Summary
Proton Mail, known for its privacy-first email services, faced backlash after CEO Andy Yen praised the Republican Party and its antitrust stance.
The company initially posted and deleted a statement supporting Yen’s comments, later claiming an “internal miscommunication” and reiterating its political neutrality.
Critics question Proton’s impartiality, particularly as it cooperates with Swiss authorities on legal data requests.
Privacy advocates warn that political alignments could undermine trust, especially for Proton’s users—journalists and activists wary of government surveillance under administrations like Trump’s.
Just when I’m done migrating all my email shit to Proton, the CEO turns out to be a nazi. A classic.
Same. Considered getting a domain for my email, but ended up just switching directly to the protonmail domain. Regretting that now.
Getting your own domain is the best thing you can do, regardless of provider - it means they can’t lock you in anymore.
I gotta get a personal domain just for email, I don’t really want my personal life mixed in with our small business domain; both due to the nature of the products and because I don’t want to dox myself on either side of the work/life gulf. It’s a shame too, because I am actually proud of our garage business.
I totally get that; I have three domains (work, personal, and one only for online services / aliases)
They’re relatively cheap. I’ve had one for years, though I don’t use it for email forwarding.
Weird shit also happens if send mail isn’t coming from a big provider :(
Yeah, I have no desire to try to host smtp. I’m thinking I could run my own imap and pull mail from various accounts and then just send mail through proton or tula or whoever. Someone already trusted.
And the main reason I didn’t get a domain? Because I couldn’t come up with a good domain name. Naming stuff is always hard.
It is hard. I made up a name that sounds like it would be a webmail provider (it has “mail” in the name).
Surely the point of your own domain is to personalise it? Why would you go for something generic?
I use it with aliases for online signups, so the genericness is a feature, not a bug.
But it’s awful for privacy, because everything is on one domain.
Email is already bad for privacy, and WHOIS protection solves most of the rest. And obviously don’t buy a personally-identifiable domain if that’s a concern.
Only way to make sure your email isn’t run by a Nazi is to run it yourself.
Unless you’re a Nazi in which case FUCK OFF
Even for the technically literate, running a mail server is an ongoing nightmare. If you think it’s easy, you’re not doing it right.
Which is why I let my email be run by Nazis.
Seriously I wish I could quit them but it’s too damn hard.
Dagnabbit - I went all in on Proton as well. Why is it so hard to find an email provider that respects privacy and isn’t run by people with ‘problematic’ views (i.e. people who wish people like me didn’t exist)
I guess I’m lucky he came out with this shit just as I was about to migrate.
Signed up last month because I had something to protect. Looking into Tuta. Anyone know a comparable free vpn?
I switched to Mullvad, works pretty well so far, for my needs.
I am aware of mullvad, and it sounds very good. However, I was looking for a free vpn, as I use vpn service very rarely.
#BigSame Friend.
I was looking at Tutanota for a bit. Guess I’m need to bust open that research again.
I did some more research and this is no joke:
Globalism is bad, being fair is bad, Europe-first, huh I wonder where we’ve heard this kind of rhetoric before.
The EU was initially a good idea, but it got too involved in national politics (anyone remembers the banana guideline that reads like a meme?). I still think, the EU is fine and we should keep it, but it should be a defensive alliance first and foremost and not some fucking merger that is advocating for the rich. Sadly, it’s the rich that have the influence because, well, money and they are going to abuse it.
A call for isolation and autarky is a massive red flag and nothing good will ever happen after that, it always leads to exploitation and violence. The reason CEOs don’t like globalism is because it’s harder to create a monopoly on a global market than regional and capitalism strives for those because it hates competition.
Ar eyou saying Proton’s CEO is a Nazi? Far as I can tell he isn’t
Edit: your message is confusing which is why I ask
I was at a similar crossroads when trying to de-google and pulled the trigger on Tuta Mail instead of Proton. Very happy with my decision now after reading this.
They usually are. Unfortunately.
While the comments were not welcome and left a sour taste, we are blowing it a bit out of proportion here.
You don’t get to decide how other people feel and respond to the issue.
Person A has an opinion, that is allowed. Person B has opinion, that is not allowed.
Lol I read this thread first, then went to the article and his comments were supportive of the potential for anti-trust legislation under the new administration? That makes him a Nazi? Wtf 😂
This is a huge reason why Lemmy faces an uphill battle in terms of growth, these absolutely batshit insane political takes pollute most threads about newsworthy events, which are in many ways the lifeblood of a content aggregator.
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen people say they tried Lemmy for a little while but eventually stopped because they got sick of every thread and community being constantly flooded with Nazi comparisons, accusations of genocide denial, and guillotine the rich stuff.
Like I get it, I really do, but maybe direct some of that righteous anger into some kind of real world activism instead of constantly bitching at anonymous strangers on Lemmy. These people are so outraged and the situation is so dire, and yet they continue to scroll online forums and farm upvotes? Have some ideological consistency ffs, if it’s a matter of life and death, go out there and do something to help.
Doomposting on Lemmy accomplishes nothing, and in fact continues to marginalize one of the few tools that we could potentially have to fight back. If Lemmy were to grow significantly and become a place where people could organize and communicate without being subject to corporate control or censorship, that could potentially do a great deal of good for people IRL. But constantly whining Nazi this, Nazi that is preventing that growth from happening.
Which is why this platform will never have a meaningful growth. But 90% of the user base is happy with that because they enjoy having their opinions validated and not challenged a.k.a. echo chamber.
Well, never say never. It happened once already, in June/July 2023 the userbase grew more than 10x.
And we have seen a nice bump of 2k users in the past week or so as the fediverse has gotten some publicity. Reddit is not an option so we have no choice but to try to make Lemmy better, and I genuinely believe that the federated, decentralized concept can be the solution in so many ways.
Piefed and Mbin are also huge boons to our chances of success. Lemmy may not ever take off, but I expect one of the fediverse content aggregators eventually will. Reddit is simply too shitty of a user experience, they are guaranteed to fail.
Reminds me of another site. It’s why upvotes/downvotes will never work.
That other site is the 6th most visited website in the world, so clearly having upvotes/downvotes doesn’t preclude growth.
Does mbin only have upvotes or am I misremembering? And boosts I guess. That’s not my personal preference but the beauty is we can still access the same content from different platforms.
They’re just expressing an opinion. Cool it.
I guess their username speaks for itself XD
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Yeah this is a masks off moment for them and people better be paying attention!
“If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
-Desmond Tutu
“If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, but your CEO and official company social media accounts are publically praising the policies of the elephant, the mouse will not appreciate your alleged neutrality.”
-iAmTheTot
Swiss company says “Nazi’s aren’t so bad.”
The more things change the more they stay the same.
When they say they’re “neutral” lets not forget what “neutral” meant during World War II. It meant making a fucking shitload of money at the expense of the rest of Europe.
Also, the geography of Switzerland is how they were able to convince Germany to not invade. A few US Nukes dropped from the sky make their geography a moot fucking point this time around.
That escalated quickly
So does their geography!
Not if @[email protected] has their way.
I migrated literally everything from Gmail around 2021. Gotta tell ya, I feel just about dumb as shit right now. I kind of understand people with those “I bought this before he sieg heiled” bumper stickers on their Teslas.
I was planning to transition everything to proton this month. Now I don’t know what to do.
Honestly the lesson I took away from this is to not vendor-lock myself if I can help it. Maybe it’d be better to have a domain through which you can route incoming emails to any inbox? That way you can just hotswap email services if their CEO turns out to be a cannibal or something.
yeah, I myself was already getting a little uncomfortable with how far proton was branching out. It’s a good thing that I was already making a transition to using my own domain using aliases through eforw.com
Or I guess just self host an email server
That actually doesn’t work. Most large email providers will put you into the spam folder unless you are a well known server. Microsoft doesn’t even bother with that and outright throws the emails away entirely. Plus, most ISPs block sending emails from residential IPs and cloud providers block sending them from cloud.
It is not that bad. I have been running my own mail server for 20 years and i generally don’t have more problems with it than users of ‘big and known’ mail server do (it is not like GMail is perfect). And when there are problems I am usually able to tell what happened.
But this does not mean I would recommend self-hosting mail server to everybody. I am an expert, have been doing this professionaly for years. And it is an ongoing fight. It is not like I set it up in 2000 and it has been working since then without changes or incidents.
I was doing it for a while and it usually worked, but the thing is you need email to always work. I’ve since moved to paying Migadu to host my email.
Do you send mail directly from your server, or do you use some intermediary?
I will admit I did not try it myself but I was under the impression it was pretty bad with the spam filters.
I send mail directly. I have a public IP address. I had to remove it (a few times) from a list of ‘dynamically residential address space’. I have configured the server carefully and implemented SPF, DKIM and DMARC. I have proper revDNS records. Currently my mail doesn’t seem to be considered SPAM by Google or others more often than other mails.
When filters consider some mail spam there usually is a reason. The trick is to find the reason and understand how to mitigate it. Some anti-spam measures are not fair (like blanket blocking whole countries or ISPs), but I was lucky enough not to be bothered by those.
That’s actually a lot more effort than most self hosting tasks. And it’s an ongoing effort at that.
Personally I signed up for web hosting at the same company where my VPS is hoted, hetzner. The cheapest tier web hosting costs a couple of euros a month and gives you multiple inboxes on your custom domain, whereas proton and gmail wanted something like 6 or 7 euros per inbox per month
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Tbh I think proton is solid. What the CEO said is just stating a fact of the situation 10 years ago and linking it to now. I don’t believe that’s right but he posted the message 4th of December which (if I’m not mistaken) was before it was clear all the tech CEOs were sucking his dick like we saw around his in inauguration.
I’d still recommend it, the other stuff the CEO says on twitter is all very logical and positive for privacy and against big tech. Unfortunately someone says something that is remotely questionable (not like this guy has outright praised Trump far as I can tell) and sudetly Proton is a dead service not considering all the good they have done and will (probably) continue to do
Check out the comment on this post by @pulsewidth, it provides some interesting perspective on this.
Mmmhm, Republicans are more likely to tackle Big Tech issues by funding them with a cold hard 500 billion smackaroos for AI research, right? /s
Gimme a fuckin’ break. D being trash doesn’t excuse this blatant endorsement of R. Never entertain the whims of the far right, no matter how sweetly they sing to you. History has taught us better.
Can’t really argue with any of that
I understand the concern but it’s not like the CEO is sieg heiling… He is stating how things used to be and his hope that Trump will continue that trend. He posted 4th of December which was far before Trump got all his big tech chronies to sit Infront of US allies at his inauguration
The sort of Swiss neutrality that doesn’t care whose teeth the gold is from.
Reason n1 why I never use Swiss services.
Yep, I moved to tuta the day Andy decided to out himself as a MAGA dipshit. The only way I’d go back is if he resigns or gets forced out. At the absolute minimum Andy Yen has shown extremely poor judgement in claiming Republicans are the party concerned with people’s digital rights. That tells me he fundamentally does not know what he’s talking about, and I do not trust Proton under his leadership anymore.
As a side note, If anyone’s looking for a VPN alternative, I highly recommend Mullvad.
What are your thoughts on Tuta so far?
If your goal is basic mail, with standard features, Tuta is great. The free option is more than enough for an anonymous email.
If you want to pay a little you can move your domain over and get a bunch more features.
If you appreciate a simple interface, Tuta will be perfect. They have apps for desktops and phones as well as web.
I appreciate the response!
It seems like a good alternative but I honestly haven’t used it enough over the last two weeks to feel comfortable recommending it to people yet. Sorry I can’t be more helpful, but there’s a free tier so there’s no downside in giving Tuta a shot for a bit.
Thank you for the response. I’ll probably give it a try since my needs are simple
Commenting so I can come back to this because hell if I’m going to remember to check it if I just save the comment.
Thank you for your assistance on the matter.
Been running my own domain from Tuta for about a year now. Had no issues so far.
Been using the free tier of Tuta for years now with zero issues. The only thing is they delete your account after 6 months of not logging in (the timer resets every time you log in). Pretty sure that only applies to the free tier, though.
Awesome. Thanks for the insight!
Same. It’s little more difficult to say goodbye to simplelogin when my partner and I have like 150+ aliases and the subdomain use is SO convenient. Trying to eventually move the family to Addy.IO
I just signed up for the cheapest paid Addy plan and so far I’m very impressed, especially since it seems to be a one-man show. The docs are good which has been a huge help, and the user dashboard website is easy to grok.
What are the political alignments of the Tuta CEO?
My renewal of proton VPN is entirely dependent on who the ceo is when it’s time for me to renew.
If fuckface is still there, I’ll move on.
I’m fickle that way.
The number of places I can do business with is dropping drastically. I’m going to have to start making my own clothes in the near future.
I strongly recommend Mullvad. Exceptional performance, wireguard support and if you’re really paranoid about anonymity you can literally send them money via post.
Same at this point. I just paid for the year in November.
Same plan here, bought Mail Plus for a year back in May. Although if they decide to enshittify everything before May I’ll just bail early.
Good news for them, I’m “financially neutral”
Okay, can someone help me, a tech illiterate, choose a new vpn, email provider, and password manager? I’d really prefer open source.
Vpn: Mullvad
Email: Tuta / tutanota
Password manager: Bitwarden or 1password
DEFINITELY do not go 1password. They took a massive VC investment and it is only a matter of time before they find a way to monetize it. Ignoring the fact they absolutely destroyed the app.
Bitwarden (you can host yourself with vaultwarden) or KeepassXC.
They took a massive VC investment and it is only a matter of time before they find a way to monetize it.
Can you explain this? I’ve been using the app for over 10 years and it’s only gotten better. I haven’t seen any evidence yet that it would suddenly change
Yes, in 2021 they took a $100M investment for a password manager. There’s no planet on which they can justify that valuation without doing things to significantly increase their revenue. https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/27/1password-raises-100m-at-a-2b-valuation/
If you’ve used the product for 10 years like you claim, then you should know very well the many ways in which they’ve gotten worse. A couple obvious ones off the top of my head because I dropped them like a bad habit after I saw that VC “investment”:
- they killed off any ability to purchase a permanent license key and forced people into subscriptions.
- the app has only improved? How are those nested tags working for you? A feature they had 10 years ago that they broke and never brought back.
- Performance on windows has continually gotten worse with every release for the last 8 years.
- they killed off any ability to purchase a permanent license key and forced people into subscriptions.
For I think $75 I used an excellent password manager for literally like 7 years on multiple platforms. As a software engineer I know that wasn’t a small effort to make that happen. I think I got my money’s worth… and out of every digital service I pay for, I find password management most critical and worth paying for
- the app has only improved? How are those nested tags working for you? A feature they had 10 years ago that they broke and never brought back.
Yes it certainly has gotten better on every platform. I don’t know anything about nested tags. I don’t even use non nested tags. But sure the whole company sucks because they removed a feature you liked. Features that get less use get removed, that’s how products work…How has it improved? Well, it’s weird you ask it all aggro like that but yeah, the search, UI, watchtower, browser extensions, ease of adding a new device, cli tool, and many tiny details have improved over the years.
- Performance on windows has continually gotten worse with every release for the last 8 years.
Funny you say that, the app went from barely usable on windows (which I rarely use) to almost as good as Mac. Then right when I switched to Linux they released a very good client on that platform, which was something I didn’t even expect.
I am not quite sure what the motivation is implying I’m lying about how long I’ve used software or my experience with it, but I’m not. Be mad I guess.
It might get worse eventually but I disagree with your condescending assertions that it already is. Later.
Keepass is superior in my experience for passwords
They asked as a “tech illiterate” so I answered what I’d answer a tech illiterate person.
Keepass is good, but it’s not tech illiterate friendly.
Oh I must have missed that sorry. Then yes it’s a bit more difficult for the tech illiterate until they’ve been using it for a while
Thank you for respecting my literacy level! Lol
From a UX perspective I disagree. 1password wins at UX hands down but Bitwarden is a very close second and IMO has better privacy guarantees.
Security is useless if it’s too difficult. Despite liking Bitwarden I am a 1Password subscriber and happy with my choice.
Really? I really dislike the UI of one password. I have to use it for work and it’s a pain.
Never tried bit Warden could be good who knows not me that’s for sure.
I don’t think keepass is to difficult as to make it useless. I think it really depends on the platform there are some amazing Android apps that will autofill directly from your keyboard no real work necessary it recognizes everything. Now if you’re on Windows… Yeah things start to fall off the wagon
VPN: Mullvad
Password manager: Bitwarden
(or if you are advanced user, KeePassXC + Syncthing for full control of your DB)Email: I use Tuta, but I am honestly not that confident in it to recommend it, unlike the above.
Airvpn has port forward i believe.
You might want to have a look at this site to study-up on available/recommended tools: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/ I use Mullvad VPN myself and am happy w/it. Ditto Bitwarden which works well and is cheap. I have a Tuta account but detest the UI and the fact that they don’t support IMAP/SMTP clients, or PGP, so I do my own PGP encryption/decryption using Thunderbird Mail on desktop which has built-in support for it. Also I use Fastmail as a (paid) provider (no built in PGP but tons of other bells & whistles) though mailbox.org looks interesting and is well-priced. Finally I use addy.io for anonymous aliases/forwarding and they have good PGP support.
Bitwarden is a good password manager. Can’t help with the rest.
I would highly recommend 1password
I was considering signing up, any alternatives?
For VPN there’s mullvad, for email there’s posteo, for storage I recommend signing up with disroot, for password storage I’d recommend KeePass or BitWarden/VaultWarden depending on your threat models and needs
The real pain is going to be having those services split up so much.
Proton was really convenient for packaging those in a really convenient way.
Guess there’s a business opportunity here?
Some would say that is actually a pro, not a con. You don’t want your entire digital life tied to the whims of a single corporation. Fragmentation trades a bit of inconvenience for a ton more privacy and control over your digital presence.
Yes, it’s a pro in my opinion, don’t want all my eggs in one basket so to speak. And of course the providers want you to do just that, to use them for everything - mail, vpn, storage, passwords, aliases, docs, digital wallets (yeah proton has one now too!) - because that makes it very difficult to leave their service if their CEO turns out to be a Nazi or if you just find a better offering.
For a bundle I’d probably say look at disroot.org
FYI, if anyone is interested in VPN for torrenting, apparently Mullvad’s VPN is no longer good for that. Something to do with port forwarding. Out of the three that are recommended on https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/ (IVPN, Mullvad, Proton), only Proton apparently still supports that.
Yeah, it’s why I went with Proton over other options. :/
I went with mailbox.org for mail, contacts, calendar. Keepass+syncthing for passwords. Still looking for VPN and file storage. I’ve been trying out nextcloud but there is a learning curve to host your own.
Mullvad is great for vpn.
How are mailbox and fastmail privacy-wise? Where are they located? Are they friendly to share stuff to random authorities?
I’ve tried Proton mail and couldn’t get comfortable with their UI. Have been on Fastmail for two years now and it’s been excellent.
I’m back with Fastmail too, after having quit to go with Proton a while back. I never ran into a single email where the recipient was encrypted, so I’ve come to see the whole encrypted email shtick as mostly marketing.
I tried proton and I couldn’t get into using their service since it kept asking for personal information. I ended up not using it.
I really like Fastmail’s web client - just the right mix of 1990s web and “reactive” eye-candy web. The phone client is OK as far as I can tell, don’t use it much. The service itself has always been great and I’ve been a subscriber for 10-15 years, long before Proton existed.
I’m curious, too. It was the only decent free vpn.
Edit: Why downvote?
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Protrump Mail?
gonna quickly post here, since I don’t know quite where else would be good, but I noticed sometime last year that the website, https://standardnotes.com/ (a product owned by proton) seems to use a massive amount of AI generated imagery.
also: I thought I was a fool for not getting lifetime visionary when I could, now a little less so :)
Standard Notes is owned by Proton? I didn’t know it lol
I only found out since I used standard notes before the ownership thing, I suppose I’m gonna have to look for a syncing note taking service again.
Have you considered self hosting a syncing note taking service?
https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/note-taking--editors.html
it’s worth some consideration I suppose. so long as it’s not too resource intensive, it could be good to spin it up on my vps space
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Welp… Just paid them 80€ for a year and was in the process of migrating my gmail accounts to it. I guess I just lost 80€ and I’m migrating to somewhere else then…
You should be able to cancel and get a partial refund. Reach out and ask.
And also during that discussion with their support team, state your reason for leaving. That will get a lot more attention than the rest of us whinging online where we can easily be ignored.
I’m going to do this with all mail domains and account with them.
I don’t care how publicly they state their neutrality, when push comes to shove, that nazi sympathizer is going to side with the enemy and all of us who thought we had a safe haven are at risk. I’d rather cut my losses.
I’m also annoyed with how they pile so much into the service that for some of us, they’re extras which aren’t needed. I just want to simplify my email into Tuta now I think, and Mullvad for VPN. While having those together was convenient, it’s no different on my phone or pc to use two different apps for those.
I will very clearly state why I’m taking my business elsewhere.
I’m also annoyed with how they pile so much into the service that for some of us, they’re extras which aren’t needed.
I agree, it’s ever-more loaded up with crap that I won’t use. I’m a free plan user and rarely use the service. Between the never-ending nagging to upgrade that I get on the website, the discount deals that end up being “one year only then full price” and their intentional crippling of the service (# of aliases, domain support, etc) that basically requires you to subscribe to one of their expensive plans just to get the functionality of other competing providers, there’s no way I’d ever give them money. And now there’s the kissing the Orange Diaper Baby butt on top of all that. It’s going to be fun giving all these Nazi tech bro services the boot. mailbox.org is looking pretty good, unless they turn out to be AfD bootlickers.
“one year only then full price”
You can say what you want, but this is mostly the norm with subscriptions. Not only that but legally they can often index the price as well. I haven’t seen a single subscription in Europe that keeps Grandfathering prices with the exception of Old School Runescape where people claim it.I haven’t verified it
For me, the most-used Proton service after email is their calendar. What privacy-friendly calendar alternatives are there that you can recommend?
Both my new service candidates, mailbox.org and posteo, offer calendars. However, I’m in a holding pattern currently since they are German based. Fuckface is meddling in their elections now, which happen at the end of Feb. so I’m holding off to see how much ground the Afd gains.
