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Comment by dividedbyzero | Hacker News Reader

I'm still looking for an alternative e-mail provider that is more privacy-conscious than Google, still works with ordinary IMAP and is based in the EU so I get to actually benefit from EU data protection. Haven't found one that ticks all boxes yet, but going with a US company doesn't appear to change much as I'm not a US citizen and hence fair game once my data is on US servers and I guess it inevitably will end up there, and encryption schemes that won't work with IMAP are too cumbersome (I tried); ideally they also have contacts and calendar that work with the iOS/macOS apps. Would love to de-google at least email on the domain I own but it's not as easy as I'd expected.

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What about https://mailbox.org/? I

I tried them in 2019, they did (and do, I guess) check all my boxes but it seemed they were moving fast and breaking stuff and IMAP/SMTP in Apple Mail was one of the broken things. Docs were very much out of date, IMAP kept erroring out every few attempts and SMTP never worked at all (their support people couldn't help either IIRC). IMAP/SMTP is a basic requirement for a not-E2E-email provider so that didn't instill much trust. Are they doing better nowadays?

I've been using IMAP with mbsync and gnus for probably over a year now and I've not had a single issue with it. I'm not the most prolific emailer, mind you.

I've created a trial account and they really have tidied up that part of the experience, they offer a downloadable profile for macOS that will set up Apple Mail, that's really neat and something I haven't seen with other providers yet. Will give them an in-depth check, this looks promising.

FWIW, I'm a happy customer of https://mailbox.org for more than a year now. I know several other users who are also happy with them.

It's a no-frills, secure setup for a decent price. I definitely recommend mailbox.org.

I recently moved all emails on personal domains to Cloudflare Email Routing [1]. It works flawlessly and you can setup ProtonMail or whatever other email you want as your private address that everything gets forwarded to without having to reveal what the destination address is.

For sending email, I setup an SMTP relay via Amazon SES. If you verify your domain, you can send an email from any alias.

This combination works great!

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-routing-open-beta/

That's a lot of moving parts, I don't think I'm comfortable juggling cloud infrastructure across three vendors just for e-mail. Also, I guess being US corporations AWS and Cloudflare still have to hand over any data a US agency requests.

Regarding SES, beware they force a Message-ID header, preventing at least forwarding of mail without breaking threads. There are probably more gotchas to this I hadn't discovered.

Have a look at Opalstack [1]. They are a hosting platform for developers, and their tools include DNS hosting and email hosting. You can have your email hosted and routed in Germany. I use them for myself and about a dozen clients of mine.

[1] https://docs.opalstack.com/user-guide/email/

I'll add Migadu to the existing suggestions ;^)

Did not know them, will check them out!

Don't know which providers you have considered, but one that many around me use is posteo.de. Or gandi.net (based in France).

Posteo can't do custom domains (I mentioned near the end of my comment I own one that I'd like to keep using)

Will check out gandi.net though!

I know you said based in the EU and Fastmail are based in Australia I think, but they are great. Integrates easily with email, calendar, and contacts clients using imap/caldav/carddav.

What makes you consider google to be privacy conscious? Aren't they just scanning your emails 24/7 to profile you for advertising?

I'd recommend against Australian based - There are laws that state companies must be able to decrypt encrypted user data if required, and for a backdoor to be in place if they require access.

A "Data Disruption Warrant" allows them to add, copy, delete or modify your data. "Account Takeover Warrant" will remove your access to an account but still allow them full access

If I was going to send truly sensitive information I wouldn't use email anyway, or I would but with gpg encryption, so I'm not too worried about the fact that fastmail might allow some government agency access. What fastmail will offer is privacy from 3rd parties such as advertisers and data brokers.

There have been attempts by police where I live to exploit such setups as loopholes to request data from companies in foreign jurisdictions that they wouldn't be able to obtain from domestic ones, and since there is no "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine over here, such evidence has actually been admitted in court, or at the least used to enable parallel construction. Given that the Aussies are doubling down on their police state, I'd rather not expose myself to such shenanigans (and if my data ends up in some predictive policing data warehouse, I'd prefer if it was just one, not two).

As for advertisement surveillance, I'd have to take Fastmail's word, whereas with a domestic provider, there's the GDPR that is a lot harder to evade for them than for some Australian company.

> Fastmail are based in Australia

Like sibling said, doesn't Australia have a pretty bad track record with respect to data protection (especially data owned by foreigners?) If ease of use were the #1 priority I'd stick with Google, I've never had a single issue in over a decade with them.

> What makes you consider google to be privacy conscious?

I probably didn't make that clear enough, but I don't consider them that, hence why I'm looking for something more privacy-conscious than Google (ideally not just a little more but I'm willing to make some compromises if that means I can keep using iOS Mail and the like)

I don't think I suggested ease of use was the number 1 priority?

Who are you looking for privacy from? Unless you use gpg/pgp it doesn't matter who you are using for email hosting, a state actor will get in. (Btw, proton etc are all pointless unless you only ever plan to email fellow proton users)

So then we are left with privacy from commercial 3rd parties. And I trust fastmail to offer me that, given that their customers pay for the service, I don't think it is worth it for them to also sell my data.

I believe Disroot is out of the EU and offers free (donation based) email services: https://disroot.org

I wasn't aware of them, will check them out. Thanks for the pointer!

https://posteo.de/en

I think they don't support bringing my own domain for privacy reasons [1]; as I mentioned near the end of my comment, I own a domain that I'd like to keep using for email, I use Google Workspace for this and lots of people and companies have that address, so switching to @posteo.de would be a waste of a neat vanity domain and a huge hassle. I probably could build something using Cloudflare and AWS as a sibling of your comment mentioned, but that's a lot of moving parts I need to manage myself. I'd rather if email just worked and when it doesn't, there's support I can ping to have it fixed.

1: https://posteo.de/en/site/faq "Can I use Posteo with my own domain?"

Did you consider ProtonMail?

I think they don't have IMAP, only some kind of bridge application that won't work on mobile. I'm not willing two have two different email apps in parallel, so I guess they are out.

Try Posteo, privacy is at the center of their whole e-mail business.

zoho.eu is quite nice and a different entity than zoho.com

This is the first time I'm hearing this. Can you please elaborate? Thanks

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