Proton

I am currently still using their stuff since my husband and I just purchased a longer subscription as a bulk purchase, but we will not be renewing and I am actively researching alternatives for the VPN and emails.

The emails is the more difficult part for me, because everyone suggests hosting your own on your own domain, but to me that just seems like a great way to have any site you tie your email to to be directly linked to your house. Unless I am massively misunderstanding how that would work, in which case any resources would be greatly appreciated.

honesty seems like a overreaction, if proton's goals and actions don't change I'm fine with staying (even if I disagree with trump). it's one person on the board not the entire company as well. however I have considered leaving proton due to bad linux support and no de-googled notifications. afaia proton is the cheapest for what I use it for (vpn+mail+email aliasing+drive (barely using it due to no Linux client)), please tell me if I'm wrong. protonvpn has port fowarding support which I use to host servers sometimes.

I was looking into proton as an alternative to Google. I am no longer looking at them because of Andy's comments and doubling down. I feel like I'm giving enough companies with questionable ethics my information and money without giving it to them too. If the company wants to come to a consensus about making a public statement that separates them from his comments I'll consider those when they happen.

No, I literally just moved to proton like 3 months prior to the comments and still in the process of moving my less used services to the new email from my Gmail. Not really willing to do it all again so soon. Maybe if something else happens which is more serious, but a single event is a bit much to make such a large decision in my opinion. If it's systemic and continues to happen then yes I will think about moving.

I downgraded from the Ultimate plan because I don't really need the VPN. It hasn't exactly achieved much because now I just have additional credit on my account.

If the CEO hasn't been replaced by the time my annual subscription comes up for renewal I'll migrate elsewhere. It's a pain because their email and calendar are half decent but I'm really not impressed with the company's failure to take responsibility.

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.

I've switched from Proton Drive and Calendar to Nextcloud, which is an upgrade.

I've switched from Proton Pass to Vaultwarden, which works just as well for me.

I've switched from Standard Notes to Memos, which has also been an improvement for me considering my notes needs are pretty basic and Memos fits perfectly.

That leaves Mail, Simple Login, and VPN. I have alternatives lined up with Tuta, addy.io, and Mullvad, but I haven't pulled the trigger yet. I would be paying more than I am now with Proton (2 year plan) and it would be a massive pain to switch email providers.

I'm considering staying with Proton for only those services, but on thin ice. If they fuck up again, I'm absolutely out.

I may end up switching anyway however. This situation has left a bad taste in my mouth, and if I have the motivation and time to deal with migrating one day in the near future, I might just do it regardless. We'll see.

i was using both proton and tuta, now i privilege tuta.

I moved many people from google to proton, from now on people i convince will move to tuta.

you don't move in a week, you decide to move and start modifying your @ on all the sites and offices that contact you through that address. One day, you realize that it's been months since you last needed your older address and you delete.

I am still with proton since the owners being pricks doesn't change the reasons why I like them for my email: They have made it clear what they will and won't give to authorities and I can act accordingly.

That said, I did look into going mullivad+tuta but decided against it. Since tuta requires you to use their desktop client if you want an "offline" copy of their emails and that just seems like a mess when they inevitably do something shitty and I need to wait for "support" to get back to me for why I can't download my emails and go elsewhere. Whereas I can just keep the bridge running and open thunderbird every week or two with proton.

I honestly wasn't going to switch, but him being backed up by the official account was iffy. Even still, I wasn't necessarily making moves to switch. But I tried to use a new card to pay for my Proton subscription, and it wouldn't verify. I eventually had to make a Paypal just to pay my bill and avoid losing access to my account. So I kinda decided, "fuck it, they can't be that shitty of a company and get my money still."

I was kinda planning to switch, just not urgently. But now, I hope to be fully moved over to Tuta Mail in the next few weeks.

Cancelled auto-renew. I have a year and half to find alternatives. I'll not support this company anymore.

Personally I switched off of VPN to mullvad at least, and am looking into self hosting bitwarden and using tuta (and now addy.io too thanks to a comment here). Honestly I'd been considering switching for a bit anyway just to be less reliant on a single service for everything, so this kinda validated that since even if this specifically isn't a dealbreaker something else could definitely end up as one. Even if I don't fully move off of proton because moving emails is so annoying, it will still be nice to at least have some other options set up.

I'm grandfathered in to the old pricing for Proton Unlimited. I ain't cancelling until they pry the service from my cold, dead hands.

For email, I landed on Tuta as being the closest in feature parity and signed up for the €3/mo plan. Been pretty happy so far and was pleasantly surprised to see both the email and calendar apps were available on F-Droid. Personal bonus for me was they also run on renewable energy.

So far the only con I've found was lack of support for +aliases (e.g. name+alias@tuta.com) but the 15 additional email addresses help to offset that.

I think leaving would be an over reaction.

Edit: I hope all of you downvoters don’t use WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Search, Android, iOS, Amazon, etc, etc. Otherwise, you’re a bunch of hypocrites. Every single major tech CEO gave Trump $1 million and SAT at his inauguration.

I canceled the night of and moved to a combination of Mailbox and Tuta (trying to diversify a little). I also provided a colorful reason for terminating to make sure they knew exactly why.

So far they each have their quirks, but overall I like them. I also set up two domains for email so that the next switch won't be as jarring (since I can just keep using the domain addresses).

I already used Mullvad for VPN, so that was a non-issue.

I don't even know what he has said.

I see a few people who don't want to switch due to the hassle it would take with changing email addresses, presumably because they use one of the @proton.me email domains. Get your own email domain! It's super cheap (if you choose one of the new TLDs, it can be as low as few dollars a year), the setup isn't really hard - you just change a few DNS values, and that's basically it - you can use whatever email you want that ends with your domain. It might take a while to slowly replace all your @proton.me emails with your domain one, but if you're not in a hurry and change any old mail you see during your day-to-day activities, you'll eventually be done with it, and you can set up mail forwarding to your domain for mail that arrives to your old @proton.me address.

And if you ever need to move to a different provider, you just change the DNS records again to a new provider, and your email will start coming to the new one immediately.

I'm moving to Tuta, and bought some domains to use as custom domains. Accidentally clicked yearly instead of monthly in Tuta (cuz I don't want such a long commitment yet), and it doesn't let me change it to monthly, so I have to message support and ask them to change it back to monthly, 24 hours has passed and still waiting for a response... Proton usually responds within 24 hours... 🤷‍♂️

Edit: In like 12 hours, it'd be 48 hours... so... 👀

I sent another email to make sure it went through.

If their response takes longer than like a week, I'm gonna have to look for something else...

I was looking at Proton for mail and calendar right around the time the Andy thing kicked off. I hadn’t yet pulled the trigger on Proton due to their fairly high pricing. I ultimately decided on Tuta for mail and calendar, and I have no issues using their native/desktop apps. I am still forwarding everything from my Gmail account as I slowly work through changing my email on key services. So far so good.

The one issue I had with Tuta is no ability to import mail unless you are at the highest priced tier. I’m on the middle one so no import. What I did instead was just download a copy of my Gmail to an MBOX file, and I have that on my desktop and access it with Thunderbird (read only) as needed. This was fine for me as I don’t have much mail of significance.

Switching was a small action, but one that made me feel immediately better, like I did something concrete in opposition to the rapidly enshittifying tech universe.

You know what would be really great? If Thunderbird actually had its own email service (@thunderbird.net) and not just a client. When they were switching K9 Mail over to Thunderbird mobile, it seemed like there might have been the slightest hint on their blog that they were at least considering it (or maybe I dreamed it). Might be a good source of income for Mozilla too...🤔

Unfortunately stuck with them for VPN (don't use any other service from them) . Lꝏking for alternatives with port forwarding . Welcome to hear suggestions

I'm in pretty deep on the email side to the point where leaving would take days or weeks of effort. I'm not above making that effort if I think it's necessary though. I do not yet think it's necessary.

I did just start using my second Proton product, Standard Notes, around two months ago. I'm not honestly sure if I'll renew it when it expires - we'll see how the year goes. I honestly have very little expectation that Proton is enshittifying or turning evil. I'll be very surprised if it becomes a recurring pattern for them.

I've been using Fastmail for over 10 years now and I love it. I haven't seen it mentioned a single time as an alternative.

I have an account there that I use as a junk email account and their android calendar app. Nothing else. I used to use davx5 and caldav via my primary email provider but I had issues with it losing notification settings on recurring events. I may go look for a different calendar solution. I'll probably still use it for junk mail.

I use the following services, and have for a couple years now I think.

Mailfence for email Mullvad for VPN

Just uninstalled the app.

If I’m honest I did use it much because my friends mostly don’t encrypt emails.

I did manage to get them all on to Signal, so mostly use that for comms now.

Still use Gmail for email because I’m a corpo bootlicker like my friends.