Privacy

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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.

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Recommendation for Email-Provider (self.privacy)

submitted 2 months ago by andylicious1337 to c/[email protected]

59 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It's me again with another question for recommendation 🙈 This time I am searching for a new Email-Provider:

Currently I am using mailbox.org (privacy-friendly provider based in Germany). Since my subscription is comming to an end there, I tought about switching to proton mail-plus. What I like about them is, that they have an easy way of creating alias-emails and also support the option to use your own domain.

But maybe you gals and guys have another great provider which offers good features for a good price.

Also: I dont need Cloud-Storage or anything like that, so just mail is fine.

Thx in regards :)

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[–] gaael 25 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Just a reminder: with Proton you can't use IMAP for your email client, you either need their mail client (mobile) or bridge app (desktop).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

While technically true, bridge is ultimately an IMAP server you run yourself ... and they do have good reasons for this design.

[–] andylicious1337 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

do you know theit reason?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Imap and end to end encryption are not possible at the same time.

Bridge exposes an IMAP interface but encrypts everything as Proton would, had you used the web client.

It solves a technical limitation.

[–] andylicious1337 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

oh so only when using their client I have the e2ee for the emails on their server? kind of makes sence but def. a point to take into consideration.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

No, I think you are misunderstanding my poor explanation.

Your emails are encrypted at rest on their server regardless if you use the web client or IMAP through the bridge.

The thing is that the encryption layer must happen at some point in time when you communicate with their API:s. In the web client this encryption is built-in. IMAP on the other hand does not support this type of end to end encryption, so the bridge adds this layer for you.

So you communicate unencrypted locally between your email client (Thunderbird for example) and the Protonmail bridge that you have installed locally on your computer. Then Protonmail bridge encrypts and decrypts all emails for you. So to your email client, it seems like a normal email server, but in reality everything is encrypted.

(Standard "encrypted email" disclaimer: Your emails are not encrypted in transit unless both parties, sending and receiving, are set up for encryption. Email is otherwise not end to end encrypted in transit)