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Comment by AndroTux | Hacker News Reader

A little bit off-topic, but regarding this (sarcastic) quote:

> Europeans can’t do web and mail. There is absolutely no provider here who can do such complicated tasks.

We really can't, though. Because it's not just web and mail, it's Cloudflare and Google Workspace. There just are no EU alternatives for this. There just aren't. You can do parts of it, of course, but if you're running a business, you can't waste endless resources on building your own internal Cloudflare and Google Workspace alternative.

This is a real problem and I wish there were more real alternatives to services like these. Even Proton, which arguably replaces parts of Google Workspace, isn't even EU-based.

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There is Nextcloud which is not only eu-based but open source as well. You choose what parts you run but it competes with most of workspace and office 365 (everything but the arguably obscure stuff*). I use all three (g-workspace, office 365 and nextcloud) and I strongly prefer nextcloud excluding my private preference of open source - even more so from an administrative perspective (fuck the workspace admin pages, they causes me so much trouble)

Cloudflare I don't know if there are good competitors by my own experience, but some are listed here: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/cloudflare

*except email-server which although easy to add on trough stalwart or external email provider is technically not part of the nextcloud ecosystem (webmail is however)

I don't know what you're smoking if you prefer Nextcloud over Google Workspace from an admin point of view, but hey, good for you.

But no, Nextcloud is not comparable to Google Workspace. Not as a user (their office web implementation is spotty at best, constantly crashes and disconnects; their calendar, meeting and chat apps are barebones; the clients regularly corrupt files or have issues syncing, etc.), and definitely not as an administrator: You have to constantly deal with manually updating the instance, re-enabling "incompatible" apps for some reason, deal with the updater taking 4 hours to download the zip file because their servers are overloaded again, updating the database server or PHP version because it will soon no longer be supported, etc. How is that better than having to navigate the Google Workspace admin interface every few months?

Proton is Swiss. That’s part of the CEE. It’s like Norway, EU-adjacent. They are part of a lot of the agreements and their laws track the EU closely where it matters. It makes sense to include in a lot of discussions surrounding sovereignty.

> you can't waste endless resources on building your own internal Cloudflare

The EU has multiple level 1 network operators that would be ideally positioned to build an alternative to Cloudfare if it was truly required. It’s not like they start from zero.

And then the Proton CEO does things like this, which kind of lets me doubt how aligned they actually are with protecting user data: https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...

I'm not sure I follow?

because the CEO of a company based on a different continent got suckered into believing Trump's campaign promises, which were mostly pretty decent... you're now doubting wherever the company he's the CEO of actually wants to monitor it's users?

I mean it was obvious that Trumps administration was gonna be spicy to say the least - but their messaging was most definitely way closer aligned to the working man vs the campaign Harrises team cooked up.

I wouldn't fault him at all, he likely just watched a Trump clip and posted his comment without any deeper meaning.

He definitely shouldn't have made that comment, but everyone makes the occasional not particularly well thought out statement... And he's a human too - and self aware enough to have other people/his employees overrule whatever he personally wants to say.

I'm not a proton user myself though. I believe the clients are the only parts that are open source, and a closed source backend thats security oriented is an oxymoron as far as I'm concerned. But I'm not particularly informed about proton either, so ymmv.

If a CEO of a company like Proton is that gullible that he falls for someone like Trump (IN 2025!), I have even less hope for my data being in secure hands.

> and a closed source backend thats security oriented is an oxymoron as far as I'm concerned.

Exactly. You're basically just trusting that this guy will always make the right decisions. I remember being in the same boat with Google. Don't be evil and all that.

https://www.icewarp.com/ is EU-based (mostly Czech Republic)

Thanks for showing. Will take a closer loo, as this might help me de-Boogle and de-Microsoft my freelance business.

Thanks a ton.

Wow, that looks surprisingly interesting. How come I have never heard of them before, given that they apparently are around for more than 20 years? Have you used their services? Are they any good?

There's decent companies doing web and mail here. Most of them don't have a global CDN but for digital sovereignty that's not really an issue. Putting servers in other jurisdictions means they are vulnerable to local laws.

And also, you have to start somewhere. And the American companies often employ business practices we frown on here. Like Google datamining their users. Microsoft linking their services together and abusing their market position. Meta pirating to train their AIs.

Without those things the services will be more expensive, but they'll also be more honourable. I see a lot of people really defeatist these days "why care about privacy because you have none anyway" and this is mostly because of American companies.

https://mailbox.org is hosted entirely in Germany and, at least in my experience, has been absolutely rock solid. It's also very affordable for private use. No Google, no AWS, no Cloudflare. (I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer.)

++1

yes, same for GMX

I came across https://tuta.com/ which looks interesting.

Yeah, I'll use Tuta if I want an email service that I can't use IMAP with, and then I still have to find a replacement for the 95% of other services Google Workplace offers.

I use Tuta, quite happy with it. The app is available on F-Droid, and I can sync contacts to my phone, which is very convenient.

Sure, it does not have everything Google has, but I mainly need Mail and Calendar, and for this it’s great. They are also working on a Drive.

https://soverin.com/ ?

well, im quite good with my GMX account? :-))

Doesnt this count?

Sure, not file & coop workspace etc., but it works quite well for me for more than 25 years

It's not a matter of technical limitations, it's EU regulation and laws that make it so expensive to run that the margins are not enough.

Large actors can do it because they have other revenue sources, and they have resources to deal with the legal matters.

I am not saying regulations are bad, they are not, but every paragraph takes a small piece of the cake. And the cake is not infinite, so at a certain point people will go away because "I earn more on doing something else".

>t's EU regulation and laws that make it so expensive to run that the margins are not enough.

Not exactly. The EU regional market fragmentation and domestic protectionism of each country is a way bigger nerf to scaling tech companies domestically.

That's why all EU tech unirons aim straight for the US to sell their products/services there first, and only once they reach escape velocity there, then open themselves to EU customers.

the moment Google launched Gmail with free 1GB inbox many years ago the groupware suite market effectively died, the only other real player is Microsoft.

and likely Google/MSFT will deploy a copy here ran without direct interference from the US, and it'll probably chug along until the first really big lawful intercept disagreement (but there are a bunch of "mutual legal assistance treaties" so it'll take a while, and by then AI will eat us for paperclip NFTs anyway)

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