DeGoogle Yourself

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A community for those that would like to get away from Google.

Here you may post anything related to DeGoogling, why we should do it or good software alternatives!

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Alternative to Gmail as a backup email address? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have degoogled myself when it comes to email, running self-hosted email & calendar (not my own server). Did it two years ago, and up to now it has worked very well. I don't miss anything from Gmail and have all the features it offered, plus some extra ones (like deleting email attachments via an email client – Gmail never deleted them, just archived them).

It's good, however, always to have a backup email address that's not connected with your hosting service. Up to now I've been using Gmail for that, but in view of recent developments, I just want to ditch the whole Google business.

I've seen that many people use Protonmail for this, and that's what I'm considering. I'd like to hear about more possibilities and experiences though. Maybe there's another provider that's friendlier or more consumer/internet-freedom oriented?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Proton and tutanota are good privacy options privacy guides has a good writeup. https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I actually didn't like Tutanota. They've got good goals and the service itself was fine, but being limited to only using their clients was kind of a bummer. I get why they've got that restriction, but it still annoys me to have yet another app to check.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, 100%. It's only reasonable if you want their full encrypted at rest design model. Every other service, including proton, keeps the metadata unencrypted: to,from,subject. This is done to make searching more manageable, but metadata is the prize.

Having used the tutanots app for a few years, it's grown on me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Email is a pretty insecure protocol as it is. From what I am aware, you can only get a certain level of security/privacy when sending cross domain emails, so we cannot get the same level of privacy as we would with Matrix or Signal. It's getting the best security you can with a medium we and the world are unfortunately dependent on.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Agreed. We are talking only about the security of the email archive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Partly off-topic: is that true even when one uses PGP? Email security and encryption is something I know very little about, unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you for the heads-up about the client restrictions!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I second this

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for the extra link! Interesting guides there even besides email.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's a great resource. I highly recommend it.