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I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

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Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#21

Post by InsideOutSanta »

Over2Chars wrote: post #18
preya2k wrote: post #11

Switching from Google to Proton sounds like picking the lesser of two evils. If you really want to “degoogle” you should probably go for self-hosting or getting a managed OSS product (e.g. managed Mailcow/Sogo Hosting). Otherwise you’re just switching from one crazy billionaire to another. https://mastodon.neat.computer/@jonah/113705526672291257

Do we really know which crazy billionaire is the lesser of two evils? We can merely choose between which is the seemingly better known evil. Self hosting is a way to go. It would be nice if one of those "no code" shops could make it a bit easier or something.

FWIW, Proton has no billionnaires, crazy or otherwise. They are governed by a non-profit foundation, though:

https://proton.me/blog/proton-non-profit-foundation

I do agree that self-hosting is best, but particularly for email, that's not trivial.

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#22

Post by prmoustache »

egamirorrim wrote: post #9
sneak wrote: post #6

This is a function of Proton’s weird e2ee setup, which the calendar and contacts and email protocols were never designed for. I self-host my own calendar, email, and contacts now. You can probably do it on a raspberry pi or small NUC at home, with some port forwards over nebula/tailscale from a $5 VPS, if you wish.

Self hosting email sounds like it comes with a lot of dragons, what do you use for it?

Having said that, you can self host only calendars and contact, this is nowhere as complicated and maintenance intensive as emails. Or use one of the many nextcloud providers available, the free tier is usually enough for that.

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#23

Post by tempfile »

egamirorrim wrote: post #9
sneak wrote: post #6

This is a function of Proton’s weird e2ee setup, which the calendar and contacts and email protocols were never designed for. I self-host my own calendar, email, and contacts now. You can probably do it on a raspberry pi or small NUC at home, with some port forwards over nebula/tailscale from a $5 VPS, if you wish.

Self hosting email sounds like it comes with a lot of dragons, what do you use for it?

Dragons to the point of being impossible. Self hosting your outgoing mail means it will almost surely never reach the recipient due to reputation issues. You can, however, set up a respected email provider with your own domain (meaning that, in particular, you can switch providers easily). I have done this myself, using ForwardEmail as the provider.

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#24

Post by eptcyka »

Over2Chars wrote: post #18
preya2k wrote: post #11

Switching from Google to Proton sounds like picking the lesser of two evils. If you really want to “degoogle” you should probably go for self-hosting or getting a managed OSS product (e.g. managed Mailcow/Sogo Hosting). Otherwise you’re just switching from one crazy billionaire to another. https://mastodon.neat.computer/@jonah/113705526672291257

Do we really know which crazy billionaire is the lesser of two evils? We can merely choose between which is the seemingly better known evil. Self hosting is a way to go. It would be nice if one of those "no code" shops could make it a bit easier or something.

Self hosting is a pain and not sustainable. I self-host, it is cool, but this cannot be the solution. It’d be like everyone going back to farming because walmart can’t be trusted - they cannot but the world will go to hell if everyone has to do everything themselves.

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#25

Post by godelski »

A bit off topic but why are calendars so hard? I recently moved from android to apple and I'm just really impressed no one does a dedupe operation on calendars. Seriously, who works on these things? I'll write you the regex if you really really need it but damn, if you're going to push fancy AI on me to make my life easier at least take care of all the annoying trivial bullshit that makes my life harder.

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#26

Post by kookiburra »

spencerflem wrote: post #2

Fwiw, I had a similar experience and ended up switching to Fastmail. Less private which is a shame, but still achieves degoogling

Here's a relevant article - essentially I think Fastmail may actually be the more private option, since E2EE email promises are only at-rest if you don't use PGP.

https://ownerofhappy.org/encrypted-email-bad

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#27

Post by pbhjpbhj »

sneak wrote: post #8
troad wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own experience of migrating my calendars and contacts from iCloud to Fastmail went seamlessly. What's more, the user experience on my iPhone went pretty much unchanged, including in Apple's own Calendar and Contacts apps, which has been very nice. Would recommend! (It's worth noting for the privacy conscious that Australia, where Fastmail is based, has a truly terrible set of laws when it comes to government snoop…

And Australia is Five Eyes, which means FBI/DHS/DEA/ATF all have warrantless access to everything in Fastmail via FAA702.

Seems to be a useful summary of 702 from a USA perspective: https://cdt.org/insights/section-702-what-it-is-how-it-works...

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#28

Post by rekoil »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #13

A lot of this reads like "I wish Proton Calendar wasn't encrypted on their servers." But that's like the entire value prop of using Proton Calendar over the many other options out there, isn't it?

While I agree with you in general, E2EE can't be a blanket excuse for building bad applications. If your E2EE applications can't deal with data encryption in a way that makes them comparable to competitors non-E2EE products from a usability aspect, then they are still bad applications, regardless if we know that E2EE does make it all way harder.

I love Proton, but there are aspects of E2EE that they haven't worked around well enough at present, in my opinion.

The biggest pain points are:

    - Collaboration
    - Offline access
Both of those are highly relevant for calendars, so it doesn't surprise me they didn't hit the nail on the head on the first try.

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#30

Post by yoavm »

Google Calendar supports CalDAV, but only behind OAuth, which many clients do not support. I've created https://github.com/bjesus/oauth-hopper to solve that - it takes care of the OAuth steps and provides a clean CalDAV endpoint that you can use to read and write to your calendar from almost any calendar application. In reality OAuth Hopper can be used to abstract OAuth away from any endpoint - it isn't CalDAV specific in anyway.
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