Email providers – which one to choose?

I disagree with the author right from the start, It appears the author wants an email service that is anonymous, free, and let&#x27;s him access it through a VPN. I don&#x27;t think that makes sence (how does the provider make money?) and I think it&#x27;s not what 95% of the public needs.<p>If you rely on your email for vital services your want email provide to operate like an (idealised) bank - store my private information with respect, and to be able to retrieve email even if my PC or account is stolen, and I am happy to pay for the privilege. Furthermore, handing over real money gives you standing to sue in the court of law if the provider doesn&#x27;t uphold their side of the bargain. I don&#x27;t mind providing real ID if it&#x27;s a trustworthy institution with a real address and a phone number I can dial for customer support.<p>By contrast if you Gmail is hijacked, there is no-one you can call for help and they can also ban you with no warning for no reason. You have almost no legal recourse on their misbehaviour because they can do anything for any reason and it&#x27;s free.<p>I was further surprised to read that the author sees no daylight between free Gmail, outlook, outlook Premium with your own domain (paid service), business office 365, etc. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to call them all data collectors and the difference between then are not trivial.<p>I am not claiming the author is misinformed or hasn&#x27;t done his homework - just that this take is from the perspective of &#x27;internet of anonymity&#x27; of 2000&#x27;s, not &#x27;internet of service I can trust my life with&#x27; that we deserve.

&gt; PGP is still fucking awesome and should always be used for any sensitive communication (best case scenario: all for every contact you can get to use it) - in addition to secure providers and all the other stuff we should be doing.<p>Sorry, I actually live in the real world, not whatever fantasy land the author comes from.

While I won&#x27;t list them out here, the author takes some, frankly, crazy statements if you read through the whole thing.<p>In addition, it seems unfortunate that some common sense measures against spam were simply unacceptable to the author. If you want to have a usable email, you have to have basic antispam protection.

Just in the last couple of days I set up Fastmail with a personal domain. At the moment I am more concerned with divorcing myself from Google than I am about privacy. It seems to me self-hosting is the only option if you are concerned about privacy. Using an email hosting service requires trusting that service to do what they claim so by definition none of them are sufficient. Eventually I plan on self-hosting but that&#x27;s been on the to-do list for years now. One step at a time.

One serious problem is that email, apart from a means of communication, is also a means of authentication. Taking away a person&#x27;s email address could easily mean that they will have to spend a tremendous amount of time changing it with various parties that have it in their records. At least those of them that can actually accept to talk to you (e.g. your bank or the IRS).<p>An non-optimal approach would be to actually own the domain name of one&#x27;s email address and then use one of those providers listed there as the &quot;backend&quot; mailbox, by forwarding the &quot;real&quot; email address to the &quot;backend&quot; mail address. Most domain name providers will actually provide this kind of email forwarding for free. And it would be much much easier to switch between the backends. Or even use two of them simultaneously.

It&#x27;s not written for the layman but it&#x27;s interesting to read about how terrible Proton Mail is for privacy since that&#x27;s the one most people think about first. The assessment begins with the following and just gets worse.<p>&quot;SMS is the only option (unless you want to donate, which would reveal your personal information of course); therefore their claim that &quot;ProtonMail does not require any personally identifiable information to register&quot; is a shameless lie. Update: a contact told me that Proton now includes the option to solve a recaptcha (still an evil) for confirmation; however, the option disappears while using a VPN. They must really want that damn phone number if you are using anonymizers! And the claim that you can sign up without personal data is still false.&quot;

I didn’t read the full list, but I found it interesting that the writer noted that some providers store the sending and delivery IPs without acknowledging these are in the email headers. Doesn’t this mean that every provider fails that test, but only some disclosed that?

The anger in this post is pretty palpable.<p>The author wants an email service that doesn’t do any of the things the service needs to operate?

Ok so free email not only needs to have no ad or data monetization but also no analytics. That’s possible although I’m not actually sure you want to use a third party email service with no analytics since that means it will be hard for them to understand bugs and things of that nature.<p>To me the requirement to not allow Tor or VPN with Captcha is just completely insane. So you’re expecting a free email service to have no monetization but also allow you to infinitely abuse its free services? Just host your own email rather than calling providers shit because they don’t allow unlimited abuse of their free email accounts (which can get them blacklisted).<p>I do think it’s somewhat reasonable to expect Protonmail to be able to support a pro-privacy payment method like Monero to allow a “truly anonymous” sign up that at least costs money to prevent rampant spamming but at that point things are getting into “who cares” territory, as in, the company behind protonmail doesn’t give enough of a shit about the 48 users who would love to use the service if only they supported accounting creation via Tor and Monero to justify spending engineering or even legal time on making that work.

This should really mention Mailvelope for those that insist on doing webmail. Only does inline PGP but that is the best you can do with a browser plugin.<p>The guts of Mailvelope actually come from Protonmail (OpenPGP.js).

I like&#x2F; even prefer straight HTML pages, but this is one of the ugliest sites I&#x27;ve seen in a long time.

Reading this list matches my personal search history pretty well, which is to say, it’s hard to find a good email provider.<p>I would have been interested to see an analysis of Apple’s iCloud email offering. Perhaps that’s not mentioned because it’s not popular enough?

Very nice and detailed analysis.<p>I don&#x27;t see zoho mail on that list though, they seem to be a popular email provider for businesses that don&#x27;t want to go the usual Google&#x2F;Microsoft route.

You could always roll your own, works great for my personal domain. I do use a third-party provider for spam filtering, I did have to find someone I trust.

Reading through this, I’m ready for a spoiler. It says a few acceptable services exist. Which ones passed the author’s litmus test?

Adding <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.migadu.com&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.migadu.com&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;</a> to the list (migrated after trying to use Tutanota and Protonmail for a short while but they did not fit into my workflow). Full GDPR compliance and:<p>&gt; Beyond technical requirements for establishing a working session on our website and webmail, we do not use cookies or any form of tracking.<p>&gt; We do not collect data for the purpose of user behavior and do not integrate any website analytics.<p>The only 2 parties they give data to are Stripe or Paypal.

The downvotes gona rain but i laughed out loud at cock mail