To replace everything. Mail, calendar, drive, vpn, password manager, documents etc. What are the pros and cons relative to proton? What are the mobile apps like? What assurances do you have they won’t go full proton in the future? And other questions

  • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    363·
    2 days ago

    What assurances do you have they won’t go full proton in the future?

    Absolutely none. That applies to all services that exist now or in the future. The only way around that is self-hosting but that path has its own issues including a very steep learning curve if you want to be secure as well as private. Maybe this could be a longer term project to work towards?

    For services:

    • Mail - Mailbox.org seems the best option right now
    • Calendar - don’t know.
    • Drive - either Cryptomator used with literally any service or a dedicated service like Filen
    • VPN - Mullvad
    • Password Manager - Bitwarden
    • Documents - I just use LibreOffice offline or CryptPad occasionally if I’m collabing with someone.

    In truth none of these are perfect. Privacy has got a lot harder recently as Proton and StartMail/StartPage have politically shit the bed and the UK seems determined to kill encryption which means I have to avoid really good services like IceDrive just because they’re in the UK.

    EDIT: Calendars. Mailbox.org’s included one works fine. You can sync using CalDAV. The process for Thunderbird (desktop) is here.

    The process for mobile is a little more complicated. First you need Davx5 to actually get the data, but thats all that app does. It’s not a Calendar app. It does work with the native Android Calendar but I used FossifyCalendar.

    So install both of those then login to your Mailbox account in a browser and create a Calendar (or use an existing one). Get its unique URL by looking under the heading ‘My Calendars’, clicking the three bars icon, click ‘Properties’ and you can then copy your CalDAV URL.

    On your Android device open Davx5, tap the plus icon then specify ‘login with URL and username’ tap ‘continue’ then paste in the URL you copied earlier, your email address and your email account password, tap ‘login’ and that should work.

    Now, switch to your Calendar app. I used Fossify Calendar so if you are too, open that up, go to Settings, scroll down to the CALDAV section and turn on CalDAV sync. It might switch to your new Mailbox calendar now, but if it doesn’t, tap ‘Manage synced calendars’ and activate it there.

    • SacralPlexus@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 hours ago

      Can you provide any link for what Startpage has done wrong? I’m familiar with the Proton situation but hadn’t heard anything about Startpage. I’ve actively been looking for non-US based search engines.

    • madame_gaymes@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Regarding Password Managers, you can put a little extra effort into setup with KeePass + SyncThing to avoid using 3rd parties at all.

      Highly recommend not relying on a cloud provider for this kind of thing. You’re just asking for one of two things to happen:

      1. Their servers get compromised
      2. They decide to shut down

      I know you can self-host with vaultwarden, but if you’re not a self-hoster then it’s a little bit simpler to setup SyncThing and use the kdbx format.

      • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2·
        21 hours ago

        Thats a good point, I might set that up myself!

        At the moment I do a once-a-week encrypted export from BitWarden and Aegis (authenticator) and put those exports onto an encrypted USB pen drive to avoid the issues you mention but I think your way is probably better.

        • madame_gaymes@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          21 hours ago

          You mentioned another excellent tool, Aegis!

          I use it too, and I have it set to auto-export every time I add a new OTP provider to my SyncThing system. Since you can encrypt the exports, it fits nicely and have my OTPs available everywhere.