Privacy

39267 readers

752 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

-1

Reminder: Proton Mail addresses have vendor lock-in (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 days ago by bl4kers@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

49 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Both auto-forwarding and auto-reply are paid features, which makes cancelling & switching much more difficult. Gmail is a breeze comparatively. I highly recommend against using their addresses (e.g. protonmail.com, proton.me, pm.me)

Email forwarding is available for everyone with a paid Proton Mail plan.

(source)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] HayadSont@discuss.online 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Thank you for raising this point.

Are there even other privacy-respecting email providers that are fit for the job? I'm genuinely curious.

EDIT: I absolute hate doing this, but I want to understand: Why is this getting downvoted?

[–] CoyoteFacts@piefed.ca 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Mailbox.org is a good pick to consider IMO. You can read some comparisons on PrivacyGuides, which I also recommend as a starting point for these sorts of topics. The mailbox.org web UI is not great, but it allows IMAP/SMTP access, so I use Thunderbird on both desktop and Android in order to interact with my inbox. My inbox is auto-encrypted with PGP using their Mailbox Guard thing, so my emails are all encrypted garbage on the web UI anyway. Mailbox.org only allows paid-for accounts, but considering the annoying stuff that Proton and Tuta do to their free accounts I'd rather just be honest about the service I'm getting. It allows auto-forwarding directly in the web UI, but given that you can hook up to it with IMAP anyway, it's not like you couldn't just do it yourself.

(Also, as another comment said I also recommend DuckDuckGo's Email Protection for email aliasing if you need it.)

[–] HayadSont@discuss.online 2 points 4 days ago

Thank you! Great answer!

For some reason, perhaps because I'm an absolute shill/sucker for free services, I always forget about mailbox.org. Thank you for bringing it to my attention and talking about its features!

Though, if I understand correctly, we basically don't have a privacy-respecting email provider that offers auto-forward and auto-reply functionality in its free plan/tier:

Proton Mail requires a paid plan for auto-forwarding/replying and its free plan doesn't support IMAP. BUT?!, crucially, IIUC, the issue can already be circumvented with a custom domain that sits in front of Proton Mail. Which, isn't entirely free, but 1$ for the domain ain't bad.
Tuta Mail doesn't even offer the functionality AFAIK nor does it support IMAP. Furthermore, I don't know if the custom domain trick works for this one.
Finally, mailbox.org doesn't even have a free plan. Though, at 1 euro/month, it's at least very competitively priced.

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

DuckDuckGo will give you free forwarding with a duck.com address. It also strips all trackers. I love it.

[–] HayadSont@discuss.online 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This is pretty cool and definitely has use, but IIUC this is strictly a free forwarding address, right? I don't think it tries to compete with Proton Mail or Tuta Mail.

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Correct, that’s all it is. But if a live person is asking me for an email, and I don’t want to break out my phone to generate something complicated and hard for them to understand, this works great. (They have enough trouble understanding “duck.com,” even though after the first few instances of utter confusion, I now say, “@duck.com, like the bird, quack, quack.” And they still get extremely confused.