The only reasonably future proof solution is to get your own domain, and redirect emails sent to @yourdomain.com to your email provider.
Then you can freely change providers in the future but your email addresses stay the same. Doing that costs very little and doesn’t require any self hosting, just buying a domain. Looks professional too.
If you’re willing to run “mail-in-a-box”, with full control of the DNS for your domain name, it sets up all of the security DNS records to not get flagged as spam.
If you’re unwilling or unable to let mail-in-a-box control the full DNS for your domain, mail-in-a-box still has a page that will list every DNS record that needs add to your un-self-hosted DNS. It is many many DNS records, for best spam protection.
My other concern was receiving spam.
But the default spam filter in mail-in-a-box felt immediately noticeably (but just anecdotally) better than the one built into Proton. Which surprised me. I had assumed that I would give up some spam filter quality by self-hosting.
No, your emails are still sent from your providers servers and are signed by Proton/Tuta/Gmail/whatever you choose to use. Your domain is the from: field but it was sent by the actual email provider with all the trust behind it.
I never ran into something requiring a Google/Apple address. Some may require a Google account, but you can create a Google account with any email address. You don’t actually need to use Gmail on your Google account.
I’d recommend an e-mail provider that supports custom domains, so you can easily switch at any time. I personally use Purelymail; I’ve also heard good things about Fastmail and Migadu.
Looking at AirVPN, but not ready to pull the trigger on that yet.
Still looking for a calendar. Thunderbird has one but it’s not on mobile for some reason.
The big one is mail. I was the same as you migrating from gmail so I’m learning my lesson now. Set up Thundermail today and have 3 custom domains set up. Spent hours today swapping out account emails. It’s rough, but I did it to myself. I knew going full Proton ecosystem was a bad idea, but at the time I just wanted out of Google. Take your time.
Basically any company that you give money to is going to be lead by arseholes. By definition. The only easy way is self hosting but that has its own difficulties. (And even then it’s still hosted by an arsehole)
Legitly the only way i would ever dare to even attempt self hosting email again is in 20 years when ai can do it entirely for me using the power of a single AA battery. No sane person self hosts email!
GOG published a letter with neo Nazi imagery, knowingly said it wouldn’t be okay in Germany, and sent the email to everywhere else. After a huge outrage they gave a meaningless apology without any real comitment to investigating how it happened or how they would ensure it never happened again.
Yeah and their defense was: we knew before that it looked bad, so we didn’t send it out to German speaking newsletter subscribers… Which recognised that they knew it looked the way it did, before they send it out. And even then the biggest question they never answered: Why send only that one symbol double? you know, the one symbol that “on some devices on some fonts” makes it an SS symbol, where the “intended” symbol doesn’t have any meaning or reason being doubled?
I want to like GOG, but that whole affair did not portray them from their best side.
Or you would need to specify what specific thing your asking for a link.
The German QA did notice it, but the feedback didn’t get send back correctly is their standpoint. Taken alone, sure, that happens. But with all the rest? no, I don’t believe it.
I’m asking for a source that makes it undisputable they chose not to send the email to Germans for the reason of SS looking symbols, which seemed to be the claim
This genuinely looked like a mistake, where was it reported they didnt send it to German users? I only saw that it was a German QA team that noticed it.
Article linked elsewhere seems to indicate it didn’t go to German users because the German QA team found the issue before it was sent, but due to an internal communication breakdown the issue didn’t make it back to the international team before the emails had already been sent. GOG immediately apologized for the mistake and changed their internal processes to catch these types of mistakes sooner.
It very much reads like an honest mistake, and even then it only impacted a subset of GOG users because it’s entirely dependent on the font used to render the email subject. The actual Unicode character used was a curved S (a letter from the Greek character set), but certain fonts render it looking more like the infamous SS symbol.
Thanks for posting this. Fucking Lemmy man. That reads like a genuine mistake to me… not everything is a conspiracy lol. If you just read the thread here, you’d believe that GOG were some underground Nazi apologists or something.
No, it was a fucking dog whistle for one simple reason: why use the last symbol double? If all of them were doubled or single? Sure, I could believe the mistake angle. But only that one symbol doubled where it doesn’t make any sense to double the “intended” symbol? I don’t believe it. That are too many coincidences necessary for me to believe it.
Is there a source or proof on that? Or is it just that you didn’t find it right now on their website?
The big drama was during their “2026 sale”, where they used GenAI promotional art for the event. They also seem to have refused to confirm using GenAI, and at the time made no promise/commitment to stop.
I mean I believe you, but thoughts on this comment:
reddit
Proton monitors employees’ AI code generation"
This is also a distortion. Proton has a tool that labels which code is AI-generated and which is human-written, which is important for many reasons. It can’t be used to evaluate how much AI somebody is using. The design document for the tool states this clearly. This document is available to all employees:
r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence
The security point
The list goes on and on. Same with the security point. I have access to that chat. Andy never said don’t do pen testing. It’s true, he used shitty language and he personally apologized to the whole company. However in that same security chat he also said something 404 omitted: “The baseline is, we must do this plus be faster at the same time” in reference to security testing.
r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence
He agreed with the additional pen testing, and it was even recently implemented at Proton. What he didn’t agree to was it slowing down the pipeline.
About hiring engineers
This quote “this is the last year that we hire engineers” is also out of context. At Proton, the engineering and product management roles are merging and we call this new discipline “Product Engineering”. Proton also mostly hires product managers with engineering backgrounds. It means we stop hiring engineers who just code, and hire instead product engineers who also exercise product judgment that AI doesn’t have, not that we don’t hire engineers at all. I know this because I help with hiring for the whole company.
One last thing
I want to put a few words out there that aren’t about quotes or screenshots, but about my experience.
To be honest to you, we’re all in a bit of a shock after reading the articles written, and some of the criticism hurts me because it described a company I don’t recognize. Reading the comments on Reddit hurts me because so many of them do not reflect reality. Proton is not rushing into AI without concern for safety, it is actually being done very carefully.
If you’re deciding whether to keep using Proton, I’d just ask that you make that decision after getting the full picture, and not solely on the quotes that have been intentionally taken out of context. Otherwise, you are only hurting the workers that you claim to want to protect.
The thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50317991 raises some valid concerns about the Reddit post in question. It explicitly even says its been approved by the company, so idunno. 404 Media has done a lot of legit exposés in the last few years. I’m inclined to trust journalists over the guy posting on Reddit with permission from Proton. The screenshots apparently included show Yen telling an employee to do damage control with their personal account on reddit, which really makes things look even worse, doesn’t it?
The hard thing about email is getting all your contacts to use your he address, it is not migrating your email history. So owing the domain is the most important thing you can do.
You do not have to own your email server, if you have the domain you can go wherever.
You do then have to defend your domain name, which means making sure it will not expire and is locked.
Do not run your own email server - highly recommend using your own domain though. Use a provider that lets you BYO your domain. Just make sure you get your MX records correct with your DNS provider, most email providers have documentation for this.
I’ve been putting it off, because it took me more than a year to migrate away from Gmail. But this is hard to ignore. I’m tired, fam.
The only reasonably future proof solution is to get your own domain, and redirect emails sent to @yourdomain.com to your email provider.
Then you can freely change providers in the future but your email addresses stay the same. Doing that costs very little and doesn’t require any self hosting, just buying a domain. Looks professional too.
yes but doesnt that just get flagged as spam?
also many services require a google or apple address to be viable
If you’re willing to run “mail-in-a-box”, with full control of the DNS for your domain name, it sets up all of the security DNS records to not get flagged as spam.
If you’re unwilling or unable to let mail-in-a-box control the full DNS for your domain, mail-in-a-box still has a page that will list every DNS record that needs add to your un-self-hosted DNS. It is many many DNS records, for best spam protection.
My other concern was receiving spam.
But the default spam filter in mail-in-a-box felt immediately noticeably (but just anecdotally) better than the one built into Proton. Which surprised me. I had assumed that I would give up some spam filter quality by self-hosting.
No, your emails are still sent from your providers servers and are signed by Proton/Tuta/Gmail/whatever you choose to use. Your domain is the from: field but it was sent by the actual email provider with all the trust behind it.
I never ran into something requiring a Google/Apple address. Some may require a Google account, but you can create a Google account with any email address. You don’t actually need to use Gmail on your Google account.
If I’d only put off de-googling a bit longer before I saw the news I could have skipped this hop. Oh well…
I’m eyeballing Tuta. Anyone have other recommendations?
I’d recommend an e-mail provider that supports custom domains, so you can easily switch at any time. I personally use Purelymail; I’ve also heard good things about Fastmail and Migadu.
I spent the day getting things set up to leave.
Pass went to KeePass, which was easier than I expected.
Drive is now replaced with Filen.io
Standard Notes is now Obsidian
Looking at AirVPN, but not ready to pull the trigger on that yet.
Still looking for a calendar. Thunderbird has one but it’s not on mobile for some reason.
The big one is mail. I was the same as you migrating from gmail so I’m learning my lesson now. Set up Thundermail today and have 3 custom domains set up. Spent hours today swapping out account emails. It’s rough, but I did it to myself. I knew going full Proton ecosystem was a bad idea, but at the time I just wanted out of Google. Take your time.
Fuck it. Let’s make an easy open source email host and all the corpse can wall us out and we’ll just email each other. Wait this sounds familiar.
Basically any company that you give money to is going to be lead by arseholes. By definition. The only easy way is self hosting but that has its own difficulties. (And even then it’s still hosted by an arsehole)
Yes go self host email, I’ll wait
Try stalwart, fresh 1.0 release from last week. Modern jmap and easy to setup selfgenerated dns-zonefile.
Oh, I’ve done it… Won’t do it again, but I have done it.
Legitly the only way i would ever dare to even attempt self hosting email again is in 20 years when ai can do it entirely for me using the power of a single AA battery. No sane person self hosts email!
I self host email. Actually, I run a publicly available email service from my office, so…
GOG is a good company we all pay for.
GOG published a letter with neo Nazi imagery, knowingly said it wouldn’t be okay in Germany, and sent the email to everywhere else. After a huge outrage they gave a meaningless apology without any real comitment to investigating how it happened or how they would ensure it never happened again.
The GOG that knowingly sent out emails with Nazi symbols in?
On some devices on some fonts
Come on man
Yeah and their defense was: we knew before that it looked bad, so we didn’t send it out to German speaking newsletter subscribers… Which recognised that they knew it looked the way it did, before they send it out. And even then the biggest question they never answered: Why send only that one symbol double? you know, the one symbol that “on some devices on some fonts” makes it an SS symbol, where the “intended” symbol doesn’t have any meaning or reason being doubled?
I want to like GOG, but that whole affair did not portray them from their best side.
You got a link because I can’t find that? It was their German team that reported it too
I would like to give you the primary source link to that other place, but since reddit is going choo-choo on the enshittification train and only allows logins now, here is a PCGamer article for that whole mess: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-nazi-runes-to-its-followers/
Or you would need to specify what specific thing your asking for a link.
The German QA did notice it, but the feedback didn’t get send back correctly is their standpoint. Taken alone, sure, that happens. But with all the rest? no, I don’t believe it.
I’m asking for a source that makes it undisputable they chose not to send the email to Germans for the reason of SS looking symbols, which seemed to be the claim
I’m sure they gave a level-headed, reasonable, rational response
Didn’t get one.
Talking about GOG the DRM-free digital PC game store.
Yes they sent an email with the subject containing two runes resembling the SS logo.
“They didn’t notice”, but somehow they didn’t send it to German users
This genuinely looked like a mistake, where was it reported they didnt send it to German users? I only saw that it was a German QA team that noticed it.
Article linked elsewhere seems to indicate it didn’t go to German users because the German QA team found the issue before it was sent, but due to an internal communication breakdown the issue didn’t make it back to the international team before the emails had already been sent. GOG immediately apologized for the mistake and changed their internal processes to catch these types of mistakes sooner.
It very much reads like an honest mistake, and even then it only impacted a subset of GOG users because it’s entirely dependent on the font used to render the email subject. The actual Unicode character used was a curved S (a letter from the Greek character set), but certain fonts render it looking more like the infamous SS symbol.
What?
https://www.heise.de/en/news/GOG-apologizes-for-newsletter-with-SS-runes-in-subject-11321683.html
Holy shit do people need to get educated on Occam’s Razor.
In this case Hanlon’s Razor might be more relevant ;D
Thanks for posting this. Fucking Lemmy man. That reads like a genuine mistake to me… not everything is a conspiracy lol. If you just read the thread here, you’d believe that GOG were some underground Nazi apologists or something.
No, it was a fucking dog whistle for one simple reason: why use the last symbol double? If all of them were doubled or single? Sure, I could believe the mistake angle. But only that one symbol doubled where it doesn’t make any sense to double the “intended” symbol? I don’t believe it. That are too many coincidences necessary for me to believe it.
Yeah my thoughts exactly.
Not with the AI generated images they use
They no longer use it.
I open it right now and all I see is flashy text with game cover art in the offers/deals pages.
DRM-free is a big plus.
Is there a source or proof on that? Or is it just that you didn’t find it right now on their website?
The big drama was during their “2026 sale”, where they used GenAI promotional art for the event. They also seem to have refused to confirm using GenAI, and at the time made no promise/commitment to stop.
The biggest dickhead I know runs my server.
Could be worse, your servers could be ran by the same dipshit that runs mine! I swear nothing ever gets fixed on time!
I mean I believe you, but thoughts on this comment: reddit
This is also a distortion. Proton has a tool that labels which code is AI-generated and which is human-written, which is important for many reasons. It can’t be used to evaluate how much AI somebody is using. The design document for the tool states this clearly. This document is available to all employees: r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence The security point
The list goes on and on. Same with the security point. I have access to that chat. Andy never said don’t do pen testing. It’s true, he used shitty language and he personally apologized to the whole company. However in that same security chat he also said something 404 omitted: “The baseline is, we must do this plus be faster at the same time” in reference to security testing. r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I’m breaking my silence
He agreed with the additional pen testing, and it was even recently implemented at Proton. What he didn’t agree to was it slowing down the pipeline. About hiring engineers
This quote “this is the last year that we hire engineers” is also out of context. At Proton, the engineering and product management roles are merging and we call this new discipline “Product Engineering”. Proton also mostly hires product managers with engineering backgrounds. It means we stop hiring engineers who just code, and hire instead product engineers who also exercise product judgment that AI doesn’t have, not that we don’t hire engineers at all. I know this because I help with hiring for the whole company. One last thing
I want to put a few words out there that aren’t about quotes or screenshots, but about my experience.
To be honest to you, we’re all in a bit of a shock after reading the articles written, and some of the criticism hurts me because it described a company I don’t recognize. Reading the comments on Reddit hurts me because so many of them do not reflect reality. Proton is not rushing into AI without concern for safety, it is actually being done very carefully.
If you’re deciding whether to keep using Proton, I’d just ask that you make that decision after getting the full picture, and not solely on the quotes that have been intentionally taken out of context. Otherwise, you are only hurting the workers that you claim to want to protect.
The thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50317991 raises some valid concerns about the Reddit post in question. It explicitly even says its been approved by the company, so idunno. 404 Media has done a lot of legit exposés in the last few years. I’m inclined to trust journalists over the guy posting on Reddit with permission from Proton. The screenshots apparently included show Yen telling an employee to do damage control with their personal account on reddit, which really makes things look even worse, doesn’t it?
Though, I learned my lesson and bought my own domain. So this pivot should be better.
I would love to chat this through with you. I have some domains but honestly, Iʻve been told so many times to not roll my own…
I did my own email server for a while using Mail in a Box. It’s not hard, but it’s a hassle.
Now I just pay like $36 a year I think for Purelymail. Works great.
The hard thing about email is getting all your contacts to use your he address, it is not migrating your email history. So owing the domain is the most important thing you can do.
You do not have to own your email server, if you have the domain you can go wherever.
You do then have to defend your domain name, which means making sure it will not expire and is locked.
Do not run your own email server - highly recommend using your own domain though. Use a provider that lets you BYO your domain. Just make sure you get your MX records correct with your DNS provider, most email providers have documentation for this.
Likewise. I never plan to host my own email server. You can bring your own domain to Proton, at least.
ngl, I feel very burried by the effort to “de-google”. Like, Iʻm close, very close, and email is like the last thing to do (along with cloud backup).