Comment by frereubu
15 hours ago
I'm a happy user of Fastmail, but I would prefer a properly EU-hosted service. (Fastmail now have data storage in the EU, but much of their infrastructure is in the US and data still passes through there - something that they're open about, but I'd prefer not to happen). The last time I looked at mailbox.org the offer wasn't nearly as good as Fastmail in terms of storage, catch-all email addresses etc, but I took another look recently and it seems to be better. Does anyone here have first-hand experience of mailbox.org?
As Fastmail themselves have pointed out many times, e-mail is inherently a multi-party activity with both parties holding a copy of the e-mails. Aside from the microscopic amount of people GPGing their e-mail and sending it over good servers, your e-mail is as private as the other party treats it. Which isn't very much. And you can't do anything about that.
You want private and / or anonymous communications? Don't use e-mail.
Fair point, but my desire is for "good enough" rather than perfect. I know my emails go into other systems, it's more about feeling that my inbox is hosted by a company solely based in a jurisdiction where it can't be compelled to do anything by the US government. It's also a matter of principle - I want to move as much of my infrastructure as I can away from US-based services because I don't trust things not to get worse there.
The bigger issue isn't a privacy one, it's a security one. For many people, if you can get access to their email box, you can account-reset your way into any other account they own. So if an authoritarian state compromises your account (because they control the servers), there goes your everything
A lot of people seem to ignore this point when it comes to Proton’s E2EE of emails at rest. It wasn’t even a year ago when the US government subpoenaed a Pennsylvania man’s entire Gmail inbox because he wrote a letter to a DHS attorney. This wouldn’t happen with Proton. It would definitely happen with Fastmail.
2 replies →
I use mailboxorg its acceptable.
The webmail has io.ox in the URL so I assume it is hosted ox (www.ox.io of softwares) which is SIGNIFICANTLY worse performance and usability wise compared to the Fastmail webmail -- I don`t use SMTP/IMAP so I do not know what that is like. Routinely on restricted networks that only allow HTTP/HTTPS so it is a webmail only experience opinionated in mine.
Thanks.
They're also headquartered in Australia, which is very friendly, privacy wise, with the US isn't it?
If you're not in one of those places and you want to move from gmail you might as well pick a safer jurisdiction.