’s fine, at best, and free alternatives are fine too.
The only thing Proton has is their integrity and focus on privacy… Or was supposed to, anyway.
It is. The direction they are going is shit, but only in isolation, if you compare it to Google, they still look like angels. Perhaps you dont understand what Google is doing.
No, you’re the one that refuses to see where Proton is heading with a CEO like that.
The only reason I’m paying for Proton is their supposed values, but clearly under his leadership they’re completely opposite to what they claim publicly.
If Proton is going to use my money to push out slop, I might as well use any other email provider that at least won’t lie to my face about it.
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FUUUUCCCK. SAME.
And a custom domain so there was no automatic transferring. Had to do the obnoxious mbox import rigamarole for two accounts (mine and my tech-illiterate dad) and talk two friends through the same.
Whatever. I’m sticking with it for a couple years, I don’t have it in me to do it again.
You’re good—it’s still one of the best options out there right now. Even if it gets shittier, unfortunately, it’s still a way better option than almost any others out there. Which is depressing. But don’t beat yourself up for staying.
I have yet to delete my gmail account but I soon will make a new one to run on my phone until I can get a new phone with grapheneos or some other OS that uses microg instead. I feel you on that 20 year account thing though. I think I made mine about 20 years ago as well. It was my very first “grown up” email after my silly kid named ones like Skaterpunkxxxxx@aol and such.
I deleted mine several years ago but my employer just added Google dependencies to their app so I can’t install through Aurora anymore and have to go and buy a new phone and a SIM card, and make a new Google account…
After decades on Gmail I finally stopped procrastinating and moved almost everything to proton over the last week. I had made a Lemmy post asking for service recommendations. Almost everyone said proton except two jerks who railed against it but had no interest in explaining and they made no alternative recommendation, just railed against proton.
Reading this article right now sucks.
Yeah, I don’t get why some people don’t elaborate. Just before I deleted tiktok and reddit, Proton and Tuta were the 2 everyone was recommending and I went with proton bc of the easy move feature which didn’t actually work for me for whatever reason so I ended up moving the most important accounts first and then all the ones that mattered one by one. I recall seeing some people do the same as you claimed; railing against proton without explanation but the looks of it and ease of use were what got me. Tuta doesn’t have that “easy move” feature either but it might be my go to. I thought all of their tiers were paid tiers but it looks like they have a free tier with twice as much space as proton.
Yeah, not only do people who do that not elaborate, they often insult you for even considering something they’re judgy about. Proton in this case. That was how both commenters approached it. Telling me I’m an idiot if I go with the recommendation that actually existed. They could’ve at least said what they use. One (non rude) person did mention tuta but I figured the bigger company would be more reliable to stick around 😭
You can probably not worry about this and be fine. Email is insecure to begin with.
I’m not gonna fight anybody about this but the proton ceo is making the right call telling everyone to just spam fixes out there without testing. The security environment has gone from the old way of making sure the hole is patched perfectly to the new way of making patches live immediately.
The reason is that ai automation makes exploitation of a vulnerability incredibly fast. Used to be if you and the opp both found something at the same time they’d have to spend a long while figuring out where it goes, what it can be chained to (this was a big one because they had to carefully interact with someone whose knowledge domain was different from their own to hook their php deserialization fuck up to someone else’s use after free etc), what that gets them and how theyre gonna use it to accomplish what. So there was plenty of time for you to patch the bug while they get their ducks in a row. Now that’s all automatable and they don’t have to deal with a different criminal in a careful and safe way.
Idk how much computer security news you get, but it’s been non stop insane banger one after another and proton has a target on its back. I’d tell people to get in line and ship the fixes too.
The way I see it is that proton’s mission hasn’t changed. I pay for their products, which remain secure and privacy focused despite their asshat CEO.
Security is suspect because the CEO is pushing devs to release code (AI-generated) to production without testing.
Fuck! Me too…