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?
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.
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.
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.
wow, hadn't heard about this until now. article: https://archive.is/J9Ant
correction that it says:
> The investigators who questioned Jon told him Homeland Security couldn’t obtain his emails, documents, photos or other content with an administrative subpoena, he said, but the breadth of what federal investigators did ask for shook him.
> Among their demands, which they wanted dating back to Sept. 1: the day, time and duration of all his online sessions; every associated IP and physical address; a list of each service he used; any alternate usernames and email addresses; the date he opened his account; his credit card, driver’s license and Social Security numbers.
However, what information the US government can or can't get from tech companies seems like a moving target.
One thing to consider - they even got the swiss banks to roll over and cough up data on their numbered accounts. This was a decade+ ago.
So good luck.
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.