commit: ba841633cb3ca88b6779af0d31c676d7e2ae6e91
parent c18202f954af177bea7025666d7c1ed07169ab6a
Author: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2024 14:04:48 +0100
Remove mail service provider recommendations
Is outdated
Diffstat:
1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 121 deletions(-)
diff --git a/content/blog/Mail-service-provider-recommendations.md b/content/blog/Mail-service-provider-recommendations.md
@@ -1,121 +0,0 @@
----
-date: 2020-06-19
-layout: post
-title: Email service provider recommendations
-tags: [email]
----
-
-Email is important to my daily workflow, and I've built many tools which
-encourage productive use of it for software development. As such, I'm often
-asked for advice on choosing a good email service provider. Personally, I run
-my own mail servers, but about a year ago I signed up for and evaluated many
-different service providers available today so that I could make informed
-recommendations to people. Here are my top picks, as well as the criteria by
-which they were evaluated.
-
-Unfortunately, almost all mail providers fail to meet my criteria. As such, I
-can only recommend two: Migadu and mailbox.org.
-
-# #1: Migadu
-
-[Migadu](https://www.migadu.com/) is my go-to recommendation
-for a mail service provider.
-
-**Advantages**
-
-- Migadu is a small company with strong values and no outside capital (i.e.
- no profit-motivated external influence). Email support and a human being
- answers, and their leadership is accessible if you have questions or feedback.
-- Their pricing is based on bandwidth usage, and does not rely on artificial
- scarcity like limited domain names or mailboxes.
-- Has lots of features for your postmaster - you can treat it as a managed mail
- server for your organization.
-
-**Disadvantages**
-
-- They have suffered from some outages in the past. The global mail system is
- tolerant of such outages - you don't have to worry about messages being lost
- if they were sent during an outage. Still, being unable to access your mail is
- a problem.
-- ~~If you are on a trial account, they will put an advertisement into your email
- signature. I don't think that it's ever appropriate for a mail service
- provider to edit your outgoing emails for any reason, and certainly not to
- advertise.~~ Updated 2021-03-12: this is no longer the case.
-
-Full disclosure: SourceHut and Migadu agreed to a consulting arrangement to
-build their [new webmail system](https://git.sr.ht/~migadu/alps), which should
-be going into production soon. However, I had evaluated and started recommending
-Migadu prior to the start of this project, and I believe that Migadu fares well
-under the criteria I give at the end of this post.
-
-# #2: mailbox.org
-
-*Update: as of 2023 I no longer recommend this service.*
-
-[Mailbox.org](https://mailbox.org/en/) may be desirable if you wish to have a
-more curated experience, and less hands-on access to postmaster-specific
-features.
-
-**Advantages**
-
-- Excellent first-class support for PGP, and many other strong security and
- privacy features are available.
-- Was able to speak to the CEO directly to discuss my concerns and feedback, and
- have my questions answered. Raised some bugs and they were fixed in short
- order.
-
-**Disadvantages**
-
-- The interface is a little bit too JavaScript heavy for my tastes, and suffer
- from some bugs and lack of polish.
-- They are a German company serving mostly German customers - German text leaks
- into the UI and documentation in some places.
-- Completing a Google captcha is required to sign up.
-
-# Others
-
-Evaluated but not recommended: disroot, fastmail, posteo.de, poste.io,
-protonmail, tutanota, riseup, cock.li, teknik, runbox, megacorp mail (gmail,
-outlook, etc).
-
-# Criteria for a good mail service provider
-
-The following criteria are objective and non-negotiable:
-
-1. Support for open standards including IMAP and SMTP
-2. Support for users who wish to bring their own domain
-
-This is necessary to preserve the user's ownership of their data by making it
-accessible over open and standardized protocols, and their right to move to
-another service provider by not fixing their identity to a domain name
-controlled by the email provider. It is for these reasons that Posteo,
-ProtonMail, and Tutanota are not considered suitable.
-
-The remaining criteria are subjective:
-
-1. Is the business conducted ethically? Are their incentives aligned with their
- customers, or with their investors?
-2. Is it sustainable? Can I expect them to be around in 10 years? 20? 30?
-3. Do they make unfounded claims about security or privacy, or develop
- techniques which ultimately rely on trusting them instead of supporting or
- improving standards which rely on encryption?[^1]
-4. If they make claims about privacy or security, do they explain the
- limitations and trade-offs, or do they let you believe it's infallible?
-5. Do you trust them with your personal data? What if they're compelled by law
- enforcement? What is their government like?[^2]
-
-Bonus points:
-
-- What is their relationship with open source?
-- Can I sign up without an existing email address? Is there a chicken and egg
- problem here?[^3]
-- How well do they handle plaintext email? Do they meet the criteria for
- recommended clients at
- [useplaintext.email](https://useplaintext.email/#implementation-recommendations)?
-
-If you represent a mail service provider which you believe meets this criteria,
-please [send me an email](mailto:sir@cmpwn.com).
-
-[^1]: This also rules out ProtonMail and Tutanota, doubly damning them, especially because it provides an excuse for skipping IMAP and SMTP, which conveniently enables vendor lock-in.
-[^2]: This rules out Fastmail because of their government (Australia)'s hostile and subversive laws regarding encryption.
-[^3]: Alarmingly rare, this one. It seems to be either this, or a captcha like mailbox.org does. I would be interested in seeing the use of client-side proof of work, or requiring someone to enter their payment details and successfully complete a charge instead.
