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Comment by aryonoco | Hacker News Reader

Moved from Proton to Fastmail a couple of years ago and couldn’t be happier.

I also made this switch a year ago, in part because I'm Australian and so is Fastmail. I miss some of the Proton bells and whistles, and my visionary plan had some great inclusions, but Fastmail is great. I just use the web app on my graphene phone and it works fine

>because I'm Australian and so is Fastmail.

That seems like the worst reason to use a product. If I had the funds for a non free mail host, I would choose one thats not going to be easy to target with a TCN or TAN.

Mail just isn’t something that’s built in a way that it can be a private service. I think most people should choose a provider based on price and features.

Yes, it’s nice that if everyone you know uses proton then you can send end to end encrypted emails with zero friction. But I consider that more of a side feature rather than a reason to buy it.

Purely Mail is a nice provider in that regard. $10 a year!

I do like FastMail a lot, though.

Proton mostly makes sense if you’re going to use the entire suite, which helps spread the cost and make it a good value.

>Mail just isn’t something that’s built in a way that it can be a private service.

No but theres a lot of daylight between "There might be intermediaries" and "The australian government can verbally request secret adjustments to this companies software"

I fail to see how that matters to the end consumer specifically in the context of an email product. It’s still ultimately a service dealing with plain text data that’s moving between providers in ways you can’t control very well to begin with.

100% of your email is read by someone else. You don’t send private information over email or store it in an email server.

Sure, I wouldn’t personally be buying an end to end encrypted drive service from an Australian company.

I mean, the government could demand an authentication backdoor that's located by non government entities.

Or any of a million things.

The Australian government needs to be treated as an absolute supply chain risk.

Again, a backdoor to data you’re already sending and receiving to basically random strangers on random servers who have an instant ability to forward that information along to anyone.

Maybe so, but I just assume anything I write is being read by multiple different parties anyway. I use Signal too, but I don't trust that either. Face-to-face communication (inside my portable lead chamber) is the way to go

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