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FairEmail: Open-source, privacy friendly email app for Android

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Re: FairEmail: Open-source, privacy friendly email app for Android

#41

Post by flopunctro »

rexreed wrote: post #39

Am I a weirdo for using POP mail on an Android? I don't trust any third party with storing my email. Is there a reason why I should move to IMAP? I mean I know the technical reasons. But it says on the FairEmail page: "FairEmail might be for you if you value your privacy." and also says "works with virtually all email providers, including Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo!" For me, privacy is more than what's on the client -…

IMAP is not an email provider, it's just another protocol for reading your mail. It is the successor of POP3, having several key improvements. Somewhat like HTTP2 is to HTTP.

If both your email provider and your client (aka mail reading software) support it, there really is no reason to use POP instead of IMAP.

Re: FairEmail: Open-source, privacy friendly email app for Android

#42

Post by sokoloff »

rexreed wrote: post #39

Am I a weirdo for using POP mail on an Android? I don't trust any third party with storing my email. Is there a reason why I should move to IMAP? I mean I know the technical reasons. But it says on the FairEmail page: "FairEmail might be for you if you value your privacy." and also says "works with virtually all email providers, including Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo!" For me, privacy is more than what's on the client -…

The convenience of having the same view (via IMAP) of my email from multiple devices is worthwhile for me. It also makes supporting my parents from hundreds of miles away much easier when they are on IMAP vs when I had them on POP3 before. "Mom, your email is also on your phone, your laptop, your desktop, and on Dad's computer. It's all the same."

I already trust my provider to handle my email once; there doesn't seem to be a vastly larger trust requirement on my part for them to handle it multiple times. (And epsilon additional privacy concern.)

Re: FairEmail: Open-source, privacy friendly email app for Android

#43

Post by rexreed »

flopunctro wrote: post #41
rexreed wrote: post #39

Am I a weirdo for using POP mail on an Android? I don't trust any third party with storing my email. Is there a reason why I should move to IMAP? I mean I know the technical reasons. But it says on the FairEmail page: "FairEmail might be for you if you value your privacy." and also says "works with virtually all email providers, including Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo!" For me, privacy is more than what's on the client -…

IMAP is not an email provider, it's just another protocol for reading your mail. It is the successor of POP3, having several key improvements. Somewhat like HTTP2 is to HTTP. If both your email provider and your client (aka mail reading software) support it, there really is no reason to use POP instead of IMAP.

Yes, I'm aware of IMAP as a protocol. My point has to do with the location and trust. I need to be able to trust the server as a point of mail storage.

While I agree that POP still uses the server as a go-between, at least the mail doesn't reside on POP servers forever. Whereas with IMAP, if I have 25+ years of email I'd like to be able to view and archive and search, all of that has to sit at the server rather than at the client.

Re: FairEmail: Open-source, privacy friendly email app for Android

#44

Post by rexreed »

lisper wrote: post #40
rexreed wrote: post #39

Am I a weirdo for using POP mail on an Android? I don't trust any third party with storing my email. Is there a reason why I should move to IMAP? I mean I know the technical reasons. But it says on the FairEmail page: "FairEmail might be for you if you value your privacy." and also says "works with virtually all email providers, including Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo!" For me, privacy is more than what's on the client -…

If you don't trust your provider then POP won't help you because you can't trust them not to keep copies. The only solution is to run your own SMTP server, at which point you might as well use IMAP.

I'm in control of my server (host) which is a shared-hosting account. While it is possible for them to store copies of the email, it is much more cumbersome for them to do that than if I just had my entire IMAP store residing on their server. For POP copies to work, they would have to purposefully copy and store all the email, whereas with IMAP they would just need to query the data store.

Re: FairEmail: Open-source, privacy friendly email app for Android

#45

Post by stilisstuk »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #21

I'm using F-droid K-9 and am happy with it. What would be the point of switching? If the new thing is flat-out better then it might be worth considering, but I haven't seen any explanation of this.

I love fairmail. Can't remember what the problem was with k9. But fair mail can't do everything. And it's slick and modern. Privacy first. Removes tracking images. And also identifiers in images you send out. It's really really good

P.s also f-droid here (ps you can donate with crypto if you want)

Re: FairEmail: Open-source, privacy friendly email app for Android

#46

Post by lisper »

rexreed wrote: post #44
lisper wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't trust your provider then POP won't help you because you can't trust them not to keep copies. The only solution is to run your own SMTP server, at which point you might as well use IMAP.

I'm in control of my server (host) which is a shared-hosting account. While it is possible for them to store copies of the email, it is much more cumbersome for them to do that than if I just had my entire IMAP store residing on their server. For POP copies to work, they would have to purposefully copy and store all the email, whereas with IMAP they would just need to query the data store.

Ah, so you do trust them. You trust that they are too lazy to take the initiative to keep a copy, but merely untrustworthy enough that they might sneak a peek if they can do so without having to put forth even the minor effort of making backups of the spool directories.

Fair enough, but that strikes me as a very odd risk posture to take. Either your email privacy is valuable to you, in which case I would think you would want to protect it against non-lazy people as well, or it isn't, in which case what difference does it make?

But it's obviously your call.

Re: FairEmail: Open-source, privacy friendly email app for Android

#47

Post by jedberg »

rexreed wrote: post #43
flopunctro wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMAP is not an email provider, it's just another protocol for reading your mail. It is the successor of POP3, having several key improvements. Somewhat like HTTP2 is to HTTP. If both your email provider and your client (aka mail reading software) support it, there really is no reason to use POP instead of IMAP.

Yes, I'm aware of IMAP as a protocol. My point has to do with the location and trust. I need to be able to trust the server as a point of mail storage. While I agree that POP still uses the server as a go-between, at least the mail doesn't reside on POP servers forever. Whereas with IMAP, if I have 25+ years of email I'd like to be able to view and archive and search, all of that has to sit at the server rather than…

> at least the mail doesn't reside on POP servers forever.

That's very dependent on the POP server. The protocol only tells the server that it is allowed to delete the message, not that it must.

I'm pretty sure if you use POP on gmail it just does an "archive" on the backend and the mail is still there, for example.

Re: FairEmail: Open-source, privacy friendly email app for Android

#48

Post by stonesweep »

pw6hv wrote: post #9
dlkmp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using the FDroid version of K9. What do you like from FairEmail over K9?

I've been on the Google Play version of K9 for years and I must say that it was perfectly fine. I changed to FairEmail as I thought having a very old version of an email client might not be ideal from a security perspective. At the moment the biggest change from my workflow is the UI, which looks better that the old K9. Now I am not switching to K9 F-Droid version just because I am lazy to configure everything again…

We had a HN thread a few weeks back on the K-9 Donations blog, basically the K-9 Play version is still the old client UI (but the betas are not 100% feature complete); you can opt-in to the K-9 beta on Play or F-Droid and get the new UI experience if some features like IMAP IDLE are not that important to you. (side comment, the new K-9 betas allow export/import of settings but not sure about the older version you're currently using)

Re: FairEmail: Open-source, privacy friendly email app for Android

#49

Post by hnarn »

While I applaud any effort to make email more usable and secure, I can't escape the feeling that email is quickly becoming the new snail mail. It seems most people only use it for very "official" communication, or communication with more or less autonomous services, while using other channels for almost everything else.

For me at least, email is moving into the same space as a phone number: something you know you need to reliably have, but you'd throw out in a minute if you could get away with it.

Re: FairEmail: Open-source, privacy friendly email app for Android

#50

Post by [deleted] »

lisper wrote: post #46
rexreed wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in control of my server (host) which is a shared-hosting account. While it is possible for them to store copies of the email, it is much more cumbersome for them to do that than if I just had my entire IMAP store residing on their server. For POP copies to work, they would have to purposefully copy and store all the email, whereas with IMAP they would just need to query the data store.

Ah, so you do trust them. You trust that they are too lazy to take the initiative to keep a copy, but merely untrustworthy enough that they might sneak a peek if they can do so without having to put forth even the minor effort of making backups of the spool directories. Fair enough, but that strikes me as a very odd risk posture to take. Either your email privacy is valuable to you, in which case I would think you wo…

[deleted]
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