Hacker News Reader

Comment by dempedempe | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to see that Fastmail is not listed as a Gmail alternative. I've tried it, Protonmail, and Zoho as replacements. IMO, Fastmail has the simplest interface and best suite of tools. I had trouble setting up an alias with Protonmail. Fastmail provides very clear instructions for this right on the app. Zoho was cool in that it lets you use a custom alias for free, but it just felt too cluttered.

I also remember reading somewhere on HN that the creators of Protonmail have some dubious ties (and work in the same office) to a shady European data collection agency. Can't find the link atm.

View on HN

Fastmail is great, but as this list is supposed to be "privacy focused", Fastmail (company from Australia) is not a good alternative. https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...

Yandex might be a niche choice, if your main worry is "5/9 Eyes". Free, even to bring your own domain.

Yandex is Russian so will certainly keep you out of the way of the five eyes, provided you ensure decent encryption between you and their systems.

Russia is also famous for its cadre of crack Salisbury cathedral appreciators.

Some of what I want to send and receive by email might be considered illegal in Russia, so that's a hard no. I don't trust Russia's legal system to interpret the law in my favor. Does, for example, this email receipt for a book about a bi football player figuring out his sexuality count as propaganda? I wouldn't risk it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_gay_propaganda_law

Do you fear the Russian legal system though? Are you really doing anything so controversial that you’d motivate Russian Intelligence to care about a foreigner?

My concern is automated systems. YouTube videos get demonetized and cloud storage gets shut down because of automated copyright enforcement. They shut channels down and delete videos for the kinds of things I worry about, too.

This was not always the case. It might not be the case now that Russian companies scan for this stuff, but why risk it?

I'd be more concerned about being blackmailed by Russian intelligence services.

To what end? Seems like a lot of work for a tiny return relative to the size of their Government.

Not blackmail in the sense of "give us money". Think more "do us a favor".

"hey let us log into your digital ocean instance every once in a while. we'll even reimburse you for the VMs..."

Yandex is a nice escape from the western law enforcement if that's a threat to one.

The "E" in email is for Evidence.

It doesn't matter what service you use. No email is private, I don't care who they are.

p.s. - I'm a paid fastmail user.

You're right. Even if the email contents are encrypted, there is still the metadata.

I wonder if the Monero Message System is still being developed. It would solve the metadata problem.

Privacy from whom though? I’d contend that more than 99% of people reading this would, in all honesty, consider their adversaries to be non-state actors—marketers, hackers and identity thieves. For the less than 1% of us for whom their adversary is a state actor, I would contend that any implementation of SMTP is non-viable, period.

If you’re sufficiently paranoid, the only thing you can say for certain is that there isn’t much you can truly trust.

This is the key. Model your threat and act accordingly.

There's (mostly) no reason for Joe Bloggs to want to protect themselves from a well funded state actor but they may want to prevent themselves being locked out of Google services because some bot triggered a threshold.

Reporting on Australia's encryption laws is wildly inaccurate. For one, it does not allow authorities to compel companies or individuals to introduce an encryption backdoor or otherwise weaken encryption. The law very explicitly addresses this issue in section 317ZG, which forbids any kind of "systematic weakness" or "systematic vulnerability" and very explicitly states that weakening encryption is included in those definitions.

What's permitted is to build something that targets a particular person in such a way that it cannot possibly affect another person's security.

The example I use (though IANAL) is that a request to backdoor WhatsApp's encryption would not be permitted under the law. However I think that pushing an update that checks for a particular person's hard-coded phone number and forwards messages to law enforcement would be permitted.

The law in question: http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997214...

> I also remember reading somewhere on HN that the creators of Protonmail have some dubious ties

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21680293

Interestingly, u/protonmail's contributions is littered with comments trying to defend ProtonVPN against such allegations here on HN. I guess, user paranoia is the bane of privacy-as-a-service upstarts.

Re: Zoho:

As a Zoho user myself, I must point out that though India isn't 5 eyes or 9 eyes, it has some of the most restrictive laws in terms of Internet freedom and is a surveillance state.

Ref: https://internetfreedom.in/

In response to your linked (unsourced) post:

> This is not correct as far as Proton is concerned and easily verifiable. ProtonVPN is 100% owned by Proton Technologies AG (Switzerland) which also develops ProtonMail and is not affiliated or owned by any other company.

I've been using mailbox.org for over a year. Very happy with the mail service - no reliability issues, supports Active Sync, built in support for PGP, works great with my own domain. They also accept bitcoin for payment. Their cloud storage uses OX Drive, but the sync clients range from bad to awful. I found the Windows client slow, the Android client awful and there isn't a Linux client.

I migrated to a self-hosted Nextcloud, which I love - wonderful client software and very flexible customizable. I didn't have any difficulties setting it up, it all seems very polished and quite mature.

I have found nothing that comes close to replacing Google Maps yet, but I hope that OSM has a bright future.

Switched to Fastmail last year and I'm extremely happy with it. Best web interface and I can use the desktop clients I like, Google is actively working against this.

Another great thing is I'm no longer worried of suddenly losing access to my mail account, because an algorithm deems me not worthy for using a "wrong" browser, setting etc. and we all know that you can't talk to real people at Google so the account will be lost forever.

I resisted switching to Fastmail for a long time because I believed Google's spam filtering was best-in-class.

The reality is, for my accounts, I get more spam in gmail than in FastMail.

I've had countless false positives from Google's spam filter - everything from train tickets to cinema tickets to invitations to parties have been swallowed by it.

About 1 out of 15/20 emails that get flagged are legit. Most are newsletters I signed up to and don't particularly care about, but they're still not spam.

Gmail sends “featured” spam.

I am a very happy Fastmail customer. The one thing I wish for is more feature parity with Google Calendar, such as setting daily agenda emails.

However, I’ve found Fastmail search, spam filtering and user interfaces to be great, on par or better than Google for all my needs.

One aspect of poorer performance with Fastmail has been boot up time on mobile though. The iOS app doesn’t appear to cache anything offline, so without a connection you can’t do anything, and if the connection is slow, app startup and display of mail hangs while waiting for whatever initial web requests the app makes to complete.

Nonetheless, I’m very happy with the purchase.

Is the iOS app necessary/worthwhile? I’ve never thought to use it, just the standard mail app, which does cache.

The Fastmail app is very nice, but not required

Using Apple’s iOS apps will give you better integration with the whole Apple ecosystem, Fastmail‘s app has better integration with a few of their specific features

The biggest advantage of using Fastmail’s app is that searching emails is MUCH faster and flexible

I normally use the iOS Mail app to connect to Fastmail. This allows me to use the very useful VIP “inbox” to filter email. But, the Fastmail web interface also works great in iPhone Safari and provides their search facility.

On my Air or Linux workstations, I always use the Fastmail web interface, it’s better than a mail app, unless I’m doing something specialized - then it’s Mutt or even Gnus.

You can be logged into Fastmail from several computers simultaneously and processing email. It’s seamless, there is never a conflict. I believe they use Cyrus IMAP.

I cut Google from most of my life years ago, and switched mail to MXRoute.com instead. I have nothing but great things to say about them.

Grabbed a special offer back then, 10 years/XX GB for something like $99 total, including all the domains i can think off and all the users i want. Compared to what was available at the time it was super cheap, and it has had like 99% uptime since.

Latest offering, free of charge, is a Nextcloud account for user/calendar/notes syncing.

I didn't see their nextcloud offering on their site.

I also had to dig around to see where they're based. According to: https://mxroute.com/policy/

> "MXroute LLC is a Limited Liability Corporation in the state of Texas. All services provided by MXroute may be used for lawful purposes only. "

Not a dealbreaker to me, as I am a native Texan by birth, but might be an issue to someone looking to avoid 5-Eyes.

The Nextcloud instance(s) runs at https://cloud.mxroute.com/login

> Not a dealbreaker to me, as I am a native Texan by birth, but might be an issue to someone looking to avoid 5-Eyes.

It's email. Any pretense of avoiding 5/9 eyes is already moot. Any conversation has at least 2 participants, and since 50+ percent of the world population runs on some kind of hosted email (Gmail/Outlook/Yahoo/whatever), anything you send has a high probability of passing through 5/9 eyes anyway. It doesn't make much of a difference if you look through the "from:" or "to:" headers.

The only way to be safe from 5 eyes is encrypting all the contents in your mailbox, either through GnuPG or using Protonmail/Tutanota.

I am using https://posted.de. Hosted in Germany on green energy and full transparency about government Access requests: https://posteo.de/en/site/transparency_report

There's a typo in your first url, it should probably be https://posteo.de

I don’t get the part on custom alias for free?

Only a con for Zoho email is IMAP is no longer a free option, but we do lots of subscription for clients which is quite smooth so far.

> I also remember reading somewhere on HN that the creators of Protonmail have some dubious ties (and work in the same office) to a shady European data collection agency. Can't find the link atm.

Fastmail too is insecure by being run out of Australia - a strident member of the 5 eyes.

Doesn't FastMail serve Google Ads?

From Wiki:

"In newer versions, the user was allowed a choice of generic graphical banners or text-based targeted advertisements provided by Google based upon the page being viewed. "

No, that's Opera, which doesn't have anything to do with them anymore. FastMail has no ads.

No, they don’t serve any ads.

Using an email alias could be also a solution to protect your email as it a)allows you to use a different email address for each website [1]. b)you can choose whatever email provider you want (Protonmail, Tutanota, Fastmail, etc).

[1] https://simplelogin.io/blog/an-email-for-each-website/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com