Man, this is such a trap. People see an ad for Tuta and think they have finally won the privacy game. They jump from Gmail to Tuta like it is some kind of digital nirvana but honestly it’s just trading one master for another. It’s an improvement, sure. Moving from a glass house into a bunker definitely shrinks your attack surface but you are still handing the keys over to a single company. They own the bunker so they actually control everything. If you want real sovereignty? You gotta go deeper than that. Go towards self hosting or actual decentralized protocols where YOU hold the keys and nothing else. Otherwise you are just a prisoner in a slightly more secure cell.
You are totally misjudging this! Honestly you are probably just thinking about the absolute nightmare of manually configuring every single little thing like SMTP and SPF back in the day which was a massive headache. But that is not how it works anymore. I have been self hosting my email for over ten years using mail in a box and it is basically zero maintenance once it is up and running. These modern stacks use abstraction layers to handle all the annoying stuff so you do not have to be a full time sysadmin just to get through the day. It is not some impossible task where you are stuck with Tuta or Proton because you can definitely escape those silos if you use the right stack instead of trying to build every single layer from scratch.
It still requires you to maintain the entire server infrastructure. Sure if you already have your server up and running either way then spinning up another docker container or whatever else you use is pretty fast to do. But building and, more importantly, properly securing a server stack just for mail is a lot of work for little benefit. And if it stops working for whatever reason you won’t even notice it since Emails just get send into the void and are forever lost there.
If you really want to go the extra mile to be more independent from big services, then buying a domain and using that with something like tuta is enough. You can still jump ship whenever you like without the workload of server maintenance.
I think this is a very priveleged take if we actually care about advocating for digital sovereignty.
In a perfect world, sure, build and manage a server with self hosted infrastructure. In reality people care about this stuff rarely actually have the money, time, skills or drive to manage a project like that confidently.
Its normal for people to want to allocate management of their services to a provider with trust to circumvent this.
For actualnconstructive advice to the people who can’t do this: Try looking up to see if their are any nonprofit email hosting services in your country - they exist but usually don’t do marketing and are often built on strong values. If not I really think using services like Tuta, proton, etc is leaps forward for your safety, privacy and ethics compared to Google, Microsoft, etc.
Man, this is such a trap. People see an ad for Tuta and think they have finally won the privacy game. They jump from Gmail to Tuta like it is some kind of digital nirvana but honestly it’s just trading one master for another. It’s an improvement, sure. Moving from a glass house into a bunker definitely shrinks your attack surface but you are still handing the keys over to a single company. They own the bunker so they actually control everything. If you want real sovereignty? You gotta go deeper than that. Go towards self hosting or actual decentralized protocols where YOU hold the keys and nothing else. Otherwise you are just a prisoner in a slightly more secure cell.
Okay, I’m sorry, but while I sorta agree with you
Such a horrible idea for email. Here’s a nice talk outlining how horrible it is to host your own email these days.
Great for chat and many other things, but you can’t escape email in today’s world. You’ll still need it.
Not sure what a good solution is though, since Tuta and Proton aren’t exactly great either.
You are totally misjudging this! Honestly you are probably just thinking about the absolute nightmare of manually configuring every single little thing like SMTP and SPF back in the day which was a massive headache. But that is not how it works anymore. I have been self hosting my email for over ten years using mail in a box and it is basically zero maintenance once it is up and running. These modern stacks use abstraction layers to handle all the annoying stuff so you do not have to be a full time sysadmin just to get through the day. It is not some impossible task where you are stuck with Tuta or Proton because you can definitely escape those silos if you use the right stack instead of trying to build every single layer from scratch.
It still requires you to maintain the entire server infrastructure. Sure if you already have your server up and running either way then spinning up another docker container or whatever else you use is pretty fast to do. But building and, more importantly, properly securing a server stack just for mail is a lot of work for little benefit. And if it stops working for whatever reason you won’t even notice it since Emails just get send into the void and are forever lost there.
If you really want to go the extra mile to be more independent from big services, then buying a domain and using that with something like tuta is enough. You can still jump ship whenever you like without the workload of server maintenance.
I think this is a very priveleged take if we actually care about advocating for digital sovereignty.
In a perfect world, sure, build and manage a server with self hosted infrastructure. In reality people care about this stuff rarely actually have the money, time, skills or drive to manage a project like that confidently.
Its normal for people to want to allocate management of their services to a provider with trust to circumvent this.
For actualnconstructive advice to the people who can’t do this: Try looking up to see if their are any nonprofit email hosting services in your country - they exist but usually don’t do marketing and are often built on strong values. If not I really think using services like Tuta, proton, etc is leaps forward for your safety, privacy and ethics compared to Google, Microsoft, etc.