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Comment by sickofparadox | Hacker News Reader

What do you use for an alternative as a free-to-open privacy focused email provider?

tutanota is great. I've been a happy, paying customer for about a year now.

The service is solid, but there are a lot of caveats and compromises they make to achieve their differentiating features. For one thing, the encryption means you can only use their frontend/app to access your email. Unfortunately the app doesn't get notifications reliably, search is utterly broken, and the app can't show the subject line in toasts for security reasons, so I never know if an email needs to be read now or whenever's convenient.

You also need to be on the paying tier for a usable product. I evaluated a number of options when I was trying to decide where to park my domain long term. Cue an incident at a border crossing where immigration wanted to see a hotel booking that search insisted didn't exist. Turns out the booking email was a few days outside the free tier search window, and that limitation wasn't obvious in the pressure of an immigration queue. Felt like I had been gaslit once I realized.

Last I checked, Proton also didn't allow third party tools to access mail. Has that changed?

Proton Mail Bridge lets you use a third party email client.

https://proton.me/mail/bridge

https://proton.me/blog/thunderbird-outlook-encrypted-email

Awesome, thanks. Was looking to pay for a provider, and this puts Proton back in the running.

Proton offers an IMAP/SMTP bridge so that generic tools can do whatever they want.

This makes backing up emails trivial.

Tutanota still doesn't have an easy way to export all emails.

I don't understand your point about it being unusable as a free user.

I only upgraded to a paid tier about a year ago, before that I was using for about one and a half years for free with 0 issues.

Notifications never arrive late (at least on the IOS app)

Maybe it's because I'm not a heavy E-mail "Power user", but I see most of these as non-issues (this depends on your use case, of course)

Another huge pro for me, as a resident of Germany, the data stays in Germany and is protected under our strong data security laws.

I do have to agree, the search was kind of sucky for a while. But imo it's improved a lot is also pretty useable now.

There isn't one unless you run it yourself. It simply doesn't exist. Email is never private unless you put your own encryption layer on it, which both sides must support, at which point you're probably better off using an E2E solution.

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