cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/25445621
How did the transition go? Do you like the new service(s) so far?
I started testing out alternatives immediately after discovering his post. I understand they’re saying this was a mistake and was meant to have been posted from his official account and not the company account, but that is still a bit off putting to me. As others have mentioned, this also made me aware of how many eggs I have in this basket, and after trying out alternatives for a few days I made the full switch away from ProtonMail, Calendar and VPN to Tuta + Mullvad.
Unfortunately, my Unlimited plan renewed in November and customer service has stated they will not refund me for the remaining time, as 30 days has passed. Oh well, I can at least cancel my auto-renewal :)
I left and glad I did. It was a needed wake-up call. All-in-one is inherently risky. I’d rather support smaller, more focused products. If one doesn’t fit my needs down the line, it’s way easier to switch.
- Email: Tuta (meh, loading issues)
- Calendar: Tuta (don’t like, can’t handle recurring events)
- VPN: Mullvad (like)
- Drive: Tresorit (like)
- Passwords: already using Bitwarden (love)
My struggle is finding an alternative to nonesense email alias system proton provides. Tuta and everyone else seems ridiculously limited with aliases. Like, I’ll use my own custom domain idgaf, just gimme infinite aliases…
Based on my understanding, Tuta is better for aliases compared to Proton. Their alias limit doesn’t apply to custom domains, only the domains they own (tuta.com, tutamail.com, tuta.io, tutanota.com, tutanota.de, keemail.me)
If you have proton pass you can generate random or semi random aliases. I don’t believe there’s a limit to this. Good to know on the tuta side though.
Oh I see. That makes sense. I think Bitwarden can be hooked up to alias providers but I’ve never tried that myself
I hadn’t thought of that, might have to look into that. That would be great for new accounts. I basically only used proton pass to create aliases and stored it all in bitwarden anyway.
Same stack as me except KeePass for PW manager. I’ve actually been enjoying Tuta though. What issues are you having with recurring?
External calendars I’ve imported have a bunch of events on the wrong days. I reported the issue and here’s what they told me:
It seems like some events in your .ics file use advanced repetition rules which are not supported in the Tuta calendar yet. We are currently working on this to improve compatibility and hope to release them soon so the calendar should be imported correctly.
I know it’s a small development team, but it’s a little frustrating. A calendar service supporting only a subset of the ICS standard is silly in my opinion
Ah shoot. I guess that makes sense that it might not match 1:1 if it’s using some advanced recurrence rules. When I exported from Proton and imported to Tuta, I did it as a CSV and needed to modify the columns a bit to get it to import, but my recurring appointments seemed to have come over fine. They are fairly simple though.
No. I’m tired of making my life inconvenient the moment someone says something stupid.
I bought a year of unlimited in November but I have canceled and will be migrating when my year is up
What’s the deal with Lavabit these days? Are they good? I don’t keep up with things that well. Am old man.
I highly-valued the cohesion and simplicity of having a suite of tools provided by a single vendor and all on a single bill, despite how often this turns into a vendor-lock-in strategy
Proton was part of my attempt to de-Google, precisely because it offered email (with custom CNAMEs), calendar, and storage, and because they open-sourced their clients and tools
Despite the UX and feature set being quite bare, I was okay with justifying this with the added privacy (which was a nice-to-have but not a deal-breaker for me)
It seems like all the alternatives are either less open-source, have even fewer features, are even less cohesive (indeed, I’d have to select entirely separate solutions and give up all integrations) or seem to have even fewer resources for development and project sustainability
I was hard considering it but if I do it then it would cost me way more.
Tuta ($3)+Simplelogin ($4)+Mullvad ($5) = $12
A proton unlimited plan costs $10. Also, when I was on a vpn plus plan, they upgraded me to unlimited so I’m only paying like $6.50 or something.
I used simplelogin before they got bought by proton and with it now being included in my subscription, it’s even cheaper. I could move to addy.io but that would mean I would have to go through all my accounts and change it to the new addy.io addresses. Huge PitA. I could use my own domain but I don’t wanna blacklist my own domain or for it to be so new that it’s blocked from signing up accounts.
That’s how they get ya
Plus mulvad doesn’t do port forwarding. Or it didn’t last time I used it.
No. Because changing email providers is a royal pain in the ass. Changed from Google to Ctemplar and from that to proton a year later after ctemplar went down.
I am not going to use smaller email providers because of that experience, and proton still seems to be the best of both worlds.
I absolutely hate that i am supporting a CEO like that with my money but I’m not in the mood to migrate anytime soon. Took me more than a whole weekend last time.It’s worth noting Proton’s email export tool (marketed as backup & restore) is pretty decent. This Python script can sort them by folders & labels too
That’s good to know. My main gripe is that changing the email address for every service is so tiring. I’ve got >200 accounts in my password manager I’d need to change the mail address in, and from previous experience i know that the complicity of this can range from “just go to the settings” over “message the moderators” to “you just can’t”.
It’s shocking how complicated it can be.
No, I’ve not switched. While I disagree with his comments, that does not make me switch.
I am fine with using services provided by companies whose employees or leaders I don’t 100% agree with all the time.
I’d moved from Bitwarden to Proton Pass only 6 months ago, so moving back wasn’t too much of a difficult choice (both services have great import/export and Bitwarden even offers self-hosting)
I’d just go Keepass. Password managers don’t need cloud to work. And Bitwarden could go rogue too.
I’ve got Keepass for password manager and Mullvad for VPN, and both have worked out really well for me so far. What I haven’t been able to find is a good alternative to Proton Drive. For aliases I use Firefox Relay.
Tresorit is a bit pricey but very privacy focused and based in Switzerland.
i have free proton accounts as am not loggin in to close them because lazy. but i havent really used it anymore…maybe for trashmail stuff. mullvad is cooler and 1$ rootboxes anywhere also. disroot,riseup and so many other mailproviders are cool too. i dont get why proton is so relevant to some. did you guys buy a lifetime package or why?
There are a few alternatives in mind for me. Mailbox, posteo, disroot. Disroot is the only one among these with a free email. But posteo and mailbox do have cheap tiers. Posteo doesn’t have support for custom domains last I checked.
That’s just email. I’ve already not been using proton for almost everything else. KeepassXC for passwords, Addy.io for aliases, Syncthing and offline storage across my 3 devices instead of any Drive. VPN I rarely use so free proton is enough for that. Mullvad exists on the off chance I need it for a while (it’s a constant price per month how many ever months you choose, and you can just “top up” with some amount and it will last you the appropriate number of days).
Mailbox and Posteo doesn’t have their app in F-Droid 🤔
I know Tuta has, and just looked up Disroot, they also have…
You can use Thunderbird with Mailbox and I think Posteo too? Does disroot even have an app? Even their official pages directed me to other clients like Thunderbird
I know this is lazy of me, but no. I was going to, downloaded tuta and everything, but I just switched this year and finally have it where I want it. I have my stuff forwarded from my old emails, and most of my important stuff has the email. I also failed to vary my programs, so it’s also my VPN and password manager. Even just getting starting with the email was giving me a headache.
And, honestly, the vpn is better than mullvad (to me). When I was attempting to switch, I started with mullvad, but it was so much slower. And I had issues on sites I normally had no issues with. I’ll keep the resources and maybe start transferring little by little as time goes on.
No, I wouldn’t switch unless it compromise my privacy. People are overreacting and politics makes them sensitive.
Yes, I canceled my Ultimate account. Andy can believe whatever he wants in private, but publicly stepping outside of non-partisan policy advocacy at this exact moment in time was a red flag, doubly so because he espoused his personal politics through an official business account in his response to the Reddit thread.
Email/calendar went to Tuta, AirVPN for VPN, BitWarden for passwords. Everything is encouragingly smooth so far.
Fair warning: Tuta’s email import is very new and only available on the more expensive tier at the moment (not sure if that’s permanent). I didn’t have any problems, but there were some issues a few weeks ago.
I do think people are over-reacting to Andy’s words and assigning him political views he didn’t express. He didn’t endorse Trump or the Republican party at large, and definitely didn’t “go full MAGA” or express Nazi sympathies. His statements about Democrats I partially agree with and partially disagree. His remarks about the priorities and actions of Republicans, though, were pure tailpipe-huffing fantasy. Being able to say these absurd things in public–under an official business account no less–shows poor judgement and implies he might believe other absurd things he isn’t willing to say publicly.
Another factor in my decision: Proton’s privacy policy specifies they can modify the policy at any time with no notification to users, and deems continued use of the services as agreement to the updated terms. The updated terms they didn’t notify you about.
That being said, no service provider is perfect. I don’t think Proton stores enough data to really be a concern if they turned over everything they have. But this whole thing is based on trust. Even with their clients being open-source software, you’re trusting that they always serve the same browser scripts that they published. You trust that the password you provide at key generation or login isn’t ever passed back to their servers. You trust that they don’t keep unencrypted copies of your emails, files, or VPN activity. You trust that they aren’t going to modify their privacy policy and quietly undo protections you thought you had.
The way Andy responded was enough to question my trust in the company with him at the helm. I didn’t leave as a heavy rebuke, just as a “do better”. There are plenty of other companies which provide equivalent services. That’s the risk companies take when a major part of their market is ideological people: if you chafe their ideology they’re more likely to put the effort into leaving.
