Alternative, privacy focused email providers similar to Gmail and 'promotional' mail

kel

kel

Ostrich
Another benefit of running your own email server - or, rather, just having your own domain even if you let someone else run it, irrespective of the privacy issues above - is you have infinity email addresses now to receive and send email. Mailinator can do the first, but not the second, and some sites block mailinator and alt domains. If you have your own domain - you can buy the cheapest one - you can put any email address in when signing up for something and just completely block the address when you're done with it or start getting spam on it.
 
redbeard

redbeard

Hummingbird
Moderator
kel said:
Another benefit of running your own email server - or, rather, just having your own domain even if you let someone else run it, irrespective of the privacy issues above - is you have infinity email addresses now to receive and send email. Mailinator can do the first, but not the second, and some sites block mailinator and alt domains. If you have your own domain - you can buy the cheapest one - you can put any email address in when signing up for something and just completely block the address when you're done with it or start getting spam on it.
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simplelogin.io does all of this, for free, open source.
 
Coja Petrus Uscan

Coja Petrus Uscan

Hummingbird
Gold Member
rotekz said:
My Protonmail has a message search function.

View attachment 27775
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I believe this only searches meta data: sender and subject.

I run my own mail server. It's very easy to setup a mail server if you are decent+ on systems. It's on a server I use otherwise. Basic setup is maybe five commands, but the issue is you have to setup security headers: SPF and DKIM for each domain. This takes more time. If you don't do this most of your email will go to spam. I also can't email a company from the sever, as for some reason the IP is on their blacklist. But beyond that there is no maintenance. But I am not looking forward to setting it all up again when I move server in about 12 months. That is the big downside of hosting your own solutions - having to set it all up again when you move. I self host emails, mailing lists, analytics, a custom firewall. Probably two days to set it all up again. SSL is also a real pain. Not sure if I should go with LetsEncrypt.

On the upside the offgrid feeling is quite good. Having the same email registered with 200 sites does not feel good. With throwaways you can use access to accounts. I have a catchall business domain, a catchall public domain (for shopping) and a domain personal (for people). I use a different email for each signup. This avoids your data being bound by email by marketing firms, see :

Avoiding Deep State-Corporate Data Harvesting Datasheet

With the extent to which social media, corporations, the intelligence apparatus and governments are now known to collude to share, sometimes gigabytes, of personal data, here are some tips to reduce your footprint. Credit-rating Agencies The industry of big data started with credit-rating...
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Athanasius

Pelican
Berlin-based mailbox.org may be worth considering. It's cheaper than ProtonMail and has cloud storage and a calendar.

It's a little clunky to set up, but works fine.
 
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Pendleton

Pelican
acco said:
Why do you want to do this? That doesn't encrypt your mails, but make your mails more look like suspicious.

If you would encrypt your mails with OpenPGP it wouldn't even matter if you are still on gmail.
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I just want to ensure anonymity and not provide the email service any identifying information (and am admittedly tech illiterate).
 
redbeard

redbeard

Hummingbird
Moderator
What email clients are you guys using? I'm working on making the switch to a more private email provider. In the process, it's becoming that spinning up my own email server is probably the best long term solution compared to a product like ProtonMail or TutaNota.

However most email clients are either closed source, hard to use, or just plain old clunky (that means you, Thunderbird).
 
Bird

Bird

Kingfisher
redbeard said:
plain old clunky (that means you, Thunderbird).
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That's true, but as an older guy I'm a bit clunky, too.
Which client are you using currently?


Pendleton said:
I just want to ensure anonymity and not provide the email service any identifying information
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In that case you may consider using a (paid) VPN service.
I never used email along with Tor since I expect more trouble (account being suspended due to suspicious IP address or something like that) as benefits.
Say Yandex does not like suspicious IP addresses, they don't even like some of my VPN addresses.

Encrypting mails is quite easy, but sending/receiving those is pretty difficult since almost no one uses it.
 
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roid

Woodpecker
Just build your own email server with mutt client. Just need to make sure that the IP is whitelisted and not shared and doesn't have a bad history of spam.
 
Cervantes

Cervantes

Woodpecker
redbeard said:
What email clients are you guys using? I'm working on making the switch to a more private email provider. In the process, it's becoming that spinning up my own email server is probably the best long term solution compared to a product like ProtonMail or TutaNota.

However most email clients are either closed source, hard to use, or just plain old clunky (that means you, Thunderbird).
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Email is fundamentally non-private. The messages by default are transmitted unencrypted, and even if you do everything on your end to protect message privacy, the people you email likely have their email on a globohomo email server anyway. Gmail has 40% market share. That means that for most people, even if you don't use Google, someone could reproduce 40% of your inbox by just data mining Google. Data mining Microsoft, GoDaddy and Apple in addition and you could reconstruct 90% of anyone's email.

Still, there is no reason to make things easy for them: I use protonmail which is a good upgrade in privacy over gmail. I expect I'm pretty well protected unless I drew the attention of the FBI.

Long ago I hosted my own email - but that was definitely not worth it. You end up spending lots of time updating it to keep up with the latest trends in spam control.
 
JayR

JayR

Woodpecker
I'm interested in transferring my personal domain away from GoDaddy and over to Epik. However, it's unclear to me that Epik also provides email hosting that will allow me to keep the '[email protected]'sDomain.com' email address that I've had for over 10 years.

Anybody have experience with this? Or is it better to just ditch my old email address and go with a proven-secure provider like ProtonMail?
 
redbeard

redbeard

Hummingbird
Moderator
Cervantes said:
Long ago I hosted my own email - but that was definitely not worth it. You end up spending lots of time updating it to keep up with the latest trends in spam control.
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Could you explain this in more detail? Everyone who DIY's their own server say it's a piece of cake. But, I have to think it's selection bias.
 
kel

kel

Ostrich
I don't know much about Epik, but any email provider that you can attach your domain to will work as it did last time. You own the domain, you own all the addresses under that domain, all you need is a DNS provider that points your domain to a host and a host that can handle it (which could include your own server, but def just look into Epik handling it).
 
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