I want to change my main email. I’m using gmail right now. Which free email host do you trust and recommend? Hopefully one that I can open from the phone and the desktop, instead of from the web.
I want to change my main email. I’m using gmail right now. Which free email host do you trust and recommend? Hopefully one that I can open from the phone and the desktop, instead of from the web.
Don’t use free email, with cloud software if it’s free than your the product. I’m not some GNU bible slapper but genuinely you should
This means you can still get emails if your email provider locks you out by switching providers and vice versa.
For free users on @hotmail, @gmail, etc, if Google locks them out even by mistake they are screwed, and it does happen, like to terraria’s lead dev and the partner of a Google employee.
Remember, email is rarely ever encrypted and it’s worth paying for your privacy
For many people email is not really that important. While I agree that it would be better to fully own your email address (domain) it’s just not that important. If I don’t have access to my email, I’ll let my bank know that I use a different mail.
I would pay protonmail 10 bucks a year for my mail address just to support them but they don’t offer that. I only need it for sometimes amazon and who knows. But it’s certainly not worth 50 bucks a year - unless you own a business that highly depends on it. I don’t use it for communication with real people. Just websites that need to prevent spam or want to communicate with me for notifications.
I think you are forgetting that
If privacy is important, use PGP or selfhost your email. But the amount of work that is needed is not worth the trouble for an average person.
The chance that you need to recover your account us so tiny that you can neglect it. And if you know that you’re doing shady stuff withyour email account, just selfhosting won’t be enough either.
The domain does not provide extra privacy, but it does not ditch extra privacy also.
buttman@gmail.comvsbutt@man.comare two emails addressed to you, but no one knows who you are.Rather, it provides a framework to be a digital nomad, switching email providers at a whim while not needing to do account recovery. An @protonmail can’t do that.
In the later half
I essentially read the “what’s the point of privacy if you have nothing to hide” argument. I don’t do drugs or run a torrent tracker.
mistakes do happen and especially with services featuring a free tier, they have so many users they don’t have time to double check their actions or care about providing good support. I already provided two examples of pretty notable people getting banned from Google for unknown reasons and still not being able to get their account back.
Closer to home, let’s look at Lemmy. As it’s still small, the admins interact with the users and think twice before banning. Reddit on the other and is the opposite, because they quite literally have a million times more people to worry about.
Not everything Free means you’re the product, do research on the email provider, do research on the company. Relying on “You’re the product” is going to be complicated, also paying for anything doesn’t make you less of a product, just look at games.
Set up your own emails or procure an Open-Source provider
Providing a basic email service with small storage/traffic allowance costs in the order of cents per UserMonth.
From the business perspective, giving something for free can basically be considered a marketing (advertising) expense – essential for building a successful business.
If you get the free storage/traffic/feature allowance in the sweet spot, it’s useful enough that free users stick around and you get a good reputation, yet juuust constrained enough that users who want that little bit more convenience or features will consider a paid plan. And word-of-mouth advertising is super effective – all the happy users will recommend your paid service to family/friends/acquaintances who happen to be looking for a service provided by them.
Another benefit free services can provide to the business (especially in early stages of developing a system/business) is real-world testing at scale of your infrastructure and processes with real users.
Thanks, you and @[email protected] reminded me that indeed there are some goodies out there.
For me personally, I do want the extra reassurance from the fact the company is profiting off me without reselling my data and I encourage others to also do that, but I am willing to believe there are free services that do respect privacy