Comment by Matt@lemdro.id on What's a good alternative to Gmail?

Trying to de-google and looking for an alternative to Gmail.

Don’t mind if it’s a paid service if it’s robust.

Proton Mail and Tutanota are great free options.

Tutanota has limited features and i dont like the UI. But it is okay.

Try to go for protonmail

I just opened my protonmail account for the first time in years and it’s really nice! Lots of great UI stuff now!

Tutanota is a bit more privacy focused, really useful for burners, because by default it will burn the account if you don’t use it for 6 months.

As far the UI, I kinda like it. Little more old school, doesn’t have the toy look so many apps have nowadays. But to each their own.

Protonmails approach to requiring hCaptcha for everything, even their mobile apps, really turns me off. I can’t complete them. And I need another email to get in using their weird and creepy accessibility cookie thing. Nah thanks. If I need a second email to access my email I might as well just use that second email.

You sure you are a human?

Who the hell downvotes a person for saying “I have a hard time with Captchas because they don’t provide accessibility options that allow entry to someone with my conditions” ?

Like, guys, Captchas being ableist is a well known thing. And they’ve only been getting worse, as they’ve been in an arms race with AI, trying to become more and more distorted, and most AI text recognition software is already better at Captchas than most dyslexic people.

I am always suspicious of free. How do they make money? Have to pay for things in life, and I’ve learned that you are either the customer, or the product. If your the customer, pay up. If your the product, your data is being dished out to somebody OR ad-a-palooza. If the free option is just ads, I can live. If every time I log on I feel like I am getting a vitual colonoscopy, pass.

The Proton free tier is pretty limited compared to Gmail, in particular for me, you’re only allowed 1 label. The basic paid tier opens up a lot more. They definitely want you to upgrade to the paid tier.

Proton is freemium. You can use the basic package but you only get 500 MB drive storage. Expanding that is cheap, which is how they draw you in.

They also offer package deals, like their VPN stuff.

Your doubts are warranted, but with Protonmail and Tutanota there is no reason be suspicious. They are basically feemium products and their goal is to respect user’s rights

How do they make money?

Buy selling a subscription that comes with more perks. For example, more storage for your email, custom email domain, etc.

Pre-paying for 2 years upfront is the most cost effective.

Last I checked, the encryption in Proton Mail means you have to use their app, no third party apps allowed. Is that still true?

Yup, and it’s kind if a pain since their mobile apps aren’t great. I’ve been using them for many years, and lately have been considering jumping ship.

Email encryption isn’t something I actually care about. If I wanted to send someone a super private message, I probably wouldn’t use email anyways since it’s just clunky, and it’s unlikely the other person is using proton mail too (which means the message wouldn’t be encrypted anyways). All I really want is to not have my email provider be scanning my messages to profit from my data.

But the effort to switch to something else is making me stay…

Same here. It’s pretty barebones but fully functional.

Just off the top of my head: on iOS, the app is frequently slow to download new messages, occasionally (but not frequently) crashes or freezes up, opening a message from a notification is unreliable, it doesn’t support landscape mode, the search feature sucks (no filtering, sorting, etc), and it has some questionable design choices. Like, why does it include spam in the “All Mail” category? And why is it that swiping a message right sends it to the trash when doing that exact same interaction in the iOS mail app marks it as read? I’ve adapted to the difference after all these years, but it’s clearly a bad design.

Overall it’s not terrible; I’d give it like 4/5 or 3.5/5 stars, however with the price I’m paying for this (IMO overpriced) service I’d expect something a little better. I will say that the experience today is much better than it was a year ago, so even though it takes a long time, it does seem to be improving.

You don’t use encrypted emails only to communicate privately. If they are not encrypted, your e-mail provider will probably scan them, whether it is for profit or under request from the NSA. That’s what Snowden uncovered.

That’s a good point, but also the more I think about it the more I realize it’s futile. Google is 100% going to scan the messages I send to gmail users, and match it to me somehow.

With Tutanota the Gmail user only gets a link (optionally password protected). Google can’t scan the actual content of the mail.

Same with Proton if you enable encryption for emails to non-proton addresses

I’ve had zero issues with the mobile app for mail.

Phone app? Yes you have to use their own app. On a computer besides the browser version you can use Thunderbird and other applications if you download ProtonBridge.

Is that GitHub issue where the bridge just starts deleting emails still open? I am pretty sure it was open for over a year.

To clarify, this is a paid feature and not included with the free tier

Yes, that’s still true. If you want to be able to use a third-party mail app, I would look at Fastmail or Mailbox.org. They don’t have free plans though.

I’ll be honest, when it comes to online purchases you may find that a protonmail email will require extra processing/fraud checking due to the amount of fraudsters that use it. Combine that with a vpn and it will just be a pain here and there with online purchases like additional ID verification/delayed orders etc…

Been using protonmail for my main email for three years, never had one issue. But I’m in Europe, maybe in the US it’s different?

I’m more talking global purchases. Just the email will probs be ok but if you purchase using that email and a vpn it raises flags.

This has happened exactly once to me, and it was the VPN, and not the email address.

Paid plan folks can also make use of simplelogin.io

Proton Mail just has 5 gigs for the free version. Doesn’t seem like it’s enough for me to switch to it long term.

They also expand your storage every year, so it’s not like it’s stuck there forever. For reference, I’ve been on Proton for about 3 years now (paid plan) and I have a data storage cap of 540GB and I’ve never had to buy more. Also, I all my emails so far only consume 340MB - so even on the free plan I’d still have years to go before I reached even 5GB.

(Also, I’ll admit I don’t email much.)

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What's a good alternative to Gmail?

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