cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/25445621
How did the transition go? Do you like the new service(s) so far?
I started testing out alternatives immediately after discovering his post. I understand they’re saying this was a mistake and was meant to have been posted from his official account and not the company account, but that is still a bit off putting to me. As others have mentioned, this also made me aware of how many eggs I have in this basket, and after trying out alternatives for a few days I made the full switch away from ProtonMail, Calendar and VPN to Tuta + Mullvad.
Unfortunately, my Unlimited plan renewed in November and customer service has stated they will not refund me for the remaining time, as 30 days has passed. Oh well, I can at least cancel my auto-renewal :)
I bought a year of unlimited in November but I have canceled and will be migrating when my year is up
What’s the deal with Lavabit these days? Are they good? I don’t keep up with things that well. Am old man.
I left and glad I did. It was a needed wake-up call. All-in-one is inherently risky. I’d rather support smaller, more focused products. If one doesn’t fit my needs down the line, it’s way easier to switch.
- Email: Tuta (meh, loading issues)
- Calendar: Tuta (don’t like, can’t handle recurring events)
- VPN: Mullvad (like)
- Drive: Tresorit (like)
- Passwords: already using Bitwarden (love)
My struggle is finding an alternative to nonesense email alias system proton provides. Tuta and everyone else seems ridiculously limited with aliases. Like, I’ll use my own custom domain idgaf, just gimme infinite aliases…
Based on my understanding, Tuta is better for aliases compared to Proton. Their alias limit doesn’t apply to custom domains, only the domains they own (tuta.com, tutamail.com, tuta.io, tutanota.com, tutanota.de, keemail.me)
If you have proton pass you can generate random or semi random aliases. I don’t believe there’s a limit to this. Good to know on the tuta side though.
Oh I see. That makes sense. I think Bitwarden can be hooked up to alias providers but I’ve never tried that myself
I hadn’t thought of that, might have to look into that. That would be great for new accounts. I basically only used proton pass to create aliases and stored it all in bitwarden anyway.
Same stack as me except KeePass for PW manager. I’ve actually been enjoying Tuta though. What issues are you having with recurring?
External calendars I’ve imported have a bunch of events on the wrong days. I reported the issue and here’s what they told me:
It seems like some events in your .ics file use advanced repetition rules which are not supported in the Tuta calendar yet. We are currently working on this to improve compatibility and hope to release them soon so the calendar should be imported correctly.
I know it’s a small development team, but it’s a little frustrating. A calendar service supporting only a subset of the ICS standard is silly in my opinion
Ah shoot. I guess that makes sense that it might not match 1:1 if it’s using some advanced recurrence rules. When I exported from Proton and imported to Tuta, I did it as a CSV and needed to modify the columns a bit to get it to import, but my recurring appointments seemed to have come over fine. They are fairly simple though.
I was hard considering it but if I do it then it would cost me way more.
Tuta ($3)+Simplelogin ($4)+Mullvad ($5) = $12
A proton unlimited plan costs $10. Also, when I was on a vpn plus plan, they upgraded me to unlimited so I’m only paying like $6.50 or something.
I used simplelogin before they got bought by proton and with it now being included in my subscription, it’s even cheaper. I could move to addy.io but that would mean I would have to go through all my accounts and change it to the new addy.io addresses. Huge PitA. I could use my own domain but I don’t wanna blacklist my own domain or for it to be so new that it’s blocked from signing up accounts.
That’s how they get ya
Plus mulvad doesn’t do port forwarding. Or it didn’t last time I used it.
No. I’m tired of making my life inconvenient the moment someone says something stupid.
I pulled the trigger and decided to leave. Not only because of the recent actions from Proton, but when I started looking for alternatives I quickly realized how deeply integrated I was into their eco system and how difficult it was to make the switch. That’s personally not something I like. I guess this goes back to the saying, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’.
I’m now a happy customer of:
- Mullvad for VPN
- Bitwarden as password manager
- Fastmail for email
- Ente for photos
- Yet to decide on cloud storage for files.
I know fastmail isn’t the perfect privacy option but works very well for me. They own all their own hardware and use encryption at rest. They help develop open standards such as Jmap to replace imap. . This, to me says a lot about the people behind the company and is something I appreciate.
For those looking for a more private email solution then Tuta is a great option too!
Best of luck out there folks 👍
Unless you’re somehow looking for tonnes of storage, I don’t think you need cloud services. I’ve set up just my 3 devices (phone laptop PC) to sync with each other using Syncthing. And that’s plenty of space for just personal stuff (including photos). And it’s so cheap (only the cost of the devices you’re already using, and no subscriptions). It’s something I wish most people did because of how prevalent Drive has become, even though it doesn’t seem like it’s necessary for a lot of use cases. You’re situation might be different though, just a suggestion.
I don’t think you need cloud services
I have 1TB of Tresorit in case my house burns down.
Makes sense if that’s something you’re worried about. I just meant that it seems to me like people immediately jump to cloud storage without even considering use cases and options. I wish I’d known about this setup that I’m using now a long time ago so I thought it’d be good to put the option out there.
Well Sync is not a backup, but I get what you mean. On top of that I do have my own Nas 😅 so using that with at least another separate offline ssd should be good enough.
No. Because changing email providers is a royal pain in the ass. Changed from Google to Ctemplar and from that to proton a year later after ctemplar went down.
I am not going to use smaller email providers because of that experience, and proton still seems to be the best of both worlds.
I absolutely hate that i am supporting a CEO like that with my money but I’m not in the mood to migrate anytime soon. Took me more than a whole weekend last time.It’s worth noting Proton’s email export tool (marketed as backup & restore) is pretty decent. This Python script can sort them by folders & labels too
Yes, I canceled my Ultimate account. Andy can believe whatever he wants in private, but publicly stepping outside of non-partisan policy advocacy at this exact moment in time was a red flag, doubly so because he espoused his personal politics through an official business account in his response to the Reddit thread.
Email/calendar went to Tuta, AirVPN for VPN, BitWarden for passwords. Everything is encouragingly smooth so far.
Fair warning: Tuta’s email import is very new and only available on the more expensive tier at the moment (not sure if that’s permanent). I didn’t have any problems, but there were some issues a few weeks ago.
I do think people are over-reacting to Andy’s words and assigning him political views he didn’t express. He didn’t endorse Trump or the Republican party at large, and definitely didn’t “go full MAGA” or express Nazi sympathies. His statements about Democrats I partially agree with and partially disagree. His remarks about the priorities and actions of Republicans, though, were pure tailpipe-huffing fantasy. Being able to say these absurd things in public–under an official business account no less–shows poor judgement and implies he might believe other absurd things he isn’t willing to say publicly.
Another factor in my decision: Proton’s privacy policy specifies they can modify the policy at any time with no notification to users, and deems continued use of the services as agreement to the updated terms. The updated terms they didn’t notify you about.
That being said, no service provider is perfect. I don’t think Proton stores enough data to really be a concern if they turned over everything they have. But this whole thing is based on trust. Even with their clients being open-source software, you’re trusting that they always serve the same browser scripts that they published. You trust that the password you provide at key generation or login isn’t ever passed back to their servers. You trust that they don’t keep unencrypted copies of your emails, files, or VPN activity. You trust that they aren’t going to modify their privacy policy and quietly undo protections you thought you had.
The way Andy responded was enough to question my trust in the company with him at the helm. I didn’t leave as a heavy rebuke, just as a “do better”. There are plenty of other companies which provide equivalent services. That’s the risk companies take when a major part of their market is ideological people: if you chafe their ideology they’re more likely to put the effort into leaving.
No, I’ve not switched. While I disagree with his comments, that does not make me switch.
I am fine with using services provided by companies whose employees or leaders I don’t 100% agree with all the time.
I don’t like his comments, but honestly… I haven’t had the energy or time.
When I have one, I lack the other.
Do I want to? Yes, in a sense. I have an enterprise grade server I could self-host a lot of services on, and it sounds like a fun project… but getting that all done? A task. Getting cooling, noise reduction (fucker is LOUD), and such installed? A bigger task that takes more money than I have available right now. All that jazz.
I highly-valued the cohesion and simplicity of having a suite of tools provided by a single vendor and all on a single bill, despite how often this turns into a vendor-lock-in strategy
Proton was part of my attempt to de-Google, precisely because it offered email (with custom CNAMEs), calendar, and storage, and because they open-sourced their clients and tools
Despite the UX and feature set being quite bare, I was okay with justifying this with the added privacy (which was a nice-to-have but not a deal-breaker for me)
It seems like all the alternatives are either less open-source, have even fewer features, are even less cohesive (indeed, I’d have to select entirely separate solutions and give up all integrations) or seem to have even fewer resources for development and project sustainability
I still like and trust Proton and won’t be switching. They’ve built up enough good will. Hopefully they don’t keep burning through it though. I’m still sour over the lack of feature parity, linux support, reliance on Google for notifications, etc.
I am currently still using their stuff since my husband and I just purchased a longer subscription as a bulk purchase, but we will not be renewing and I am actively researching alternatives for the VPN and emails.
The emails is the more difficult part for me, because everyone suggests hosting your own on your own domain, but to me that just seems like a great way to have any site you tie your email to to be directly linked to your house. Unless I am massively misunderstanding how that would work, in which case any resources would be greatly appreciated.
You don’t have to self-host email (which is a pain) with a custom domain. Most of the providers will let you point your domain’s email at their servers, with a few DNS entries. The major (IMO) benefit of that is that your email address is decoupled from your email provider, so changing providers in the future doesn’t require you to tell all your contacts.
Thank you! This helps, and while it doesn’t solve the issue of the @ being recognizable, it does solve a lot of issues.
You would need to register your domain with someone who offers privacy from Whois lookups (they all should). Your contact information will be discoverable with a subpoena. A mail relay like Duck or Firefox would be an additional layer of anonymity but idk how they will respond to law enforcement
PSA on the topic of WHOIS. Avoid
.usdomains. These by law can’t be hidden from WHOIS lookups.I’d probably just do Tuta mail if you need anon/private email
Mullvad VPN has worked well for me.
i have free proton accounts as am not loggin in to close them because lazy. but i havent really used it anymore…maybe for trashmail stuff. mullvad is cooler and 1$ rootboxes anywhere also. disroot,riseup and so many other mailproviders are cool too. i dont get why proton is so relevant to some. did you guys buy a lifetime package or why?
I was looking into proton as an alternative to Google. I am no longer looking at them because of Andy’s comments and doubling down. I feel like I’m giving enough companies with questionable ethics my information and money without giving it to them too. If the company wants to come to a consensus about making a public statement that separates them from his comments I’ll consider those when they happen.
