Know any good Email alternatives?

I'm trying to move away from Gmail and whatever MS is trying to do with their Hotmail/Outlook/Live email service, I'm just tired of their BS.

I heard ProntoMail is secure and pretty good, anybody using Thunderbird how that's working out for you.

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Still haven't found negatives from mailbox

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I use proton mail, just the web-client though. I like it a lot though.

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I use Fastmail myself. It's not open-source, but is located in Australia and has a well written privacy policy: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html

But I hear ProtonMail is very good as well.

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Been using protonmail since beta, haven't had any complaints. I would not say its the most "reliable" being that they get targeted for DDOS attacks the biggest being last year that actually took them down for a few days iirc. But they haven't been taken down since and their security seems pretty good now. So I'm honestly a happy customer.

How often are those DDOS attacks?

This is the first time I've heard of Fastmail

Hard to say. Kind of a non-issue now, since they beefed up their security since the big one. That being said they are kind of a big target for attacks, like anything that is touted to be "anonymous".

I've been looking for some alternatives as well, and have seen this one come up and get recommended a few times:
www.zoho.com
I haven't started using it myself yet. From looking through documentation and policies, I'd say it's probably not as secure and private as some of the other options already mentioned. But, that said, it doesn't seem too bad in comparison to gmail and whatnot. It's also free with extra for personal use, so the price is a bit better than other options.

I've actually been wrestling with this question myself of late. I've had a protonmail account for a while and after poking it with a stick I decided to upgrade to the paid version earlier today. I'm still in the process of transitioning.

You can't use a mail client like Thunderbird, which put me off for a long time. Their UI is pretty good though and if i'm being objective labels and filters might be the better option for organising mail. They are supposedly working on IMAP but I don't know what the eta is.

They can also handle mail for any domain you have which might be handy. I would recommend perusing their support pages, a lot of good info hidden in there!

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Hey, I use Protonmail and it is secure but there are some problems that I will disclose here from my own experience:

  1. Non-paying users only get 500MB of space (still a lot of space.)
  2. The email is web based only.
  3. Not all emails are encrypted, and you cannot change your signature as a non-paying user.
  4. You don't know for sure what code is being run on the website, so you have to trust Protonmail.
  5. In terms of 2-Step-Auth options, nothing is supported other than Oath, still good unless you want to use a specific service like Duo Security.

These aren't necessarily big issues, just thought you should know, the email itself is actually pretty good. The interface is good too.

Of course it would be more secure and practical to use your own email server, however you would also be exposing your server to the internet making new security risks arise. I personally suggest using Gmail with your own email client paired with something like GPG or whatever you want, and use a good Messaging app or service to chat to friends if your conversations are very private.

Protonmail is a good option but I would only recommend it IF you want a secure email and you have a backup email like Gmail or Outlook to use for many services and what not. Protonmail is good, but I have trust issues too, I personally don't trust Protonmail's servers to resist a large DDOS attack, and would probably be the target of future government-sponsored attacks.

This might be a mouthfull. But I hope you understand what I'm saying. Hope this helps man! :D

(TBH encrypted and secure chat platforms are more secure than emails IMHO)

I use protonmail, have done for the better part of a year now. It works just fine, I just want a secure email that is simple to use. Sure, proton probably isn't the most secure provider in the world, but I trust them a hell of a lot more then google.

Regards Protonmail and other services I think the real question is what are you trying to achieve? Gmail seems to be basically bombproof in terms of infrastructure but comes with the cost of google presumably hoovering up all the data. I assume privacy is the goal here and privacy is more than just messaging friends.

It may be worth doing something akin to a 'taxonomy' (for lack of a better term) of your web presence and then decide on the right response. Not all services are worth protecting others are; if you use social media everything is basically in the open, so does it mater that google can read your facebook related emails? That's not a rhetorical question, it's for the user to decide for themselves. You may find that you only really want alternative email for a few key things.

At the end of the day Protonmail is probably about as secure at the point of storage as you will get, anything in your inbox is encrypted and only the user holds the key (subject lines are not encrypted). Someone could still recover your mail from a sender/receiver's inbox/outbox on whatever non-encrypted service they are using, but once it enters your inbox it is encrypted.

messages in your ProtonMail inbox is stored end-to-end encrypted. This means we cannot read any of your messages or hand them over to third parties. This includes messages sent to you by non-ProtonMail users, although keep in mind if an email is sent to you from Gmail, Gmail likely retains a copy of that message as well.

To clarify what is/isn't encrypted take a look here

Protonmail is probably of more interest to people that need to communicate securely and genuinely have something to hide (political dissidents etc.) but knowing someone can't simply copy and read your inbox is reassuring in a world of high profile hacks. Given some of the shortcomings others have listed Protonmail isn't totally ideal for everyday use but that is the cost of the privacy they offer. If you just want to avoid google peeking at your mail there are many non-free services that would likely suffice.

Another satisfied ProtonMail user,
Although sometimes my email end up in the spam section of gmail users.

I also use protonmail. I use the paid plan with custom domain addresses. It is web and mobile-app only. This is why they claim it is more secure than the typical client model.

https://www.privacytools.io/

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They recently created a closed beta for IMAP/SMTP for a small number of Protonmail Plus users. They're calling it Protonmail Bridge. It's supposed to start mid-January. I might expect that it will be a publicly available feature this summer or later.

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Posteo is pretty good as well. But it's paid service. 1 euro per month.

For a service, you're on your own, but as a client TBird is as solid as you can get. I use it for all my emails including gmail. It's simple, reasonably feature rich, conforms to the standards, is easy to set up and is free.
I've never had to use Outlook, Express or any of the other "mainstream" clients. For me it was a lateral move from Eudora when Qualcomm abandoned it.

Yeah, I've heard the news the other day, going to watching closely on how they bounce back.