Tutanota / Mailbox.org?
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Hi guys!
I'm looking for a Proton alternative. So far I've seen these two recommended. I was wondering what are the pros/cons of each? Seems Tutanota offers more bang for the buck in mailbox size etc, but I'm not sure. I'd also like to have a better integration with Android, because Proton's email/calendar apps suck big time.
Thanks!
It's not on your list but I've had a Mailfence email for the last couple of years and they've been solid.
You could also use YUNOhost to host your own on a VPS. I had no experience before setting mine up and it was fine. Unlimited email accounts and aliases out of the box, plus you can host other stuff besides, like a website, file server or even a fediverse instance.
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If you want a compatible, interoperable email service, then Mailbox. Tutanota is a propietary, centralised email system.
This. You can't use your client, not on your phone nor on your PC. Therefore Tutanota was never a viable option
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I don't know mailbox.org but tuta will try to upsell you, eventually. It's going down the same path as Proton is so maybe stay away from it if you want to get away from Proton.
With tuta, I was locked into using their apps which kind of sucked. I moved to mailbox.org with the intent of encrypting my inbox but never did in the end. I'm happy to have IMAP/SNMP back that's for sure.
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Didn't know Mailbox had a free tier! Gotta check that out.
Damn, thought they did. Could have sworn Privacy Guides said it was free.
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If you want a compatible, interoperable email service, then Mailbox. Tutanota is a propietary, centralised email system.
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I don't know mailbox.org but tuta will try to upsell you, eventually. It's going down the same path as Proton is so maybe stay away from it if you want to get away from Proton.
I just got on Tuta and don't want to do this every 3 years forever. Can you elaborate on Tuta upselling the customer? I just need reasonable encryption, basic mail service, and for my data not to be in the hands of psychopaths.
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I just got on Tuta and don't want to do this every 3 years forever. Can you elaborate on Tuta upselling the customer? I just need reasonable encryption, basic mail service, and for my data not to be in the hands of psychopaths.
Every once in a while they'll send you an email with special CSS styling so you can't avoid seeing it and you can't unsubscribe from it. They call it a newsletter. It's advertising. It's less news and more begging you to buy more of their stuff. Very occasionally they'll bump new features onto a higher tier but still show that feature in your UI, with special CSS styling. God forbid if they try to upgrade your account but you deny because you're happy with the features you have now and the amount you pay; they push harder and harder the longer you're on a 'legacy' tier.
It happened to me. It'll happen to you.
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I don't know mailbox.org but tuta will try to upsell you, eventually. It's going down the same path as Proton is so maybe stay away from it if you want to get away from Proton.
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As far as I’m aware, there is a huge difference between these three in that Mailbox.org is not end-to-end encrypted. So if that is an important feature for your use case, that may disqualify them from your options.
Huge beginner here, but privacytools.io says Mailbox is encrypted? Is it the "end to end" part? How did you find out they're not?
https://www.privacytools.io/privacy-email -
Hi guys!
I'm looking for a Proton alternative. So far I've seen these two recommended. I was wondering what are the pros/cons of each? Seems Tutanota offers more bang for the buck in mailbox size etc, but I'm not sure. I'd also like to have a better integration with Android, because Proton's email/calendar apps suck big time.
Thanks!
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I'm sorry, english is not my first language but what do you mean by advising to stay away from Tuta?
"stay away" from something, means to avoid it, they are saying to not use it
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Tuta also doesn't easily support pgp and has no plans to integrate it. "we encrypy our stuff for you, trust us bro"
we encrypy our stuff for you, trust us bro
Their clients are open source. Might not be "standard" like PGP, but if you could read code, you could verify that it's encrypted before it gets sent.
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"stay away" from something, means to avoid it, they are saying to not use it
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Oh lol.
tuta will try to upsell you
"upsell" refers to a sales tactic, where a salesperson keeps trying to convince you to buy something more than you might need. Basically, you want to buy a $200 TV, and the sales person tells you: "Hey this $700 TV is much better, it has 8K High Definition, Premium Speakers... etc, etc..."
And then you say: "No thanks, I just want the $200 TV
"But they keep repeating the $700 tv over and over and it gets annoying. That's what the user is claiming that Tuta is doing.
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Every once in a while they'll send you an email with special CSS styling so you can't avoid seeing it and you can't unsubscribe from it. They call it a newsletter. It's advertising. It's less news and more begging you to buy more of their stuff. Very occasionally they'll bump new features onto a higher tier but still show that feature in your UI, with special CSS styling. God forbid if they try to upgrade your account but you deny because you're happy with the features you have now and the amount you pay; they push harder and harder the longer you're on a 'legacy' tier.
It happened to me. It'll happen to you.
special CSS styling so you can’t avoid seeing it
you can't set your client to plain-text only?
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Huge beginner here, but privacytools.io says Mailbox is encrypted? Is it the "end to end" part? How did you find out they're not?
https://www.privacytools.io/privacy-emailMailbox encrypts the email at rest on their servers but with the encryption keys they own. Protonmail, in contrast, uses zero access encryption where they encrypt your data with your public key and they do not know or have access to your private key to be able to decrypt the data even if they wanted to.
Mailbox has a zero access encryption service called (I think) Guard that basically encrypts the email with PGP where they would no longer be able to decrypt your email. But it’s not enabled by default.
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I'm all for options, to be honest. What ideally I'd like is some sort of good encrypted email based in some safe European country, which can achieve decent Android integration. Proton apps are pretty useless to that effect (lack of offline basic functionalities, the calendar app isn't even an android calendar provider).
I'm not too hard in moving around my emails, since for the last few years I've been giving my email @duck.com which actually ends up sending to my final email after some tracking cleaning. Changing email provider would entail only updating my @duck.com destination. -
It's not on your list but I've had a Mailfence email for the last couple of years and they've been solid.
You could also use YUNOhost to host your own on a VPS. I had no experience before setting mine up and it was fine. Unlimited email accounts and aliases out of the box, plus you can host other stuff besides, like a website, file server or even a fediverse instance.
I'd try avoiding email hosting. I've heard way too many times that it's too much pain when it fails, and when it fails basically emails are bounced. I can't afford to miss taxes emails or other important stuff.
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Didn't know Mailbox had a free tier! Gotta check that out.
For what's worth, I'm going to give it a shot on the month trial. But I already see the middle tier for 3€ offers 10GB email only. I think I can fit my current old mail backup in about 4GB, but it would be slightly tight, I guess. I'm on an older Proton plan which charges about 3USD per month (by-yearly) and it gets me about 20GB. I think shared between cloud and email (I'm not actually interested in the cloud part, I have Seafile for that).
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However, mailbox can still be encrypted with pgp, and has some built in supports which make this easier.
One problem I had with proton/tuta is that you cannot use a third party app due to the encryption, which you can with mailbox. A problem I have with mailbox is that it does not support fido2 for login or 2fa, which could be a security concern.
Thanks, these are the kind of valid points I'm looking for. I noticed the lack of 2fa when I was registering for the demo, they only asked for a backup email or a phone number...neither too privacy-friendly there. But I guess I can live with that.
