Hey all, I’ve been taking my digital privacy and security much more seriously this year, but the one thing I’ve been stuck on and feels overwhelming to me is email. So I wanted to know what do you guys use or what practices do you follow? Do you keep a separate email or alias for every single account, or just compartmentalize, like one email address for online shopping, one for business, one personal correspondence, and etc.
What services do you use? Right now I have a free Tutanota and ProtonMail account but haven’t decided which one to pay for, if either. ProtonMail makes me iffy with the amount of controversy and debate that has come out of them in recent years even though it comes with a lot of other nice stuff like cloud storage and a vpn. Tutanota I just dislike the fact I can’t add it to third party mail apps like Thunderbird, but this might not be a deal breaker. I know there are others, so what do you guys use? I don’t need something to protect my emails from the NSA or organizations like that but definitely something more private and secure than gmail. Thanks.
I’ve been on a very slow-burn transition from using gmail (and other google services). Email is hard, since that’s an address others contact you by, so you can’t easily switch providers on a whim. I kinda broke the problem down into steps:
First, buy my own domain, and have the registrar forward all email sent to it, to my gmail account. At this point, I could continue using gmail as the interface, and host, but I no longer had to use it as an address I hand to people/services, I would give them [servicename]@[mydomain.whatever].
Second, I purchased email hosting from the registrar. I continued with the setup, of having everything forwarded to gmail, using it as a host and interface, but used the alias feature to send replied back from any @[mydomain.whatever] address.
Third, I started investigating alternate email clients: thunderbird and fairemail are where I’m currently at, so that I’m only gmail as the email host, but no longer rely on it’s interface.
I haven’t taken the final step, of switching to a different provider (cause I’m a big wuss)… I might wind up doing something self-hosted, but at this point it’s easy enough for me to switch by re-pointing my forwards. Most email comes in/out of an address at my domain, and I don’t depend on gmail to be my email ‘client’.
So all that to say, not that I have an answer for you, but I have a recommendation, to buy your own domain, and give yourself the flexibility to switch around different providers.
Yeah, I’ve been looking into buying a domain for that exact reason, flexibility if I do switch providers so I don’t have to change my email on a bunch of accounts or give people out a new email address.
Self-hosting interests me too but have heard it’s very hard to get right so people actually receive your emails. I haven’t looked super deep into it though, it’s just been on my todo list to try.
Thank you!