What are your alternatives to proton?
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What assurances do you have they won’t go full proton in the future?
Absolutely none. That applies to all services that exist now or in the future. The only way around that is self-hosting but that path has its own issues including a very steep learning curve if you want to be secure as well as private. Maybe this could be a longer term project to work towards?
For services:
- Mail - Mailbox.org seems the best option right now
- Calendar - don't know.
- Drive - either Cryptomator used with literally any service or a dedicated service like Filen
- VPN - Mullvad
- Password Manager - Bitwarden
- Documents - I just use LibreOffice offline or CryptPad occasionally if I'm collabing with someone.
In truth none of these are perfect. Privacy has got a lot harder recently as Proton and StartMail/StartPage have politically shit the bed and the UK seems determined to kill encryption which means I have to avoid really good services like IceDrive just because they're in the UK.
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I've had Tuta for years and can't recall ads.. what do you mean?
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Tuta is a great german alternative with e-mail and calendar.
For Drive there is many options but I don't feel recommanding one now
For VPN there is Mullvad, IVPN and NymVPN(beta)
For Password Manager there is BitWarden or any popular KeePass clients but sync is mainly on you.
For Documents there is CryptPad -
they have to make money somehow.
I was a paying costumer.
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ENTE for photo storage:
https://ente.io/Crypt.ee is also an option.
Have a look at:
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/ -
Custom domain + migadu.com
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And I am a newer tuta user ( a year or so) and haven't seen an ad yet either.
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As others have said no all-in-one solution, but Privacy Guides has good recommendations for each use case
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I can personally recommend fruux for calendars and contacts, but their free accounts are rather limited.
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Proton's probably the best mail.
Calendar: paper
Documents: cryptpad
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Incoming mail: my own server and my own domain (Postfix). Sufficient to receive confirmation mails and notifications.
Outgoing mail: no good/reliable solution yet. I have to send personal e-mail very very rarely.
Calendar: Tasks.org app, used offline (not synced).
Drive: 1TB external HDDs. GPG encrypted backups of important stuff are uploaded regularly to one of the VPSes I have.
VPN: Tor
Password manager: KeepassXC (with backups at 3 places).
Documents: Stored on computer, important ones are backed up.
In general things I need on the go (e.g Calendar) is on my phone, the rest is at home at my computer. If I need to move data between devices I simply use USB drives. I don't need no cloud sync of anything.
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Crypt.ee looks like a solid option if you don't mind their UI/UX. It also gives me confidence in them when I read their FAQ and listen to the podcasts episodes the CEO has been intertwined in.
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Things I have changed to or plan to
Tutamail for e-mail and calendar
Plan to change Filen for cloud services
F-secure's Freedome for VPN
For the rest I'm looking for good solutions as well and also opinions on Filen or if there's other alternatives that might be better
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Tuta?
I just synced them in a triangle between my phone, laptop and desktop.
This is precisely my setup, haha! But I don't even use my desktop often enough to merit a server...
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What happened with StartPage?
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I wholeheartedly agree with Tuta over Proton Mail!
And to add to password manager, KeePassXC + SyncThing is excellent if you need to access your vault on multiple devices without any 3rd parties involved.
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Regarding Password Managers, you can put a little extra effort into setup with KeePass + SyncThing to avoid using 3rd parties at all.
Highly recommend not relying on a cloud provider for this kind of thing. You're just asking for one of two things to happen:
- Their servers get compromised
- They decide to shut down
I know you can self-host with vaultwarden, but if you're not a self-hoster then it's a little bit simpler to setup SyncThing and use the kdbx format.
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Yeah, I tried tuta. I have (overall less but) the same issue with proton. I just want to use my own client apps of choice.
I have registered with mailbox.org and while the trial period is very limited, the web ui is minimalistic and basic looking. You could say outdated. I seriously consider paying for a "team" account for me and my wife. The price is unbeatable. Aside from the gui, the features I need are there.
I just need the Wife's approval. She'd be migrating from yahoo of all places.
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It does not offer all the options from proton but I bought my own domain from OVH provider (France). Can configure email addresses in their admin user interface. I have one main account that I do not disclose. So when I need to create an account somewhere, I just go to OVH web interface and create a new alias for my main email.
The day OVH goes dark, I’ll just have to move my domain somewhere else.
