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Cover image for Quest To Get Out of the Google Trap, pt 1
Ryan Haber
Ryan Haber

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Quest To Get Out of the Google Trap, pt 1

I'm working to get some of my life out of the Google Trap. I'm starting with email. It seems like there are the most choices.

There's protonmail.com. I have a subscription already and I like the privacy-first approach, but am not happy with the small storage size. It's a 5 gig limit, and I'm paying like $120/yr. You can only get that up to about 50 gigs. The only solution to this cap is to download photos and upload them elsewhere, which is maybe tedious, but also maybe will help me be more thoughtful. I am excited by their forthcoming protondrive.

Right now, I'm experimenting with hey.com email. I like that larger storage size and some of their workflow features. Some of it is new enough that I'm not sure what I think.

Has anyone used either of these or another smaller, privacy-first email provider that they like and recommend?

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mattother profile image
mattother

I personally really like Fastmail. It looks like it's $10/m for 100GB.

But it has a lot of nice features I really like. Just to list a few big ones for me:

  • Can create email aliases to use different email addresses for different things.
  • Can forwards emails from different aliases to other email addresses (unique to each alias).
  • Good support for FIDO U2F keys with the ability to remove your phone as a fallback device.
  • Solid mobile app that exposes quite a few features (no offline support though).

But it does not support encrypted messages, that I know of (though there's probably a way to setup GPG or something).