What do you folks use instead of Proton and Google? Ideally I’m looking for:
- Non-profit.
- European-based if possible.
- Paid is fine.
- Low-risk. E.g. unlikely to disappear, unlikely to go bankrupt.
My reason to want non-profit is that it’s the best way to align mine and the provider’s incentives, I think. I’d consider for-profit as well, but it’s best if it’s a non-profit.
So far I like disroot a lot. But they are principled about being unpaid, so if the financial ends don’t meet each other my emails will be in trouble. I’m donating to them, but I have my worries. I’m willing to pay a little if I know that my money will go for a quality service, for expansion of coverage (new users) and for open-source technologies.
Proton and their founder Andy are just a piece of sh*t in terms of upper management, so that’s not worth discussing.
Posteo seems adequate. Tuta feels similar to Posteo with a bit more push for fanciness. Is there something similar but non-profit?


I’ve settled on switching to startmail. Its pretty cheap, based in the Netherlands, offers aliases, (which are important to me for keeping emails organized and privacy.) and allows emails to be pgp encrypted. The pgp encryption is honestly a better feature than proton’s encryption since you can communicate with people who don’t have a proton account and still keep emails secret from the provider. (cough cough)
Also it offers IMAP support so I set it up with thunderbird, and I don’t have to bother with plugins or anything like with proton. I’m honestly more happy with startmail than I was with proton so far, although its only been a few days.