I'm considering finally jumping off gmail. I'm not going to host my own email since I just don't have the skill to secure that thing well enough myself. Any mail server I set up would become a botnest within hours. So that has me looking at third party stuff.
Proton has a mostly good reputation, though their CEO's twitter post a while back praising the Trump regime makes me question if I should trust them with anything. I don't know enough about the entire situation to know if its just internet drama or a real concern, but anything involving Trump is a huge red flag for me.
Tuta looks pretty nice but I've read there are concerns about it being in a country that's part of the 14 eyes collaboration, so it might not matter what the organization wants if the government of the region they are in says fuck off and do what we tell you.
On the lower end of concerns, I am in the Apple ecosystem. (boo hiss I know). I like the clean and simple built in apps like email and calendar and how the notifications all work across my watch, phone, mac and homepods. I like how safari can just jump in and throw an email alias at things for me. I like how all my stuff is managed. But I also know Apple could piss me off at any moment and make wild sweeping changes I might not like, so relying on them too much could screw me over someday. I dont know, right now I really like their setup but portability does seem to matter more ultimately so this switch does seem like a better idea in the long run, even if I'm giving up features I may enjoy.
What are your opinions on the privacy email and calendar services in 2025? Should I even both with a cloud based calendar in the first place?
I recently started migrating my email and went with mailbox.org. I opted for it based on it having a good balance of ethical/environmental stances, support for custom email domain (so email doesn't feel like vendor lock in in the future), and a business model focusing on paid service.
There were a lot of options but ultimately I just wanted something "good enough" rather than spending weeks on comparing. A part of that decision was realizing I didn't care about getting something with the best possible privacy - email is predominantly an insecure medium and things with E2EE work only if the recipient is in the same ecosystem, which is rare. In practice I'm not going to trust anything sensitive to email regardless, so I might as well prioritize picking something that looks like a decent and stable balance.
Mailbox.org has calendar but I haven't really played with it much. I'm realistically going to look in to look in to something self hosted since I will require more features than most email providers will offer, so I don't want to tether the two services. That was a part of the reasoning for Mailbox.org over something with more services - I wanted email, not something trying to be the next ecosystem - that's what I was trying to get away from!
Chiming in from a USA user. Their webmail and suite run slow in the USA. Once it loads the page initially though, it uses localstorage.
However, back when I used them less than a year ago, they had random periods where the websuite did not load.
Finally, they have a really bad 2fa implementation that is not documented and I had to search Reddit to figure out how to log in.