Proton, Mullvad, PIA, are a few decent options. Be careful about anything that isn’t widely trusted by the community as there are so many un-trustworthy providers out there that are basically shilling old-school spyware/malware. Also, for getting decent performance, they should also be using a modern protocol like wireguard underneath, not something like OpenVPN or L2TP or something like that. You will want port-forwarding if you use it for torrents, and that narrows it down extremely.
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expatriado@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
looking to ditch hotmail after 25 years, noticed proton also offers vpn, may as well get that, i live in a red state
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Proton, in my opinion, make the best VPN for people who need both mobile device support and port forwarding so they can be a good citizen with all those linux ISOs they torrent. I don’t use their desktop client (I prefer to rawdog OpenVPN and Wireguard) but people like those.
Proton’s email is dogshit. Don’t get me wrong, it is awesome for making burners that many websites don’t insta-block (although that is shifting). But you don’t own your data unless you regularly run their nonsense client to tunnel into their servers. So if Proton goes shit tomorrow? All your emails are gone. Not a HUGE issue if you regularly fetch those but… yeah.
I’ve been backburnering it for other reasons but folk like (Not That) Will Smith and many others have been very big supporters of Fastmail and, looking at it, it seems pretty nice. And it fits my use case of using an email address at a domain I own so that I can just move between services depending on pricing and how evil corporations are in a given month.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
No one gives a single flying fuck about owning their email generally. The number of people who actually care about that aspect basically can be counted on one hand compared to the total number of even technical people who understand what that means.
funkajunk@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Tbf most people don’t download offline copies, they just let all their email live on their provider’s servers and never think twice.
Personally, I’ve used either Outlook or Gmail since 2000 and haven’t ever had an issue getting access to my emails.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Which, again, is an issue if you need to get your McCauley on and get out the door in 5 minutes flat
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
That is an important point. For all that Microsoft and Google do to enshitify email, all the spying, all the privacy invasions they do monitoring your every click, contact, and the content of every email, they are extremely reliable at storing those emails. If you move away from them, there is a non-zero chance that is greater than the above companies that your new provider will go belly-up and you lose access to email. So there is an incentive to download things, at least periodically, and store them somewhere. If you use a mail client, that’s very easy. This is an aspect of tech literacy, like backing up your files in more than one place generally, that very few are taught.
The 3, 2, 1 rule of backups should be taught to school children. Instead, big tech go out of their way to abstract away the problem behind layers of infantilizing services. It works well, until it doesn’t.
Flisty@mstdn.social 3 weeks ago
@Jason2357 @funkajunk I mean that was the initial selling point for Gmail wasn't it? Don't worry about deleting or archiving anything, ever, you can just search for it... Basic file management skills sidelined.