What email provider do you use?

Posteo.de and Mailbox.org, can encrypt your inbox with your own PGP key, that’s also a good option!

I prefer Posteo.de since their Address book and calendar is also encrypted unlike mailbox.

I don’t think following a court order makes you “shady”.

The real issue is that swiss privacy laws changed a few years ago.

None of that would protect you against what happened with protonmail.

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My email is provided by my service provider but i use Thunderbird as an email client. I also use gmail because it’s handy.

I was talking generally a good alternative

As for shadiness;

ProtonMail deletes ‘we don’t log your IP’ boast from website after French climate activist reportedly arrested

Posteo and Mailbox does IP stripping.

Even if they do, they can receive an order to start capturing that data and they would have to comply in most jurisdictions. In some countries, they could even be ordered to not share that information with their customers.

This is why understanding the laws of the countries that have jurisdiction over your data is so important.

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This is what people dont understand is that for instance Protonmail as of recently was compelled by law to provide IP info for a specific user. They couldnt decrypt any information as they dont have that ability but regardless of exact location/jurisdiction there is no perfect service and they may be forced to comply.

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As has been stated this wouldnt have done anything in the protonmail situation. Your data itself is already encrypted on protons services and in situations such as these they even give you the option of using TOR to limit what IP info they may get. They cannot say no when the government forces them to do something unless its something they physically cannot do like decrypt your data.

This doesnt make Proton “Shady” and they have previously stated that they may be forced to comply with the law and cannot stop it in some cases. This is the case with any service as a business and this is being blow up for no reason as you should NEVER trust your service providers or anyone but me, myself, and I when it comes to OPSEC and sometimes not even yourself.

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He told ya…Hi did :sweat_smile:

Best part is that they delete his vids from protonmail reddit :rofl:

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ProtonMail was never billed as Anonymous, This guy also didnt say anything when Tutanota was forced to do more than even Protonmail was. Why all the sudden do people like this give a crap when this has happened several times before and if people took even a little time to read ToS and understand at least somewhat the laws of countries youre operating in people wouldnt be like “oh gorsh, i dun did thought this was 100% completely anonimoose emails”

This guy doesnt understand Swiss law, Didnt read Protons ToS, Claims the service was billed as Anonymous (it isnt and wasnt). They provided a means to access ProtonMail somewhat anonymously through TOR but that can be brought into question depending on if youve accessed the account outside TOR, if you use a VPN which TOR useless through,etc.

He also claims its impossible to not log IPs, which isnt true either. You need an IP for a connection obviously but when no logging policies are claimed its not that you dont even have an IP address at all but that you dont retain that information. No Logging =/= No IP is ever obtained, thats not how the internet works and anyone who uses that as a criticism for these services is dumb.

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Another thing people need to understand is that in regards to privacy and security as a general rule Email is just broken. Its terrible to use if you want to keep things secret or anonymous.

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They were advertised exactly like that, if you noticed (and change that part after the incident) - that’s main criticism, and even worse onion site which redirect to clearnet :laughing: .

Yes, but at the same time he told universal truth, which is:

e-mail technology is NOT safe and always logs at the very least ip by it’s nature.

That’s very debatable.

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They have made the claim you can create an account without using personally identifying information, this is not the same as claiming to be a completely Anonymous email service. The advertising for that service around the net that ive encountered never even mentioned that part and this isnt an aspect of the service that many have even discussed till now. The argument can be made that that section would be misleading for someone who isnt aware of Emails pitfalls among other issues related to signing up for a service and “anonymity” especially when not using Tor,etc. I could see the argument that the ignorant may think they can use a service 100% anonymously simply by not providing personal info in the signup but I do not believe that was the intent. When I was looking into protonmail I never read that as it being an anonymous service but an “anonymous” sign up. Now what they did here isnt remove that entirely but changed the section to have an “anonymous email” subsection that links to Using Tor and their Onion service. How good the onion site is is up for debate obviously.

It now reads

Protect your privacy

ProtonMail is email that respects privacy and puts people (not advertisers) first. Your data belongs to you, and our encryption ensures that. We also provide an anonymous email gateway.

With a link to their Onion stuff, instructions about it, and an explanation. This is a good change IMO as it makes things clearer regarding their “anonymous” claims. It doesnt remove them but gives it an entire page while clarifying what the base service intent is. I would still argue that Email cant be and if youre needing to be anon I would avoid email but thats a different discussion all together.

His arguement seems to be that a no logging would never get the IP in the first place which would make the service completely unusable and not even function.

Imagine this, lets create a simple example here

You go to the store and you buy some items. We will assume for sake of scenerio that this store doesnt have registers, the cashiers can do mental math, and all items are marked with tax included. Now you ring up for your Items and pay the cashier, they dont write down any information for this transaction and your money is just exchanged, no record, no camera,etc.

In this case would you then say that if the store kept no records of individual customer transactions that this would be debatable? Does the very act of the exchange of money mean its recorded by them?

Silly example i know but my point is, no logging = logs arent retained, thats it.

As for the

e-mail technology is NOT safe and always logs at the very least ip by it’s nature.

Agreed, Email is crap in regards to privacy and anonymity. It wasnt designed with this in mind to my knowledge and atm the best we can do is bandaid it.

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Well yeah exactly that is an argument (couple of us and Mental Outlaw are obviously in the knows :laughing:)

But stuff like that was very misleading

Anonymous e-mail :laughing:

Change is definitely better, which is not fun for the people who have fallen for the meme, but their onion site is…well not good, let’s just say it, since it still redirects to clearnet on login - so it’s still misleading to false sense of security :man_facepalming:

I just don’t believe it’s relevant to the discussion and therefore he’s still correct on the point, because in reality there is no service including your self-hosted one which can protect you from…all that.

As there are no such store (unfortunately!!! :upside_down_face:), except perhaps Monero, if you count digital exchange :upside_down_face:

On the bright side with self-hosting - you can at least encrypt content of your e-mails, but obfuscation of transactions and no connection to your identity at all…is very hard and can be done in my view only with…errm…expropriated dedicated server :rofl:


tl;dr
anonymous e-mail is about as silly as anonymous Bitcoin :sweat_smile:
poor normies.

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My argument was that from my experience with the Proton folks is that this was not their intent. Obviously not knowing them personally I cant trust them realistically but they havent shown a history of intending to be malicious towards their users or pull the wool over their eyes. I do not believe the intent was to prey on folks by making them think it was 100% Anonymous and that never was the Intent of the service to be 100% Anonymous. Ive never encountered the Proton folks trying to claim that it was an Anonymous service but a “private encrypted email”, which it is.

People have been very aggressive towards the proton folks since the release of the VPN especially. I find it very strange the number of people willing to throw in with Nord or PIA then go over the the ProtonVPN reddit and spew crap on the proton folks. They seem to be one of the few groups creating a paid alternative to Google products that lends itself a bit more towards privacy which I appreciate and would hate to see crushed under the weight of rampant online hate simply because people are looking for them to be evil.

Another little bit here is the sort of threat model ProtonMail is looking at
from the folks at proton back in the wayback

" NOT RECOMMENDED:

Edward Snowden – If you are Edward Snowden, or the next Edward Snowden, and have a life and death situation that requires privacy, we would not recommend using ProtonMail. For extremely sensitive situations, it is simply not a good idea to use email as a medium for communications."

" There will always be a trade off between security and usability, anybody that tells you otherwise is lying. And just because a system is not 100% secure does not mean you should not use it, the key is understanding the limitations of your security. And for the record, there is no such a thing as a 100% secure system.

At ProtonMail, our goal is to guard against mass surveillance and we feel the best way to do that is to give encryption to everybody. The only way to do that, is to make encryption easy to use. This is why ProtonMail works out of any modern web browser, and why we went to great lengths to make the cryptography completely invisible to the user. However, this approach does come with certain shortcomings."

Protonmail is not meant for criminal or 100% anonymous kind of activity, its meant to avoid Advertisers, Online Tracking by Google/Facebook/etc, and the sorts of normal people threat models.

In the News:

Can someone recommend a free, vaguely privacy-centric email provider, who offer CalDav support for calendar synchronisation? I need to set up an account to share between me, my sister & partner, but purely in order to have a shared calendar.

There are already some discussions on this forum about calendar sharing. For example:

One option is to subscribe to a free Nextcloud provider. Here’s a list:

I’ve seen some mentions of OwnDrive, but I have no experience with it myself:

https://owndrive.com/

This post explains how to set up Thunderbird to sync with OwnDrive’s CalDav service:

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I think Vivaldi offer that: LINK

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Ah… that looks like what I’m after. Thank you.

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and i even think you can set it up with pgp keys (dunno for caldav but with the emails definitely)

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