cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/25445621
How did the transition go? Do you like the new service(s) so far?
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 pulled the trigger and decided to leave. Not only because of the recent actions from Proton, but when I started looking for alternatives I quickly realized how deeply integrated I was into their eco system and how difficult it was to make the switch. That’s personally not something I like. I guess this goes back to the saying, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’.
I’m now a happy customer of:
- Mullvad for VPN
- Bitwarden as password manager
- Fastmail for email
- Ente for photos
- Yet to decide on cloud storage for files.
I know fastmail isn’t the perfect privacy option but works very well for me. They own all their own hardware and use encryption at rest. They help develop open standards such as Jmap to replace imap. . This, to me says a lot about the people behind the company and is something I appreciate.
For those looking for a more private email solution then Tuta is a great option too!
Best of luck out there folks 👍
Unless you’re somehow looking for tonnes of storage, I don’t think you need cloud services. I’ve set up just my 3 devices (phone laptop PC) to sync with each other using Syncthing. And that’s plenty of space for just personal stuff (including photos). And it’s so cheap (only the cost of the devices you’re already using, and no subscriptions). It’s something I wish most people did because of how prevalent Drive has become, even though it doesn’t seem like it’s necessary for a lot of use cases. You’re situation might be different though, just a suggestion.
deleted by creator
What does that cost you a month/year?
Makes sense if that’s something you’re worried about. I just meant that it seems to me like people immediately jump to cloud storage without even considering use cases and options. I wish I’d known about this setup that I’m using now a long time ago so I thought it’d be good to put the option out there.
I started testing out alternatives immediately after discovering his post. I understand they’re saying this was a mistake and was meant to have been posted from his official account and not the company account, but that is still a bit off putting to me. As others have mentioned, this also made me aware of how many eggs I have in this basket, and after trying out alternatives for a few days I made the full switch away from ProtonMail, Calendar and VPN to Tuta + Mullvad.
Unfortunately, my Unlimited plan renewed in November and customer service has stated they will not refund me for the remaining time, as 30 days has passed. Oh well, I can at least cancel my auto-renewal :)
I bought a year of unlimited in November but I have canceled and will be migrating when my year is up
What’s the deal with Lavabit these days? Are they good? I don’t keep up with things that well. Am old man.
I left and glad I did. It was a needed wake-up call. All-in-one is inherently risky. I’d rather support smaller, more focused products. If one doesn’t fit my needs down the line, it’s way easier to switch.
- Email: Tuta (meh, loading issues)
- Calendar: Tuta (don’t like, can’t handle recurring events)
- VPN: Mullvad (like)
- Drive: Tresorit (like)
- Passwords: already using Bitwarden (love)
My struggle is finding an alternative to nonesense email alias system proton provides. Tuta and everyone else seems ridiculously limited with aliases. Like, I’ll use my own custom domain idgaf, just gimme infinite aliases…
Based on my understanding, Tuta is better for aliases compared to Proton. Their alias limit doesn’t apply to custom domains, only the domains they own (tuta.com, tutamail.com, tuta.io, tutanota.com, tutanota.de, keemail.me)
If you have proton pass you can generate random or semi random aliases. I don’t believe there’s a limit to this. Good to know on the tuta side though.
Oh I see. That makes sense. I think Bitwarden can be hooked up to alias providers but I’ve never tried that myself
I hadn’t thought of that, might have to look into that. That would be great for new accounts. I basically only used proton pass to create aliases and stored it all in bitwarden anyway.
Same stack as me except KeePass for PW manager. I’ve actually been enjoying Tuta though. What issues are you having with recurring?
External calendars I’ve imported have a bunch of events on the wrong days. I reported the issue and here’s what they told me:
It seems like some events in your .ics file use advanced repetition rules which are not supported in the Tuta calendar yet. We are currently working on this to improve compatibility and hope to release them soon so the calendar should be imported correctly.
I know it’s a small development team, but it’s a little frustrating. A calendar service supporting only a subset of the ICS standard is silly in my opinion
Ah shoot. I guess that makes sense that it might not match 1:1 if it’s using some advanced recurrence rules. When I exported from Proton and imported to Tuta, I did it as a CSV and needed to modify the columns a bit to get it to import, but my recurring appointments seemed to have come over fine. They are fairly simple though.
I was looking into proton as an alternative to Google. I am no longer looking at them because of Andy’s comments and doubling down. I feel like I’m giving enough companies with questionable ethics my information and money without giving it to them too. If the company wants to come to a consensus about making a public statement that separates them from his comments I’ll consider those when they happen.
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 left and canceled my plan. No alternative yet as I was migrating from Google.
I am currently still using their stuff since my husband and I just purchased a longer subscription as a bulk purchase, but we will not be renewing and I am actively researching alternatives for the VPN and emails.
The emails is the more difficult part for me, because everyone suggests hosting your own on your own domain, but to me that just seems like a great way to have any site you tie your email to to be directly linked to your house. Unless I am massively misunderstanding how that would work, in which case any resources would be greatly appreciated.
You don’t have to self-host email (which is a pain) with a custom domain. Most of the providers will let you point your domain’s email at their servers, with a few DNS entries. The major (IMO) benefit of that is that your email address is decoupled from your email provider, so changing providers in the future doesn’t require you to tell all your contacts.
Thank you! This helps, and while it doesn’t solve the issue of the @ being recognizable, it does solve a lot of issues.
You would need to register your domain with someone who offers privacy from Whois lookups (they all should). Your contact information will be discoverable with a subpoena. A mail relay like Duck or Firefox would be an additional layer of anonymity but idk how they will respond to law enforcement
PSA on the topic of WHOIS. Avoid
.usdomains. These by law can’t be hidden from WHOIS lookups.I’d probably just do Tuta mail if you need anon/private email
Mullvad VPN has worked well for me.
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.
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 haven’t left, but now it’s something that’s on the cards, which wasn’t the case beforehand.
I only recently linked my domain to my ProtonMail account, so if I do switch it should be relatively painless given I’ll transfer the domain too, and the original PM address has become more of a lost cause anyway due to spam.
Cancelled auto-renew. I have a year and half to find alternatives. I’ll not support this company anymore.
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
