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Ask HN: How to move away from Google

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Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#111

Post by currysausage »

thebean11 wrote: post #75
destitude wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ProtonMail has abysmally small storage space if you receive attachments in mail frequently.

Fastmail is much cheaper if you need many gigs of storage, but you don't get the encryption Proton offers.

On the upside, Fastmail is the one e-mail service that I have tested that is actually more comfortable to use than Gmail. How they manage to incorporate practically every feature I could dream of while offering a totally neat, snappy, intuitive interface across platforms is just impressive. (Testing right now and planning to move there from Gmail.)

Proton looks really neat too, I just don’t like the thought of not having platform-independent IMAP access. It’s certainly a sensible tradeoff for more security-minded folks though.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#112

Post by dividedbyzero »

salzig wrote: post #42
dividedbyzero wrote: post #25

I'm still looking for an alternative e-mail provider that is more privacy-conscious than Google, still works with ordinary IMAP and is based in the EU so I get to actually benefit from EU data protection. Haven't found one that ticks all boxes yet, but going with a US company doesn't appear to change much as I'm not a US citizen and hence fair game once my data is on US servers and I guess it inevitably will end up t…

What about https://mailbox.org/ ? I

I tried them in 2019, they did (and do, I guess) check all my boxes but it seemed they were moving fast and breaking stuff and IMAP/SMTP in Apple Mail was one of the broken things. Docs were very much out of date, IMAP kept erroring out every few attempts and SMTP never worked at all (their support people couldn't help either IIRC). IMAP/SMTP is a basic requirement for a not-E2E-email provider so that didn't instill much trust. Are they doing better nowadays?

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#113

Post by devoutsalsa »

currysausage wrote: post #111
thebean11 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail is much cheaper if you need many gigs of storage, but you don't get the encryption Proton offers.

On the upside, Fastmail is the one e-mail service that I have tested that is actually more comfortable to use than Gmail. How they manage to incorporate practically every feature I could dream of while offering a totally neat, snappy, intuitive interface across platforms is just impressive. (Testing right now and planning to move there from Gmail.) Proton looks really neat too, I just don’t like the thought of not ha…

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail a few months ago and it’s been great. Don’t miss Gmail at all.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#114

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

throwaway67743 wrote: post #14
4kelly wrote: post #8

Fastmail for email. I used to use syncthing to maintain backups and syncing, but eventually just gave into iCloud as a compromise. Setting up and maintaining syncthing on wife and kids devices became a pain. DuckDuckGo for search. Dropping down to google when I’m stuck. Honestly I’ve found google worse for technical topics due to all the junk websites that recycle content. You’ll be fighting against the current tryin…

I really want to like ddg but it's just awful - not only are the results completely irrelevant but now it's started showing me russian language results, I'm in a country that uses the Latin alphabet.

I just recently started seeing these results too, particularly when doing foreign (latin) non english searches.

I thought at first it was russians talking about hacking foreign banks, supermarkets etc. Then i started noticing links about doctors, etc and i realized something is off.

This is a very recent development. I'll prob have to drop ddg for something else...

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#115

Post by kyharri »

keraf wrote: post #36

I moved away from Google a few years ago. I'm using the following alternatives: - Email: ProtonMail - Contacts, Calendar, Online storage: NextCloud hosted by Hetzner ( https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share ) - Phone: LineageOS (Android) -- App stores: F-Droid for most apps and Aurora store for the occasional non F-Droid apps (like the ProtonMail client) -- Maps: MagicEarth (not open source but privacy friendl…

Any particular reason to avoid OpenStreetMaps? Vs MagicEarth

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#116

Post by dividedbyzero »

srhngpr wrote: post #89
dividedbyzero wrote: post #25

I'm still looking for an alternative e-mail provider that is more privacy-conscious than Google, still works with ordinary IMAP and is based in the EU so I get to actually benefit from EU data protection. Haven't found one that ticks all boxes yet, but going with a US company doesn't appear to change much as I'm not a US citizen and hence fair game once my data is on US servers and I guess it inevitably will end up t…

I recently moved all emails on personal domains to Cloudflare Email Routing [1]. It works flawlessly and you can setup ProtonMail or whatever other email you want as your private address that everything gets forwarded to without having to reveal what the destination address is. For sending email, I setup an SMTP relay via Amazon SES. If you verify your domain, you can send an email from any alias. This combination wo…

That's a lot of moving parts, I don't think I'm comfortable juggling cloud infrastructure across three vendors just for e-mail. Also, I guess being US corporations AWS and Cloudflare still have to hand over any data a US agency requests.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#117

Post by Macha »

ilikepi wrote: post #102
Macha wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recent one from me: "Hibernate window function" Google showed results that explain Hibernate's expression language isn't sufficient to express them and explainers on how to drop down to native queries. DDG showed me how to hibernate my windows PC.

I tried the same test, in a clean browser that should have nothing for Google to grab (beyond IP address) to correlate with my browsing habits. Of the top 10 results, Google got the right context in 7, while DDG got it in only one (the 10th in fact). I guess if you work with that particular piece of software, maybe you hit this sort of thing a lot. Thankfully, my experience is more like GP's: I only rarely try sendin…

Yeah, enterprise java tech in general (not just hibernate) seems to be some of the worst. There's enough terminology collision and incentive for blogspam with the number of corporate users, but not enough interest in people using it for personal reason to have high quality blogs, and core pieces of it (Hibernate, Spring, Jackson for example) have shockingly poorly organised documentation.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#118

Post by dividedbyzero »

mjochim wrote: post #35
dividedbyzero wrote: post #25

I'm still looking for an alternative e-mail provider that is more privacy-conscious than Google, still works with ordinary IMAP and is based in the EU so I get to actually benefit from EU data protection. Haven't found one that ticks all boxes yet, but going with a US company doesn't appear to change much as I'm not a US citizen and hence fair game once my data is on US servers and I guess it inevitably will end up t…

Don't know which providers you have considered, but one that many around me use is posteo.de. Or gandi.net (based in France).

Posteo can't do custom domains (I mentioned near the end of my comment I own one that I'd like to keep using)

Will check out gandi.net though!

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#119

Post by throwmeariver1 »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #25

I'm still looking for an alternative e-mail provider that is more privacy-conscious than Google, still works with ordinary IMAP and is based in the EU so I get to actually benefit from EU data protection. Haven't found one that ticks all boxes yet, but going with a US company doesn't appear to change much as I'm not a US citizen and hence fair game once my data is on US servers and I guess it inevitably will end up t…

zoho.eu is quite nice and a different entity than zoho.com

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#120

Post by e19293001 »

keraf wrote: post #36

I moved away from Google a few years ago. I'm using the following alternatives: - Email: ProtonMail - Contacts, Calendar, Online storage: NextCloud hosted by Hetzner ( https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share ) - Phone: LineageOS (Android) -- App stores: F-Droid for most apps and Aurora store for the occasional non F-Droid apps (like the ProtonMail client) -- Maps: MagicEarth (not open source but privacy friendl…

I moved to DuckDuckGo as my default search engine in the past couple of weeks but a few days ago, I had gone back to google search because the search results are much better. I really wanted to move away from google but the service is just much greater compared to the alternatives.
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