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What's a good alternative to Gmail?
(meganice.online)
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Last I checked, the encryption in Proton Mail means you have to use their app, no third party apps allowed. Is that still true?
Yes, that's still true. If you want to be able to use a third-party mail app, I would look at Fastmail or Mailbox.org. They don't have free plans though.
Phone app? Yes you have to use their own app. On a computer besides the browser version you can use Thunderbird and other applications if you download ProtonBridge.
To clarify, this is a paid feature and not included with the free tier
Is that GitHub issue where the bridge just starts deleting emails still open? I am pretty sure it was open for over a year.
Yup, and it’s kind if a pain since their mobile apps aren’t great. I’ve been using them for many years, and lately have been considering jumping ship.
Email encryption isn’t something I actually care about. If I wanted to send someone a super private message, I probably wouldn’t use email anyways since it’s just clunky, and it’s unlikely the other person is using proton mail too (which means the message wouldn’t be encrypted anyways). All I really want is to not have my email provider be scanning my messages to profit from my data.
But the effort to switch to something else is making me stay…
You don't use encrypted emails only to communicate privately. If they are not encrypted, your e-mail provider will probably scan them, whether it is for profit or under request from the NSA. That's what Snowden uncovered.
That's a good point, but also the more I think about it the more I realize it's futile. Google is 100% going to scan the messages I send to gmail users, and match it to me somehow.
With Tutanota the Gmail user only gets a link (optionally password protected). Google can’t scan the actual content of the mail.
Same with Proton if you enable encryption for emails to non-proton addresses
Same here. It's pretty barebones but fully functional.
Just off the top of my head: on iOS, the app is frequently slow to download new messages, occasionally (but not frequently) crashes or freezes up, opening a message from a notification is unreliable, it doesn't support landscape mode, the search feature sucks (no filtering, sorting, etc), and it has some questionable design choices. Like, why does it include spam in the "All Mail" category? And why is it that swiping a message right sends it to the trash when doing that exact same interaction in the iOS mail app marks it as read? I've adapted to the difference after all these years, but it's clearly a bad design.
Overall it's not terrible; I'd give it like 4/5 or 3.5/5 stars, however with the price I'm paying for this (IMO overpriced) service I'd expect something a little better. I will say that the experience today is much better than it was a year ago, so even though it takes a long time, it does seem to be improving.
I've had zero issues with the mobile app for mail.