Who of you uses one of the above services, what do you think of it?
Fastmail is great but it’s a totally different market /use case, you wouldn’t go with them if you’re privacy oriented. They’re better than Google in that sense but you’d go with Proton if you’re looking for privacy features.
Also keep in mind Fastmail is based in Australia and their government tends to be anti-privacy with the laws that get passed there.
AU laws are worse than US laws, in fact, the US gets AU to do things for them that would otherwise be illegal if performed by US agents
Proton Mail is great. Can’t compare to fastmail because I’ve never used it. But I enjoy being a paying customer instead of an advertising target and I use every product in their suite. Happy to answer more specific questions
I really like Proton.
I use both, bit Proton is more fearute rich. Never mind the fact that this is the first company I’ve seen that lowers it’s prices because they are making good money. That alone is worth a shot.
I’ve used Fastmail with a custom domain for a few years now… (5+?) and have been really happy with it. I wish it was a bit cheaper (or had a better family plan), but it works well with my terminal email client (mutt).
The web client is pretty quick and I use the calendar there all the time. Fastmail supports all the normal standards such as CalDAV, so you can use it with third party applications.
I think that any e-mail service that doesn’t provide IMAP/SMTP directly to their servers (like Proton Mail) and uses custom protocols is yet another attempt at vendor lock-in and nobody should use it.
What Proton is doing is pushing for vendor lock-in at any possible point so you’re stuck with what they deem acceptable because it’s easier for them to build a service this way and makes more sense from a business / customer retention perspective.
I always read about people complaining when others use Google or Microsoft for e-mail around here and the self-hosting community. At least if you’re in one of those providers you can access your e-mail through standard protocols like IMAP, POP3 and SMTP. How ironic it is to see privacy / freedom die hard fans suddenly going for a company that is far less open than the big providers… just because of marketing. :)
Proton is just a company that wants to make money and found out there was a niche of people who would buy into everything that says “encryption” and “privacy” no matter what the cost. They’ve learnt how to weaponize “privacy” to push more and more vendor lock-in. Not even Apple does this.
What vendor lock-in are you talking about?
I can take my domain, customize DNS records and in a couple of minutes I am using a new provider. They also allow to export email content, which means I obviously don’t lose anything.
With a free email account, you are anyway locked-in as with every provider, because you are using their domain. You can set automatic forwarding in that case.
Vendor lock exists when you invest substantial amount of work to build tools around a specific platform (say, AWS), or where you have no way to easily take the data from one platform out and use something else to do the same thing (say, Meta).
The fact that you can’t use SMTP, which is a protocol that requires data on the server is not a vendor lock-in in any sense of the word. It’s a decision that depends on having that content e2e encrypted, because the two things are simy incompatible.
Also the code for all Proton clients and the bridge is open source, and the bridge is essentially a client that emulates being a server so that you can use your preferred tools to access the emails. Even in this scenario, there is no vendor lock and all it takes is changing the configuration of your tool from the local bridge address to whatever SMTP server you want to use elsewhere.
Can you please describe in which way you are actually locked-in, to show that you have a clue about what the word means?
The fact that you can’t use SMTP, which is a protocol that requires data on the server is not a vendor lock-in in any sense of the word. It’s a decision that depends on having that content e2e encrypted, because the two things are simy incompatible.
No, they aren’t. There are lots of ways to do e2e encryption on e-mail over SMTP (OpenPGP, S/MIME etc.). SMTP itself also supports TLS for secure server-to-server communications (or server-to-client in submission contexts) as well as header minimization options to prevent metadata leakage. And Proton decided NOT to use any of those proven solutions and go for some obscure propriety thing instead because it fits their business better and makes development faster.
Also the code for all Proton clients and the bridge is open source, and the bridge is essentially a client that emulates
The bridge exists yet, you can only run in certain devices AND it only exists until they allow it to exist. You don’t know if there are rate limits on the bridge usage and other small details that may restrict your ability to move large amounts of email around.
They also allow to export email content, which means I obviously don’t lose anything.
Decent providers will give you an export option that will export all your e-mail using industry standard formats such as mbox and maildir. Do you know what Proton does? They provide you a convoluted mess of EML files + metadata as JSON files that you can’t import to another service without some data loss. Same goes for Contacts and Calendars.
E-mail, contacts, calendars, notes and whatnot is one of the few truly open and truly interoperable solutions we still have nowadays. Protocols like IMAP, POP3, SMTP, WebDAV, CardDAV, CalDAV make it so you can have e-mail at any provider, talk to people from other providers and use any client application you would like - not like the bullshit that Whatsapp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal and others that that you can only communicate with people using the same provider.
Proton mail is so closed that you can’t even sync your Proton mail contacts / calendars with iOS or Android - you can only use their closed source mail client to access that data or the webui. Not even Apple, the most anti-competitive and closed company in the world, holds your contacts and calendars hostage - they allow you to sync with ANY CardDAV and CalDAV server and their iCloud service also supports those protocols so you can use it any 3rd party client.
Proton doesn’t respect the open internet by not basing their services on those protocols and then they feed miss-information (like the thing about e2e encryption being impossible on SMTP) and by using it you’re just contributing to a less open Internet.
im not involved in this discussion really but i wanna add a couple things.
Proton is the only e2ee email provider that uses PGP interoperability, because they are trying to be more open, and also means that anyone can do e2ee with you not just other proton accounts. this is different from skiff, tuta, etc
also their export tool allows mbox, contrary to what you said.
also their export tool allows mbox, contrary to what you said.
From their own documentation:
Proton Mail Export Tool (…) allows you to export all your emails as EML files, and their metadata as JSON files.
you haven’t used the tool. but ok lol.
I’m a proton unlimited subscriber and it’s great. I love the email aliasing from simplelogin, protonvpn, drive storage, calendar, etc. well worth it imo. I love the company.
I use Proton, business tier. My only gripe is that addresses can’t be deleted without contacting support, or so I’ve read. I can’t find a delete button on any of my addresses, but can find the button to buy more address slots.
Using custom domains and a catch-all pointing to certain labels is my workaround.
You aren’t missing anything. You can’t delete them yourself, but, you can pause them. For now, for me, the pause works just as well because if/when any of my email addys starts getting ridiculous spam I’ll just pause it. I run a business off one of my accounts and I don’t want any of the emails I’ve handed out to not reach me so I am fine nit being able to delete (for now). I’ve just been extra careful to choose addresses that I don’t feel a need to delete.
