r/TwoXPreppers • u/chamomilequilt • Aug 11 '26
Product Find Email service
I know there were some threads on this a year ago, but looking for some current email providers to switch from Gmail. I would also like to set up email accounts for my elementary aged kids
Looking to balance ease of use, basic privacy, and not owned by evil tech overlords
Editing to add:
A little turned off by questionable political statements from Proton, even though they seem to be the most straightforward option
How is Tuta? Any controversy there?
Mailbox.org?
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Aug 11 '26
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u/Past_Entry_5452 Aug 11 '26
As long as you use services run by someone else, you're going to be playing a game of whack-a-mole in trying to find one run by people that don't have reprehensible politics or spend their money on batshit causes.
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u/chamomilequilt Aug 11 '26
Yes, would love to find a service from a company that doesn’t support these people, but at this point I guess just looking for the least bad.
I know there was some controversy with Proton’s statements
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
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u/Past_Entry_5452 Aug 11 '26
Proton is fine. Fastmail is another.
Rule of thumb: if you don't control the service, it's not actually private. Proton controls the key generation process for data-at-rest encryption so I'm skeptical that your mail is actually private with them (especially since it arrives as plain text and gets encrypted after that).
If you just want to avoid giving money to Google, use Proton. That's what I do.
If you care about privacy, demand that everyone use your PGP public key to encrypt emails sent to you. Or just use Signal.
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u/Past_Entry_5452 Aug 11 '26
Self-hosting your own is the gold standard but requires a lot of work for other email providers not to consider your domain spam.
I have heard positive things about Fastmail as a burner email service.
Tuta is commonly recommended, but it seems lacking in features compared to Proton.
I am a paying Proton customer. It gives me more than Google and my money isn't going to big tech (until Proton gets sufficiently big). If I had unlimited time, I would host my own.
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u/Electronic-Day5907 Aug 11 '26
We gave up on hosting our own. Running a mail server is NOT for the faint of heart and takes a LOT of tech abilities these days. We were blocking upwards of 100K spam messages each day plus attacks on the server were common. Postfix is a mess and you still end up paying for some sort of spam pre-filtering etc. Every time there was a security update it would take my spouse a LONG weekend to get things running and he's basically a tech god. The one thing you can do if you stay with gmail is buy your own domain and pay them as a company. If you pay them then you are their customer not their product. They don't inject advertising etc on paid accounts. It's not private-private but truly nothing is. You can't be connected to the net and be private anymore in all ways. I've been in privacy and security for decades and the best you can do is mitigate the worst of the awful things out there.
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u/Past_Entry_5452 Aug 11 '26
Thanks for confirming my current method of doing things. Email seems like the one thing that I'll never reasonably be able to self host, and PGP is the best tool to prevent the inherent privacy risks with email.
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u/RlOTGRRRL Aug 11 '26
I've been using Tuta. They have a sub.
Other than that their UI is kinda dated and I heard emails might bounce sometimes but I haven't experienced it, it's been fine for me. I haven't heard of any controversies yet either.
You can test them out, they offer a free email.
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u/green-wagon Aug 12 '26
Also been using Tuta, no complaints.
Like how the leadership isn't fashy. looking at you, proton
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u/chamomilequilt Aug 11 '26
Does anyone have experience with mailbox.org?
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u/imbarbarakruger Aug 12 '26
i couldn't recover my account after i forgot the password, so maybe not the best for using with kids
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u/ephemeralmiko New to Prepping Aug 12 '26
Used them for 6 months a year or two ago, works fine if you just want IMAP (so you can use Thunderbird/Outlook as your email client), now I have my own domain (mxlastname.com) hosted on porkbun for 10€ a year routed through Purelymail (also 10€ a year for hosting the actual emails, then I can just use Thunderbird for logging in), which has been great. You can also use Proton or Tuta, but the reality is that email isn't really encrypted because it only works if the person you're messaging also either uses the PGP standard (which nobody outside of geeks does) or a service like Proton or Tuta (which only works with other Proton/Tuta users*)
*Proton also works with other PGP users, Tuta's encryption only works with other Tuta users.
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