No. Because for some stupid reason, my bank will only accept a proton mail address.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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I’m working on getting off it, planning to self host. It’s unfortunate, because I was all in and working to degoogle, so it’s all a mess right now
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.
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I'm backing stuff up and waiting to see how this plays out until March before deciding. The only reason I didn't immediately quit is because it's just one board member and he's not American, so I'm leaving towards him not understanding how bad things were getting. It was also before the Musk Nazi salute so he gets that tiny benefit of the doubt. Still, it was insanely dumb what he did, and did erode a lot of trust in Proton.
I left and canceled my plan. No alternative yet as I was migrating from Google.
I was never on Proton. Back when I decided to degoogle my digital life I landed on a short list between proton and tutamail. So I deep dive into both. When I researched Proton it stank of corporate technobro culture. The crypto wallet, trying to be an everything platform/brand, style over functionality programming, the communications. It all reeked of corpo bs.
Their only pro was operating from Swiss legal protections. So I landed on Tuta. Not because they were any particularly better, but because they were focused on doing one thing and one thing only at a time. They were also more focused on features over marketing buzzwords which I liked.
I've left and canceled my paid subscription. Addy.io + Posteo. I like it way better.
Addy.io absolutely amazing.
Yup, addy.io is amazing. Used to selfhost it but the price is so low it's not worth the hassle. I have a domain at addy.io and a second at a normal hoster. If I'm not happy I can easily transfer the mails and change mx records to a new location.
I use Azire for vpn since they own their servers and let you use a plain old wireguard client. Before that I used Mullvad but I need port forwarding and a few sites I frequent blocked it for some reason. Only use Proton’s VPN for less sensitive stuff and being able to exit in lots of countries. The inconsistency in all the apps’ UIs sort of irks me, and the lack of a drive client for Linux is a negative.
I only recently finished migrating all my email to Proton so I’m probably leaving it for now. But I’m eyeballing replacements. His comments on X seemingly sucking up to Trump weirds me out… especially after the shock and awe shit show happening this week
I also left my plan, even refunded the amount, since my renewal was set on January 1st.
Main reason I used Proton was their VPN, especially their wide range of servers and countries helped me. But now I don't need that many individual country servers anymore, so I settled to Mullvad, mainly because their prices are very competitive and they are considered "trusted" (even though I kinda miss port forwarding, I'd rather not have it, than trust in AirVPN or other smaller services).
I used their mail for a little while, so migration was rather simple. I currently test out Posteo, when I am happy with them, I might stick to them.
Same with Drive, I didn't use them, mainly because they do not have proper Linux support (no, rclone isn't sufficient).
Thankfully I didn't use them as my password manager (and definitely not as a crypto wallet service) :D
Port forwarding or nothing for me. Do you just... Go without now?
Me +wife were seriously considering switching to proton, but we had been "considering" for like half a year. So while the transfer now has been officially put on hold indefinitely, that's in practice no different from how it was before :)
Have considered tuta but there are several reasons I'm not sold on that service - primarily that they manage to give me (who isn't a techie!) the impression (I might be wrong...) of a walled garden where all the benefits /convenience of the service evaporate (??) as soon as you need to talk to a non-tuta user.(??)
From your description it sounds like the feature you might be thinking of as walled-garden-ing is end-to-end encrypted (e2ee) emails, which they call "confidential". The idea is that you can encrypt a message and send it to someone. The message they receive is actually just a link to a publicly-accessible page that Tuta hosts. You give the other person a password that they can enter on that page to read the email you sent and respond to it. If your recipient is also using Tuta, though, when you send an encrypted email it just shows up in their inbox like a regular email.
This is the standard way to handle secure emails, and it's actually a limitation of the email protocol. The way you would send an encrypted message to someone on another email server is to encrypt the email with your recipient's public key. Then the message goes to their email inbox like a regular email and they can use their private key to decrypt it (which is what Tuta does if you're sending an encrypted email to another Tuta user--they already have the recipient's public key). Email servers don't have a standard way to send each other public keys for accounts, so if you want to encrypt an email you either have to get the recipient's public key yourself and tell your email software to encrypt the message with it, or have your provider send a password protected link.
I actually just switched to Tuta. You can still get and receive normal unencrypted emails. The encryption is optional and not enabled by default. I don't have strong feelings one way or the other yet on the service as a whole. They just added the ability to import emails exported from another service, which is usually something email providers do pretty early on. Currently it's only available at the $8/month tier, but it's speculated that they'll roll it out to the $3/month tier once it's stable. That'll be a non-starter for a lot of people. The client UI is simple but functional. It was easy to set up my domain so I don't have to go into each account and update my email address. Yeah, no complaints so far, but also nothing that blows me away. There's a free tier if you wanted to just poke around.
Of course, bolting security on top of email is going to be a challenge, and require trade-offs between convenience and security.
It's likely that there are aspects of how Tuta works that I have misunderstood, but based on my understandings, this is my take:
For my use case, I believe tuta's choice of increased security isn't worth the added inconvenience for the people I'm communicating with who have to access our communications through a separate webpage instead of within their normal email inbox. (Perhaps they can export the emails from that site, but if so, they'd be unencrypted on their machine unless the user took manual steps to reenceypt, no?)
Secondly, I do not, IRL, know anybody else who uses Tuta, but I know a handful of people who do use PGP (for example through Proton). That would mean that communications with them would need to be unencrypted, or go through Tuta's portal, just as if they were regular gmail users. In contrast, if I were to choose a PGP based encryption, communicating with them - encrypted - would be more convenient. Less secure? Yes, but as I said above, that's a trade-off that I'm willing to make. Not to mention, if I no longer liked the service next year I ought be able to move on without ruining access to old emails, or really, even seeing an interruption in ongoing email conversations. Yes, that does require a custom domain to work in practice - I've set that as a precondition for whatever service I'm going to sign up for.
Thirdly, I mentioned a walled garden. Assume I were to use Tuta for a couple of years. People I regularly exchange encrypted mail with have gotten frustrated by having to use the portal and signed up for Tuta as well. One day, I decide that I would like to move elsewhere for whatever reason. Now I'm the one who have to use Tuta's portal whenever I want to communicate with my friends, because there's no other service that I can go to, that's compatible with Tuta's encryption. That's why I consider Tuta to be a walled garden.
I am glad that they finally did add import/export. When I took the service for a spin maybe a year and a half ago, import and export wasn't yet possible and a another reason too why I didn't join them already in mid 2023.
(BTW, have they fixed the Linux desktop app so that it can be used on a hi-dpi (4k) screen without a magnifying glass? Back then, that app refused to listen to any display scaling commands. I had to reconfigure the display resolution from 4k to 2k to be able to interact with the app.)
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You know what would be really great? If Thunderbird actually had its own email service (@thunderbird.net) and not just a client. When they were switching K9 Mail over to Thunderbird mobile, it seemed like there might have been the slightest hint on their blog that they were at least considering it (or maybe I dreamed it). Might be a good source of income for Mozilla too...🤔
I canceled the night of and moved to a combination of Mailbox and Tuta (trying to diversify a little). I also provided a colorful reason for terminating to make sure they knew exactly why.
So far they each have their quirks, but overall I like them. I also set up two domains for email so that the next switch won't be as jarring (since I can just keep using the domain addresses).
I already used Mullvad for VPN, so that was a non-issue.
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.
I see a few people who don't want to switch due to the hassle it would take with changing email addresses, presumably because they use one of the @proton.me email domains. Get your own email domain! It's super cheap (if you choose one of the new TLDs, it can be as low as few dollars a year), the setup isn't really hard - you just change a few DNS values, and that's basically it - you can use whatever email you want that ends with your domain. It might take a while to slowly replace all your @proton.me emails with your domain one, but if you're not in a hurry and change any old mail you see during your day-to-day activities, you'll eventually be done with it, and you can set up mail forwarding to your domain for mail that arrives to your old @proton.me address.
And if you ever need to move to a different provider, you just change the DNS records again to a new provider, and your email will start coming to the new one immediately.
I've been using Fastmail for over 10 years now and I love it. I haven't seen it mentioned a single time as an alternative.
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I don't even know what he has said.
He said unnecessarily political things in a tweet which don't match the experiences of many people, at the exact worst moment possible. Then he doubled down on his statement with an official company account, which he later edited after there was backlash. The original comment. He's promised to post from a personal account in the future. In that same post he stated that "while the X post was not intended to be a political statement, I can understand how it can be interpreted as such, and therefore should not have been made".
In further discussions he described his political leanings as "probably closest to European center-left parties. But again, that's a massive generalization/simplification. Where that puts me on the American spectrum, I have no idea". That's not really part of the drama, but can be taken to imply that despite working with US legislators in the past and touting this work in his responses, he may not have fully understood the current political climate or party dynamics if he doesn't know which US party he more closely identifies with. Another interpretation could be that he knows full well and doesn't want to say either way because making a statement of partisan support is what put him in the hot water in the first place.
I linked original sources so you can do your own reading and come to your own conclusions. Personally I bounce between believing that he stepped in something he didn't mean to and he genuinely doesn't support either party, and thinking that he's too clever a man to not understand, especially since he has directly worked with US legislators on privacy issues and he doubled down in the comments after the general response was critical of his original tweet.
I don’t see what’s controversial here. This just seems like an independent thinker who evaluates issues on a case-by-case basis rather than blindly adopting the views of any one group as a package deal.
The tweet where he said Trump's pick was great and that people forget that the Republican party is the one that fought against Big Tech, blah blah blah.
Let's give him the benefit of the doubt for a second and say he isn't familiar with why that isn't true since he's not American.
He is publicly tweeting something supporting Trump.
There's a broad spectrum of people who are flawed which I'm 100% fine with acknowledging publicly that they did something right. But there is a line where it doesn't matter anymore.
An extreme example: if I thought of something Hitler did that was good for the German people, should I tweet about it?
No. Because I don't want to come off as supporting Hitler.
Trump and his administration are causing so much awful shit. The wording of Andy's message wasn't "Trump sucks but just FYI there's one small thing he did right". His wording was simply all positive, leaving the important context that Trump is a fascist out entirely.
No, I literally just moved to proton like 3 months prior to the comments and still in the process of moving my less used services to the new email from my Gmail. Not really willing to do it all again so soon. Maybe if something else happens which is more serious, but a single event is a bit much to make such a large decision in my opinion. If it's systemic and continues to happen then yes I will think about moving.
Cancelled auto-renew. I have a year and half to find alternatives. I'll not support this company anymore.
I honestly wasn't going to switch, but him being backed up by the official account was iffy. Even still, I wasn't necessarily making moves to switch. But I tried to use a new card to pay for my Proton subscription, and it wouldn't verify. I eventually had to make a Paypal just to pay my bill and avoid losing access to my account. So I kinda decided, "fuck it, they can't be that shitty of a company and get my money still."
I was kinda planning to switch, just not urgently. But now, I hope to be fully moved over to Tuta Mail in the next few weeks.
They probably had too many chargebacks and lost their payment processor.
honesty seems like a overreaction, if proton's goals and actions don't change I'm fine with staying (even if I disagree with trump). it's one person on the board not the entire company as well. however I have considered leaving proton due to bad linux support and no de-googled notifications. afaia proton is the cheapest for what I use it for (vpn+mail+email aliasing+drive (barely using it due to no Linux client)), please tell me if I'm wrong. protonvpn has port fowarding support which I use to host servers sometimes.
As a Linux person, I, too, am somewhat tired of being treated like a second-class user. Having no Linux client for Drive is a real pain.
This is the single-most annoying thing with Proton for me. Give us a Linux client for drive already... 😭
Supposedly rclone can work with Proton Drive, but for me at least, it seemed way too complicated to set up.
Yes, I tried to set it up before, but wasn't successful either. So I decided it's not worth putting hours of work into it, to make it work in some hacky way that will break down anyway any chance it gets.
I'm grandfathered in to the old pricing for Proton Unlimited. I ain't cancelling until they pry the service from my cold, dead hands.
I think leaving would be an over reaction.
Edit: I hope all of you downvoters don’t use WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Search, Android, iOS, Amazon, etc, etc. Otherwise, you’re a bunch of hypocrites. Every single major tech CEO gave Trump $1 million and SAT at his inauguration.
Eh if quitting or stopping use of products and services required perfect circumstances then nothing would be quit, and you might as well be saying nobody should do anything because of being labeled a hypocrite. Pretty much the same as arguing stanchly for apathy and inaction.
Realistically though people cut what they can if a decent substitute presents itself. So when those rare opportunities come I say take it and quit products you might have issue with. Real life doesn't often present perfect gift wrapped hypocrite free opportunities, so if there's an exit take it. Better than inaction because of the hypocrite label dictating you doing nothing. A tiny step is better than none.
They did do some damage control. But it was a pretty terrible thing for the CEO to say.
For email, I landed on Tuta as being the closest in feature parity and signed up for the €3/mo plan. Been pretty happy so far and was pleasantly surprised to see both the email and calendar apps were available on F-Droid. Personal bonus for me was they also run on renewable energy.
So far the only con I've found was lack of support for +aliases (e.g. [email protected]) but the 15 additional email addresses help to offset that.
They support catch-all. You could use your pluses and then mail filters.
Oh really? That'd be welcome news. I'll have to try it again. I tested it yesterday and got an Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender from my sender email account's mailer daemon.
I have an account there that I use as a junk email account and their android calendar app. Nothing else. I used to use davx5 and caldav via my primary email provider but I had issues with it losing notification settings on recurring events. I may go look for a different calendar solution. I'll probably still use it for junk mail.
I use the following services, and have for a couple years now I think.
Mailfence for email Mullvad for VPN