This might come out as a bit of a rant, but I just wanted to post it here anyway since it’s the only social media I use.
Recently, I’ve been making some steps to improve my privacy. GrapheneOS, Linux on my PC, open source software, moving away from Google stuff. So, next logical step was for me to switch away from Gmail. I went with Tutanota, since they’re based in EU, their mobile app is on F-Droid and doesn’t require Google Play Services. So I made an account, switched a bunch of my private account e-mails from Gmail to Tuta, and was basically done. Two days later, I wake up to a “invalid credentials” message. I checked the option to remember my password on my PC, so I thought it was weird. I checked my phone, and it turns out I was logged out of the app too. I tried changing my password with recovery code, thinking something went wrong (though unlikely since I used a password manager), but I got an error on that one too. So I contacted Tutanota, almost a week ago. No response.
I tried looking on various sites to check if people had a similar issue. I found a few reports on Reddit. The moderator of Tuta says to contact the e-mail address that I sent a message to already, but people complained that they haven’t gotten a response either. I found out that similar reports were happening for a while now, accounts being flagged for seemingly no reason. I found one post from October, 2024, from a frustrated user. He said he was in the same situation, and when he finally got the reply, Tutanota said they can’t do anything. When I found that post, I was really disheartened. I’ve already went back on a bunch of accounts to @gmail.com account, for safety, but there is still a few that I’m not even able to access because they use e-mail 2fa. Some of them being accounts for various government public services.
So this one gave me a pause on my privacy journey. I never encountered problems like this one before. A service blocking my account without any message or warning. No contact from support. Being locked out of my accounts. I’ve lost a lot of enthusiasm to replace a few proprietary services that I have left.
I guess that’s true. This might make me question using some online services and providers altogether if I can avoid it. For example, I don’t think I’ll ever use an online password manager and just stick with local one. Having a situation like this with Bitwarden/Proton Pass would be a nightmare.
Regarding email, consider buying a personal domain for your email address. You specify the ip addresses of the email provider in the domain’s DNS, and on the provider’s side specify that the domain is for your email box. This way, if the email provider doesn’t work out, you only need to change the DNS records to another provider, instead of changing the email address on accounts (which is often impossible).
However, not all email providers support custom domains, and some only do that on paid tiers.
If you do this, make sure to have a backup email on a different provider for all of your domain and DNS services in case something goes wrong you can still fix it. I’ve heard horror stories…
Or use an online password manager and take scheduled exports of the data as a backup.
Search selfhosted on Lemmy and reddit. Take control of your own data and also lean why so many choose not to.
E-mail seems a divisive topic on that though. You find either people whobsay, selfhosted my mail for 4 decades already, never ran into issues! While the other end of the spectrum is not to ever ever eeever try selfhosting e-mail, it is not worth it.
It heavily depend on you internet provider too. In France if you use orange you will have many trouble self hosting, they split IP to multiple users, and your livebox disconnect your IP and port range you were on change. For some time I have to pay for a tiny vps to manage orange port redirections. And emails need some specific DNS configuration which they never did for me. My actual provider is great for self hosting, I sent them an email and the created all the required DNS entry to make hosting email possible.
Yeah it certainly is. I do feel that the people who claim to have had no problems don’t send much email. It’s easy to receive email.
I pay purely mail 10usd to host mine but it’s my work email so I can’t afford any fuck ups (more than I already make)
I self-hosted my email for several years. It was fairly easy, asides from some HTTPS cert issues that I had to correct (and took ages to propagate). But I switched away - I don’t have the expertise to ensure it was safe and secure.