What are your alternatives to proton?
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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 You could say outdated.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.
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I honestly don't see the big deal with people hating on proton. It's still open source it's still encrypted and doesn't mine your data that seams to check most of the boxes for me. The only problem I had with it was the default main client which shows upgrades to go unlimited all the time but I just use Thunderbird now.
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Thats a good point, I might set that up myself!
At the moment I do a once-a-week encrypted export from BitWarden and Aegis (authenticator) and put those exports onto an encrypted USB pen drive to avoid the issues you mention but I think your way is probably better.
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You mentioned another excellent tool, Aegis!
I use it too, and I have it set to auto-export every time I add a new OTP provider to my SyncThing system. Since you can encrypt the exports, it fits nicely and have my OTPs available everywhere.
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I like fastmail
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Check out Addy.io. This would make your email alias creation much easier and manageable from your phone. They even have an api and direct integration into various password managers.
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Self host email and nextcloud. Keepass for pw manager. I use davx5 and fossify calendar for mobile calendar. Nextcloud mobile just manages your files and doesn't have the other Nextcloud apps.
Idc about Proton either way though. Imo if proton was fine for you before then it's fine for you now. I just prefer to have control over my own services.
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I did not know about Addy.io. I’ll definitely have a look. Thank you!
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The hate for proton is because the CEO Andy Yen retweeted Trump announcing his pick for assistant attorney general for antitrust cases. His retweet included commentary fawning over Republicans as “standing for the little guys.” When criticized the company doubled down and supported him but then said they wouldn’t be making any more comments because it was a distraction.
If that isn’t enough, someone noticed that CEO Andy’s Reddit username is ”andy1011000.” The numbers at the end are binary for “88” - a well known pro-Nazi dog whistle. He says this is only a coincidence and is meant to refer to being born in 1988.
So in summary he is publicly praising fascists and has a username which coincidentally has a pro-Nazi reference.
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Can you provide any link for what Startpage has done wrong? I’m familiar with the Proton situation but hadn’t heard anything about Startpage. I’ve actively been looking for non-US based search engines.
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According to Wikipedia pages 14, 18, 1488, 8814 are also common Nazi's symbols. I personally feel the birthday explanation more likely as I see a lot of people doing that (without the nerdy base 2).
But yeah, I'm not sure of anything now, if you told me a few years ago that dozens of billionaires would go full on highlander on 2025 I wouldn't have believed you...
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I get the controversy about the CEO being controversial the services that proton make are still very good for the most part. And since there open source and encrypted you don't need to trust proton anyway (aside from the VPN).
