I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year(zeitgeistofbytes.com) |
I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year(zeitgeistofbytes.com) |
Now, Proton is based in Switzerland (thank god for some sane countries in Europe that still remain), but EU is not friend to your "privacy and data sovereignty".
Countries in EU are going after you (and demanding that external platforms disclosure your anonymous identity so that they can put you in prison) because you write "wrong" stuff on the internet. Like, simply calling a - morbidly obese - politician fat. Imagine if that platform was based in the EU. [1]
So, no. EU is not the solution for your privacy. Unless you only care for businesses using your data (which is still bad, of course), but appreciate having the government (and the unelected European Commission) Big Brother watching over you and policing your words.
They are both bad, but they aren't both equally bad. Sure, the businesses can use what I write and see to put even more silly ads in front of me or even train some LLM. But, at least, they won't put me in a Gulag for re-education because I committed some thought crime.
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/germany-started-criminal-inves...
In America they don't wait for you to commit a thought crime, they throw you into a gulag right after trying to enter the country: https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/03/13/bc-woman-us-detenti...
But they're practicing the thought crime part by requiring your social media history on entry.
One of those being about American exceptionalism and how Americans will only ever make judgement about other countries (including the EU) from the highly deformed perspective of their local news. And they’ll do this, knowingly, with no remorse, because they’ve been taught all their life America is the best so there are no reasons to doubt or consider that things aren’t quite right.
Being a continent away, with no idea what is going on over here, americans don’t understand EU culture, nor how it relates to German culture. Fox News does not understand what exactly happened in that particular case you linked, let alone you who is reading a ragebait-fueled summary of it.
You also clearly don’t understand how the European Commission works and what it is able to actually do.
Should I bother correcting you? Of course not: you are most likely not interested otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation. The information is available freely online if you so desire and if you are willing to get out of your comfortable bubbles that constantly prioritise the aforementioned American exceptionalism.
There is no such thing, and has never been. Europeans are different people with different cultures. No matter how much hackers and global projects want to exterminate those cultures and those people.
The equivalent would be to talk about "Mercosul culture" or "NAFTA culture". Or why not "NATO culture", or "BRICS culture"?
(You'd think this last part is obvious, and yet it seems it has to be spelled out for some, who'd rather pick random acronyms to strawman a culture question onto, than use common sense.)
PS- For the sake of your mental health, work on popping that bubble of yours you seem to live inside of.
The common European culture is foremost christianity, and secondly renaissance values, as well as nationalism. The latter mostly in domestic matters, such as welfare. But those values aren't exclusively European.
> For the sake of your mental health
Are you proud of expressing yourself in this way? Probably you're blowing off steam online anonymously, but if you rage and insult like this in real life whenever somebody doesn't agree with your opinions, you're not going to have fruitful interactions with other people.
And yes there is an EU culture as well; just like there is a US culture not just a North American culture.
Go tell a Spanish or an Italian, that is normal for the authorities to go and investigate him and put him in jail for calling someone fat.
It's fascinating the amount of bullocks that comes out of your keyboard with an aura of self-righteous intellectuality, as if you are preaching some universal acepted gospel.
Also, didn't you vote to not call yourself European or something-something?
Oh, I didn’t notice we are already in the censorship phase and we can’t even link Fox News. It’s a factual news (but you are free to contest it) and if Fox is the only one willing to publish it, it says more about European descent into madness than you think.
> Also, didn't you vote to not call yourself European or something-something?
What are you even talking about? You people are insane. You need to be stopped before you destroy us all.
What do you know of what I am or am not? What a silly thing to escape the actual discussion.
What does it say then about the news story itself?
As I said above: Fox is not reputable, and if they’re the only one willing to run a story, that’s not someone speaking truth to power — it’s the equivalent to a wacko conspiracy theorist being the only person agreeing with you. Not a good sign, and not one that will get you taken seriously.
Whether the story has legs can be evaluated independently, and others have done so (it is indeed a non-story that was simply used as rage bait, which you and the other guy are falling for hard). But a lot of time can be saved simply dismissing fox as a sole source, because they have this reputation, and it’s earned.
1. German authorities demanded GAB to disclosure the real identity of a user that called - a morbidly obese - politician, fat, so that they can persecute him.
Now, you can go on with your little show, pretending to be in your high horse where news that shows from Fox News don't count, so that you don't have to actually address the facts.
Go on, deny the actual facts if you dare.
In Germany, Beleidigung has been a criminal offense for decades. Courts (not "authorities") can compel platforms to identify users after due process. No one is being "persecuted", no one is going to a "gulag", and weight is irrelevant.
If you want to argue that criminal defamation laws are bad, do that. But stop dressing an old legal reality up as dystopia.
M365 has become an intangible mess of a multitude of different admin dashboards redirecting you around and complicating things beyond comprehension. For the migration, I wanted to backup my entire email backlog. It took me two hours to finally get it connected to thunderbard via IMAP and do the backup. I was redirected from Docs pages to the M365 dashboard, M365 Exchange dashboard, Security dashboard and whatnot. I had to turn on 2FA which only worked afer enabling some hidden "Security defaults" until I finally could enable IMAP login, and then took several AI assisted attempt to get the server and credential details.
When I cancelled my subscription MS asks you to give a reason, and the first bullet point is "This product is too complicated to manage" - so they even know about the mess they created.
For now, Proton replaced my M365 subscription, bitwarden, and Kagi (I use protons LUMO AI, which uses different models in the backend and gives you unlimited requests). I didn't have a VPN plan before, now it is also included. The value proposition of Proton is unbeatable in itself, the privacy on top is just the icing on the cake.
It’s the price of end-to-end encryption.
The only workaround is synchronising everything locally and searching locally.
- No catch-all (yes, I use my own domain just for me, and I want a catchall to my mailbox)
- Outlook 365 webinterface becoming buggy and shitty in so many ways
- I had 2 domains set up (one private, one business) but O365 would not display which email a given was used as target (just display my name), nor would it let me choose FROM which Email I want send/reply to a mail
- O365 required re-authentication every 24h or so, but I always keep the webinterface open in my tab 24/7
Additionally, I had a Bitwarden paid subscription and looking for another VPN subscription, plus a commercial AI subscription. Proton is has all of that in a one-package deal.
2. Agreed
3. Yes, inbox rules could color these
4. Something must wrong in CA, this should not happen (if you don't want it to)
Whatever nostalgic love there has been for the company from the olden days has completely evaporated by now. It will take a decade for the OS competitor to emerge but once that happens, MSFT will hopefully die in the fiery blaze of death it completely deserves at this point.
This opinion comes fresh off of having to had to engage with their partner center "experience", where basic UI functions are broken beyond repair and simple form submissions have to go through three layers of subcontracted customer "support" which is best described as a broken telephone where you have to explain the problem repeatedly to an endless stack of support staff.
Not to mention Windows 11 BSODing every week and failing to make basic functions like bluetooth work on it.
This may seem dramatic but its an 100% true and accurate representation of how everything works with them these days.
I could only wish my own business were this screwed.
Probably
> they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365)
You forgot Github, the once-reliable and once-generally-fast but now pink-unicorn-bedraggled slow-as-molasses 'forge' site. Oh how they messed it up and am I ever glad I only ever used it as a mirror for my own repos.
How they manage to screw up just about every product they purchase remains a mystery to me but by ${deity} are they good at it.
my experience of asian software development is they simply build enterprise for the users, how the users want it. rather than trying to shape consumer behaviour. in some ways it could be argued that it is less innovative, but when big orgs figure out a USD$500 laptop running WPS+Harmony + email client can replace msft enterprise contracts a lot of asia co's will never go back
culturally homogenous dev teams producing software for a culturally homogenous market is quite powerful. then outsiders will adapt. rather than winslop focus on support everything, localise to every market, hardware, whatever
i see future of:
HarmonyOS or MacOS for corps then misc tablet systems
this will acelerate with hardware shortages making unified OS+hardware product like huawei or macbook more competitive
- No search in Mail. You can use Bridge to pull your emails into something else, but this means it's no longer secure, and not really feasible for a non-techy partner!
- No search in Drive
- 3 domain limit for Mail(???)
- Drive sucks. No previewing files, viewing photos etc. due to missing docs suite
- No proper shared folders in Drive
- Pass is woeful at autocomplete
- Pass Aliases are independent of logins, so you end up with double entries for everything
- You can't sync the calendar with native apps, and the calendar doesn't show birthdays
- No contact sync
- Pass doesn't support SSH
- VPN lets you split tunnel by app on PC, app AND IP on Android, IP on the chrome extension. Some let you include, others exlcude. How hard is it to just allow exclude/include for hostnames?
There's tonnes more that I'm missing that I can't think of from the top of my head, but it seems like Proton have stretched themselves very thinly. What I would consider a lot of basic features are missing. One look at their UserVoice community shows a lot of frustration
I think it's probably best to pay for individual services that focus on one area. I ended up with Fastmail, 1Password, and Windscribe for example.
However, the value of the Google Workspace* mid-tier (approx. 15€) is hard to beat, I think.
I get:
- granular domain \ email controls (blocklists, routing rules, etc.)
- 2tb of google drive space
- and now Gemini, which is quite nice
It’s 2025, and I’m still finding it impossible to leave :(
* note: I use Google Workspace as a personal account, with just one (my) user, because that gives me access to the domain and management tools listed above
It doesn’t seem like Proton even really cares about the how bad their mail search is and is more focused on releasing new products.
This is wrong. There are loads of alternatives, which I can't remember at the moment. AlternativeTo.net lists Hyvor Blogs (https://blogs.hyvor.com/), which isn't one of the ones I was familiar with and cannot vouch for, but serves as an existence proof. Does anyone know any better ones?
Zoho's free plan stopped offering custom domains and/or limits imap access.
[0] - https://workspace.google.com/lp/business/ [1] - https://www.zoho.com/us/billing/pricing/
That of course assumes time is free, so I wouldn't compare it to cloud pricing directly. I'd also personally budget in incremental backups.
The only down side I have heard, that people have, is that you cannot use your own domains.
The great part about email is that you can move between providers without issues. I wouldn’t want to use a posteo.de email for all my services when I don’t know if they will be around in 10 years.
For a business email this might not be cool tho. I get that
According to their Privacy Policy, they sure are a German company and have their core infra on Hetzner, but they rely heavily on USA-based providers for CDN and others: https://www.superlist.com/privacy-policy
Also, if they had a paid tier for Todoist, I don't see how the free-tier of Superlist will provide the same level of service/features.
So overall it looks like a fun exercise but the result is not true to the title and honestly feels misleading.
I DON'T WANT my chats to be "full E2E encrypted" with a 6-digit pin, only for me to loose them when I get a new phone. I DON'T WANT having to use a special gateway instead of normal IMAP to access my Proton mail. It really feels like server-side encryption is being forced down my throat and I don't consent. FB Messenger, X Chat, WhatsApp, Signal, etc... NO. Just LET ME CHAT. This is why me and my friend groups are staying on Discord. Becuase it "just works".
I would like to see more EU companies which aggressively focus on being a just-as-good alternative to US tech companies, but HQ'd in EU for european strategic security, and without throwing usability under the bus.
For documents, if you are even slightly techie, hosting your own OwnCloud/NextCloud is pretty easy. It just works. Both also offer a central calendar function, if that is important.
For email, buy your own domain, and host it with a local provider.
All the other things he mentions (to-do lists, password manager, etc.) just pick your favorite app, and store the data in OwnCloud.
Pumping data in and out may take a while, but they expose an imap interface and it’s a right click in thunderbird or whatever to do this or a ./cli to dump an imap mailbox…
It seems document editing is quite an intensive task.
I think privacy services and software will soon run out of safe havens to operate from.
For standard questions I feel like it doesn't matter too much what you use. When it comes to multi-step searching + reasoning flows like look for alternatives, fetch pricing, feature lists, compare etc, the differences are larger because of the engineering glue and prompting around the pure LLM inference which makes the tools more or less powerful.
I'm moving slowly because this kind of migration is never easy, but I fully intend to move >90% of my stuff to European providers (and 100% of the critical parts).
I admire the motivation though
That's a big deal to some of us.
Especially important it the demonstration that your privacy which Google et al, are so insistent on monetizing, does not mean they are charging you less for the same services that other companies can charge when you are paying only with your money, not your privacy as well.
I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control, and the latest news is that they're still trying / succeeding on some fronts. Please don't reduce such complicated matters to red vs. blue, it's really more complicated and there are no easy solutions anywhere.
I see, the EU propaganda shows effect. Of course a proponent of the non-elected regime doesn't mind the illegal "chat control" and censorship of any wrongthink facilitated by the Digital Services Act.
I've got a bridge to sell you if you think Apple isn't doing the exact same thing. What do you think they are doing with all their focus on their ad business?
> I avoid Google like the plague and only use it when I have to. When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.
HN needs to make an exception for clown emoji.
just untrue lol. people literally just believe any nonsense they read. in a pedantic sense any company, where you send things to them is just "going into a log somewhere to be monetized" if you mean having logs can help improve the product which makes said company money...
so, to narrow things down this is presumably about personalization - in which case that's obviously just untrue.
assuming it's in the pedantic sense, most logs at google are not directly monetized, nor are most logs at google even part of services that even roll-up to ads.
What's more valuable is simply accepting that there are others who are different.
It's not like registrars haven't randomly shut down people's domains due to accidental (or malicious) abuse reports.
Email is really the one that requires lot of caring about so not easy to self host.
By that I mean, could we have like for firefox , heavy clients but with client to client sync. The goal is to not need to have a always online machine while still solving the "i prefer if my emails are copied both on my laptop and my phones" . Especially as nearly all my devices are often if not always on the same LAN
For the experience an average consumer expects, you at a minimum need a central short-lived cache.
Next up I'm moving my TODOs off Todoist to something local-first, and plugging that into my Syncthing setup.
But the blame is on us: we should have known better than to entrust our data to free services run by a company whose entire revenue comes from ads.
Proton is funded by our subscription payments. I think there’s reasonable hope that their incentives will remained aligned with those of their paying users.
> I got my own domain for email
Edit: s/mining/migrating
Recently they got some Euria AI - i havent tried it i bet it's bad. Rest though i really like.
Regarding Euria, I don't use it much since I have Kagi Assistant and other things via work, but I was quite surprised by the results given its cost.
The only annoying thing I saw was that it kept answering in French even though I prompted in English.
Not sure if it's related but
Proton does not hold your unencrypted email body content
It's not perfect but obviously it's a LOT more than searching only on titles.
So basically they sacrifice a usable search function for a security service that isn't relevant to 99% of people and isn't even effective half the time.
The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows. And thunderbird doesn't work great with M365.
But anyway my point is even supposedly premium services screw this up.
I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding, but on MacOS there is a "proper" application: "Microsoft Outlook for Mac". As I understand this is called the "New Outlook" which is a native, non-Electron version. As it is not Electron based it is only 2.6GB (/s).
Anyways.. the search capabilities are insanely bad for searches outside of your current mailbox. It might be related to handling of large result sets where it just provides a limited set of random hits as opposed to a set with the most recent hits. When you provide from-to dates (from a hideously complicated "advanced" menu) the results seem a bit better.
edit/addition: on MacOS, Outlook supposedly uses the native "Spotlight" search engine. MacOS spotlight, when used from the Finder, actually does a really good job in finding the E-mail .eml files from the file system and, when clicked, they open up in Outlook.
Have you tried Apple Mail? I’d be interested to hear if it’s worse than that.
I use it, the search is very bad.
The desktop client is rubbish, though, agreed.
Apple Mail.app is the fastest search available. I use it with o365 specifically for search.
Proton websearch is by default email title, sender/receiver only. You can enable full body search but Proton will download your emails to your browser so the search is local. They dont support server-side body search. If you have thousands of emails, youll need to download those first.
Instead (and this is the suggested way) you can link it to an email client which stores emails on device unencrypted using proton mail bridge. They could pre-load all content in your browser, but again it's pretty bad UX and you would sit there wondering why the search takes 1-2 minutes on a fresh window session if it was on "by default". You *can* use automatic tagging for assisted search (like "if contains flight, add flight tag") though if you want to continue exclusively using the web app(s).
But there is a pretty valid concern here: why don't the native iOS and android apps have an email index?! I guess they don't want to be caught "storing" your emails unencrypted? I don't know - should really be an option.
They are on my watch list however. The CEO is pro-surveillance, but was forced to back down due to the outrage of their customers, but he seems to be ethically quite questionable. But for the moment, I think they do a good job, but they should change their CEO to someone who unquestionably is against surveillance.
Open-source, managed service, based in Germany, and integrates with Proton. Authoring in a block editor or Markdown. Optional built-in analytics with a focus on preserving privacy. Web-hosted posts added about two weeks ago.
That’s how you end up sending push notifications for your latest Nazi content.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-p...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...
Of course for ordinary people there has always been an alternative to Substack, and it's the Bcc field in their email client. For folks looking to self-publish on the web, Wordpress has been around for decades now - there is no excuse for any serious writer or journalist not to know about it and the multitude of managed hosting options. Even for a newsletter-first option, there is Ghost. But if you discuss this with writers who move to Substack the answer is always the same - they want to try access the money or the fame that may come from being on the most popular social network for writing. I think the only fix for this broken ecosystem is for governments to dismantle these sorts of companies, but the US will never kill their golden geese - they are gladly taking a cut from every other country's content creators.
It was irritating.
I just assumed it was "IT policy" and accepted the inconvinience.
GDPR like law and no chat control sounds pretty good.
I'm considering self-hosting Immich to replace photos, but not sure when I'll tackle that and don't fancy having to use Tailscale all the time. No idea about a Drive replacement as yet!
At the same time, they also win on the little things that diehard opponents choose to ignore, like search that kind of works. I don't like Office 365 but I'm a paying customer because, after long research, I haven't found a competitor that meets all my requirements.
No, but I'd call the UK "England" without a second thought...
Last time I checked, it was always rejected, no matter how they reforrmed it. The EU is not one voice, it will always have different opinions. What matters is what's actually voted into law, chat control tried multiple times and it never was.
Also, would you be so kind as to share those wrongthinking related with DSA?
So we an focus on improving things and not bashing on them.
FUD much? Snakeoil would be false claims. There are plenty of problems with Proton but AFAIK not genuinely encrypting customer data is not one of them. If you do have examples please do share.
Marketing that might not address the average user who still get in touch with people relying on surveillance capitalism like GMail address sure but bundling both as one is dishonest IMHO.
Have a look at Word. The app, the web version, the Teams versions. Try editing in one and then opening in another - they aren’t even compatible. It’s such a nasty swamp.
It's unfortunately just a webview to their cloud outlook. If you have an account that's not with Microsoft they will pull your entire mailbox into their cloud (though they don't charge for it). Just pulling directly from another mailserver is something they don't care about.
I'm surprised the search is so bad on Mac too. But spotlight has degraded a lot. When it first arrived in tiger it was great but when I was last on Mac 3 years ago it was indeed pretty bad.
We are where we are due to our choices too - New Zealand.
I tried synchronising the data directly in the browser, without any email client and the search is mediocre and slow.
This is not a great experience for search.
But again, it’s not a critique of Proton, it’s just how it is with E2EE. At least it demonstrate they are really doing E2EE.
I still hope some time in the future homomorphic encryption will help, but I think we are at least a decade away from that.
For anything enterprise related, I would avoid Google and their automated account bans without the possibility of contacting a human tech-support agent like the plague.
You pay for a SaaS solution to remove worries to your day-to-day, not to add more things to worry about.
the polish that can't even delete your entire spam folder half the time
the polish that asks you to verify you own your own email address via email if you want to add an alias to send an email from your own domain (e.g: if you have wildcard inbox and want to reply from one of the addresses you used)
the same polish that gives you no results if you search "one" and the email actually contains "oneword" - you know, search, the thing google is known for.
such amazing polish.
It might not be successful, but you do have far better options than relying on a third party in a country far away.
It's always a varying grade, not either/or.
Google knows what you watch and post on Youtube, your emails, your google drive contents, your photos, contacts and everything. Any bit of that can trigger an automated ban for your account you can't recover from unless you know a Googler personally or can get through to their only working customer service outlet: the front page of HN.
Even if it's just your google account being locked for some random reason, good luck getting out of the situation and/or getting in touch with a human there.
If you can't access your gmail.com address anymore then you become locked out of so many other things.
Horrible times when this has started to become a part of my thought process.
Well that's a quite an important difference.
The way I interpreted is that first password is for the account, so verify I am who I say I am. But since the emails are encrypted, browser can't show my messages in human-readable form. Second/mailbox password decrypts it and shows the emails in human readable format.
This is just a guess.
I would love to hear about second password from other/more knowlegeable folks.
Proton does not have access to your email contents, no matter if you use one or two passwords. They do not have you password, neither the first one, nor the second one, they have a hash of it, to be able to verify you have types the correct password. Only the actual password (the first one or the second one) can decrypt email content. Decryption only happens in the browser (Or in the proton app).
Of course you need to trust them on this, it’s difficult to verify, but it as been audited multiple times.
The second password is an old vestige of the time where they couldn’t manage to use a single password for both authentication and decryption.
I use the second one as well, but I use it so I can use VPN on some common devices the family use as well, without having to enter the second password. So if the family device is lost or compromised, only my first proton password has ever been used on it.
I see this reasoning as the #1 reason not to self host, but it really isn't a big issue once you do the initial setup.
Please expand on this. Public cloud IPs would be on spam lists, and providers like Hetzner and OVH aren’t any better. Where does one go to buy a decent IP?
Unfortunately I don't think there ever will be google docs alternative that people will easily accept because it's almost impossible to build business based on competing with very complex/expensive product that google provides for free. It's clearly their loss leader and moat.
[0] https://nextcloud.com/c/uploads/2025/09/Nextcloud-Hub-25-Aut...
Even google docs are not really pretty. Maybe it's opportunity to get something like Craft, Outline or Notion and thus leaving that docs requirement as part of the suite.
I accept that some people think others are inferior, even if to me they are idiots. I would even be ok if they say it out loud without harming anyone, I just won't listen to them.
Some corporations claim otherwise because they think nazis are good for business.
And they are right at this time in various major tech hubs.
We will see how that works out.
Strange to compare "scares" with a business model that's 20 years old now. Sure the EU is far from perfect but it's like comparing a well known problem to a potential one. One is bad, the other might sucks. It's definitely not equivalent.
We agree, but not for the reasons you think we do.
Chatcontrol is literally 1984. It's mandated at the provider level. You can't opt out.
You can always chose not to participate in the social media, sharing whatever you do. You can't not participate in chat control. Same same, but different.
Chat control is an EU thing. The article is about a move to Proton which is Swiss and therefore outside the EU and not directly affected by chat control or other EU laws. Of course the EU might make it illegal for them to supply their services to EU countries, but then no platform anywhere can avoid that problem.
On the whole EU govt surveillance (assuming you live in the EU) is better than EU govt surveillance plus US govt surveillance plus big tech surveillance.
Its also interesting that they have chosen specific EU countries and the differences between countries does matter.
What happens if, as is probable, the EU brings in similar laws?
What you will find is that many dedicated IP's from larger vendors are fine.
I personally use Hetzner and don't have any issues with reputation at all.
IME anything that can be purchased by an average developer is in some list nowadays and deliverability is always crap (with luck it lands on spam folder).
Europeans tend to have very little idea how the US government functions. Trump is able to do what he does simply because the people voted for a congress that supports him.
It also isn’t how you win in the US. The winner of the popular vote was Trump this last round (unlike his first term), but with a far-from-resounding 1.5%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
