Email provider suggestions (non- BIG TECH)

Does anyone have an email provider that is "non" BIG TECH...?  I'd like to quit using gmail, yahoo, outlook and move to a "not big tech" host.

Anyone have suggestions?  I'm willing to pay a provider for email.

I recently stopped using youtube, use of google, chrome, Facebook, and now Ebay (just yesterday).

You could try https://protonmail.com/

Zippy wrote:You could try https://protonmail.com/

Just heard about that one as I began my search... I will investigate, thanks

Sounds promising...


ProtonMail is run by Proton Technologies AG, a company based in the Canton of Geneva. Its servers are located at two locations in Switzerland, outside of US and EU jurisdiction. The company also operates ProtonVPN, a VPN service.

I have a couple "tinfoil hat" wearing friends that use the paid version as they can encrypt to outside domains as well. From what I understand everything internal, e.g. your inbox, is encrypted. Outbound mail is not unless you upgrade to premium.

Zippy wrote:I have a couple "tinfoil hat" wearing friends that use the paid version as they can encrypt to outside domains as well. From what I understand everything internal, e.g. your inbox, is encrypted. Outbound mail is not unless you upgrade to premium.

My tinfoil hat has nothing to do with being worried about encryption... has everything to do with what's right for our country (and google, microsoft, yahoo and etc etc are not)  IMHO

I vote at the ballot box and with my $$ and patronage

Don't want to get political... just want an option for email that isn't supporting what I don't support, period

+1 for protonmail. I've been using it for quite some time, very pleased with it. There are outages, but they are very unfrequent and brief.

javaduke wrote:+1 for protonmail. I've been using it for quite some time, very pleased with it. There are outages, but they are very unfrequent and brief.

thank you... I'm going to give this one a go

Spend the $12 a year to own your own domain (e.g. iowashooter.email) and then pay to have it hosted. I use Rackspace for historical reasons but there are lots of alternatives. That way you keep your own email address regardless of who's actually moving the bits for you.

straybrit wrote:Spend the $12 a year to own your own domain (e.g. iowashooter.email) and then pay to have it hosted. I use Rackspace for historical reasons but there are lots of alternatives. That way you keep your own email address regardless of who's actually moving the bits for you.

Also something to consider... Thank you

straybrit wrote:Spend the $12 a year to own your own domain (e.g. iowashooter.email) and then pay to have it hosted. I use Rackspace for historical reasons but there are lots of alternatives. That way you keep your own email address regardless of who's actually moving the bits for you.

I have not been considering this at all but I like this suggestion.

Thanks for tips... Signed up for protonmail.  So far, so good

Proton Mail is a fine choice.

The big providers give you email for free. Free! But it's not free to store 50GB mailboxes and have it continuously backed up and available, with all sorts of powerful search, organization and anti-malware & phishing features. That all costs a lot of money and the shareholders of the big tech companies don't provide these services for free as a gift to society. No, instead it's a profit center. Generally if you aren't paying for a service on the internet such as gmail or facebook you are not the customer - you are the product. They make big money not just off of showing you advertisements but also mining and selling your activity, demographic, relationship data etc. And often content you handle with the service (e.g. sending photos) gives the provider an unlimited royalty free license to all of that content.

As mentioned you can buy a domain and either use a hosting provider or many of the domain registrars like Gdaddy offer hosted email services. I would caution that using Microsoft *Office 365* puts you in their cloud like Google's gmail and if you aren't an enterprise customer negotiating your own terms I wouldn't trust them any more than the others. But if they have a *hosted exchange* offering where the provider is hosting the infrastructure on your behalf and not just reselling the MS cloud O365 then you get the benefits of not having your data mined (except of course when interacting with people who are on e.g. gmail anyway) but also having at least rudimentary security filtering and being able to use Microsoft Outlook as your email client with decent search and great calendar functionality.

A frequent alternative to Microsoft for hosted email is something like a squirrelmail frontend with IMAP and SMTP services on the backend. There are two stand-out issues for me with this approach: little or often no security (anti-malware, anti-phishing & anti-spam) capabilities and poor search by modern expectations.

Gmail is very good at what it does in regard to features. It unfortunately though pays for itself by exploiting your activity on it. I would prefer instead to be able to pay them $60/year for the service and no surveillance but I'm not sure that would be more than they could make off me using it for free

I have lived with all of these mentioned options and more. Personally I have resigned to using two providers: gmail and proton mail. Personal information, pistol photos, primer order receipts, etc. that I don't want Google having license to or telling other people about I use proton mail for.

Iowashooter got his question answered, closing this off topic thread.