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I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

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Re: I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

#161

Post by waihtis »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #118

Just migrated away my personal email (with custom domains) from Microsoft 365 to Proton, and boy, it is such a better experience. M365 has become an intangible mess of a multitude of different admin dashboards redirecting you around and complicating things beyond comprehension. For the migration, I wanted to backup my entire email backlog. It took me two hours to finally get it connected to thunderbard via IMAP and d…

MSFT is absolutely screwed, they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365) through a combination of hiring subpar cheap devs and AI code slop, and their big strategic money squeeze bet on AI is about to be severely undercut by the market. There is very little of actual value left in the company, they're only held in place by the OS monopoly.

Whatever nostalgic love there has been for the company from the olden days has completely evaporated by now. It will take a decade for the OS competitor to emerge but once that happens, MSFT will hopefully die in the fiery blaze of death it completely deserves at this point.

This opinion comes fresh off of having to had to engage with their partner center "experience", where basic UI functions are broken beyond repair and simple form submissions have to go through three layers of subcontracted customer "support" which is best described as a broken telephone where you have to explain the problem repeatedly to an endless stack of support staff.

Not to mention Windows 11 BSODing every week and failing to make basic functions like bluetooth work on it.

This may seem dramatic but its an 100% true and accurate representation of how everything works with them these days.

Re: I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

#162

Post by agobineau »

waihtis wrote: post #161
littlecranky67 wrote: post #118

Just migrated away my personal email (with custom domains) from Microsoft 365 to Proton, and boy, it is such a better experience. M365 has become an intangible mess of a multitude of different admin dashboards redirecting you around and complicating things beyond comprehension. For the migration, I wanted to backup my entire email backlog. It took me two hours to finally get it connected to thunderbard via IMAP and d…

MSFT is absolutely screwed, they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365) through a combination of hiring subpar cheap devs and AI code slop, and their big strategic money squeeze bet on AI is about to be severely undercut by the market. There is very little of actual value left in the company, they're only held in place by the OS monopoly. Whatever nostalgic love there has been for the company fr…

WPS office + HarmonyOS will likely become dominant

my experience of asian software development is they simply build enterprise for the users, how the users want it. rather than trying to shape consumer behaviour. in some ways it could be argued that it is less innovative, but when big orgs figure out a USD$500 laptop running WPS+Harmony + email client can replace msft enterprise contracts a lot of asia co's will never go back

culturally homogenous dev teams producing software for a culturally homogenous market is quite powerful. then outsiders will adapt. rather than winslop focus on support everything, localise to every market, hardware, whatever

i see future of:

HarmonyOS or MacOS for corps then misc tablet systems

this will acelerate with hardware shortages making unified OS+hardware product like huawei or macbook more competitive

Re: I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

#163

Post by drcongo »

omnimus wrote: post #62
nocchedure wrote: post #8

I’m heavily invested in the Google ecosystem and nothing would make me happier than switching to a privacy-focused European alternative. However, the value of the Google Workspace* mid-tier (approx. 15€) is hard to beat, I think. I get: - granular domain \ email controls (blocklists, routing rules, etc.) - 2tb of google drive space - and now Gemini, which is quite nice It’s 2025, and I’m still finding it impossible t…

Infomanikak “kSuite bussiness” plan 79eur year. 5 email adresses. 3TB drive (their kDrive is legit better than google drive). WebDav/CardDav/CalDav. Their kMeet conferencing is solid. Recently they got some Euria AI - i havent tried it i bet it's bad. Rest though i really like.

I really want to get my entire company out of Google and into Infomaniak but persuading anyone to use their docs suite is going to be impossible, it's awful.

Re: I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

#164

Post by boudin »

miki123211 wrote: post #127
whazor wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should all have e-mail backups regardless of which service we are on. Even Google shuts down accounts randomly. Owning your domain and having e-mail backups makes it easy to switch e-mail services.

Owning your domain just changes your point of failure from Google to your registrar. It is not, in fact, any safer. It's not like registrars haven't randomly shut down people's domains due to accidental (or malicious) abuse reports.

The risk of loosing a domain, especially if used only for email, is lower than losing a google account. Using a gmail.com means that google owns both your emails and your email address and can do whatever they want with it.

Even if it's just your google account being locked for some random reason, good luck getting out of the situation and/or getting in touch with a human there.

If you can't access your gmail.com address anymore then you become locked out of so many other things.

Re: I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

#165

Post by wolvoleo »

andrehacker wrote: post #48
wolvoleo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outlook online (I have M365 business basic) search sucks just as much. It finds really recent emails and ones from years ago but nothing in between for some reason. The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows. And thunderbird doesn't work great with M365. But anyway my point is even supposedly premium serv…

>> The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows. I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding, but on MacOS there is a "proper" application: "Microsoft Outlook for Mac". As I understand this is called the "New Outlook" which is a native, non-Electron version. As it is not Electron based it is only 2…

Yes Mac is the exception. They still have a real app there. On windows they're discontinuing the real app for an electron one (or Webview2 as they call that)

It's unfortunately just a webview to their cloud outlook. If you have an account that's not with Microsoft they will pull your entire mailbox into their cloud (though they don't charge for it). Just pulling directly from another mailserver is something they don't care about.

I'm surprised the search is so bad on Mac too. But spotlight has degraded a lot. When it first arrived in tiger it was great but when I was last on Mac 3 years ago it was indeed pretty bad.

Re: I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

#166

Post by wiether »

As a Todoist heavy user, I was intrigued by their switch to Superlist.

According to their Privacy Policy, they sure are a German company and have their core infra on Hetzner, but they rely heavily on USA-based providers for CDN and others: https://www.superlist.com/privacy-policy

Also, if they had a paid tier for Todoist, I don't see how the free-tier of Superlist will provide the same level of service/features.

So overall it looks like a fun exercise but the result is not true to the title and honestly feels misleading.

Re: I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

#167

Post by mschild »

general1465 wrote: post #78
cdmckay wrote: post #41

I really wanted to switch to the Proton stack and even tried it for a couple weeks but the search in Proton Mail is so bad I couldn’t use it for even simple things like finding my airline tickets. I had to switch back to Google Workspace. It doesn’t seem like Proton even really cares about the how bad their mail search is and is more focused on releasing new products.

I am using paid version of Proton Mail and search is working in thunderbird connected to their IMAP/SMTP bridge just alright. But web interface may suck, I did not use the web for a long time.

The web search feature isnt great. With the bridge youre unecrypting the emails and letting Thunderbird have full access so its as good as whatever Thunderbird (or other programs) have implemented.

Proton websearch is by default email title, sender/receiver only. You can enable full body search but Proton will download your emails to your browser so the search is local. They dont support server-side body search. If you have thousands of emails, youll need to download those first.

Re: I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

#168

Post by drstewart »

ranguna wrote: post #132
drstewart wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, can you define non-US for me? Does a Chinese data centre count as a US option, or are people not moving towards "non-US" options? Let's play the game where you slowly whittle your definition of "non-US" to a set of villages in Iceland and Norway

I'm not sure what your problem is here. Non-US means anything that is not US. Pickup a map and start enumerating countries, China and Russia are just two of many.

[flagged]

Re: I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

#169

Post by kassner »

throw-12-16 wrote: post #159
kassner wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thats just a matter of buying a decent IP Please expand on this. Public cloud IPs would be on spam lists, and providers like Hetzner and OVH aren’t any better. Where does one go to buy a decent IP?

Use an IP reputation tool like https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx What you will find is that many dedicated IP's from larger vendors are fine. I personally use Hetzner and don't have any issues with reputation at all.

I had troubles with Apple blocking a bunch of range IPs from OVH, because they don’t handle abuse claims. It didn’t show up in blocklists at the time, but was in practice unusable.

IME anything that can be purchased by an average developer is in some list nowadays and deliverability is always crap (with luck it lands on spam folder).

Re: I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

#170

Post by Foorack »

Am I the only one who doesn't care about E2E encryption, and just want an EU alternative?

I DON'T WANT my chats to be "full E2E encrypted" with a 6-digit pin, only for me to loose them when I get a new phone. I DON'T WANT having to use a special gateway instead of normal IMAP to access my Proton mail. It really feels like server-side encryption is being forced down my throat and I don't consent. FB Messenger, X Chat, WhatsApp, Signal, etc... NO. Just LET ME CHAT. This is why me and my friend groups are staying on Discord. Becuase it "just works".

I would like to see more EU companies which aggressively focus on being a just-as-good alternative to US tech companies, but HQ'd in EU for european strategic security, and without throwing usability under the bus.

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