We recently posted more news about why we don't trust Proton, the company behind ProtonMail. In short, their board member is a World Economic Forum Chair and they're trying to hide this fact.
The obvious next question is, "Well, crap, then who CAN we trust with our email?!"
Believe me, we get it. We also used to be entirely running on ProtonMail, which is why we decided we should learn more about them to confirm if they actually were the bastion of free speech and privacy that we were led to believe they were. Again, you can read the dossier we did on them HERE.
Migrating email accounts is also major pain. To be blunt, it down right stinks. Even when we are paid to help customers through this process, we still think it stinks. It takes time, each provider has a little different process and most people haven't done a data purge in years, meaning 95+% of the emails they think they want to migrate are useless and don't need to be migrated.
So, what's the solution?
Where is it safe?
How do you make the migration process not a total pain?
Let's tackle this in 3 parts:
- ProtonMail Alternatives
- Accessing & Managing Your Email
- Migrating Your Email
1) ProtonMail Alternatives
Why do we like and support Paxmail?
- The team is 100% unapologetically mission aligned with our vision and values here at MARK37.
- They are built on top of existing, powerful, scaleable, open source frameworks.
- Their founding team is hard core engineering focused.
- Their technology is hard core privacy focused.
- They have a free option, so you can test it out before you buy.
Full disclosure: We have a referral partnership relationship with Paxmail and receive a small % of any referrals we send their way via the paxmail.cc/mark37 link.
Why do we like and support StartMail?
- Our customers sing their praises.
- Super simple provider... only provides and manages your email.
- We don't know their team like we do Paxmail, but our digging on the company and ownership hasn't returned any red flags.
We do NOT have a referral relationship with StartMail.
We like LiberationTek. As a GoDaddy hosting provider alternative, they are solid, and we endorse them. We found, and our customers found, their email service to be a bit clunky, however, and more difficult than Paxmail or Startmail to get up and running quickly or manage on an ongoing basis as your team and account grows. This being said, if you have other services with them, choosing them for email too is likely a simpler option as you can keep everything under one roof... so go for it.
We have a referral partnership relationship with LiberationTek and receive a small % of any referrals we send their way via the link above.
What about Tutanota.com or Reagan.com?
Like many Silicon Valley, European and especially German tech companies, Tutanota is agro proud LGBTQ+ABCDEFG. Their privacy and security tools may be sound, but we would rather our dollars go toward businesses and business owners who share our values.
From Tutanota's own words on their "Jobs" Page:
Reagan.com has had all kinds of issues with lawsuits between business owners, the security of their service, and from our research, it appears they're simply playing a GRIFT game off the Reagan name. As such, it's not a business we are willing to throw our support behind. We did a dossier on them as well awhile back worth looking at if interested in learning more.
What about _______ email provider?
Are there other service providers that we would get behind if we had the time to do the homework and get to know their team? Of course. I have no doubt there would be. We get questions about what we think about a new email service provider nearly every week. God bless the very few of you who support our work at Intelligence on Demand, and the many more who support us here at MARK37, but we unfortunately do not have the time or resources to vet and do diligence on every single option available.
As such, until something drastic changes with the companies listed here, we're sticking with what we DO KNOW and who we DO TRUST.
Simple rule of thumb that YOU can do to vet a provider is look at their about page, look at their investors, management team, board of directors and dig through their about us page. Check out their social media (especially in the month of June). Do some simple searches on Linkedin or elsewhere for the key stake holders.
There's a lot you can learn by doing some quick searches online and following the trails they lead!
2) Accessing & Managing Your Email
It is entirely possible for someone to "self host" their own email on their own server. Ask anyone who has done this, however, and they will acknowledge that it is/was a total pain in the butt and not worth it for just a single or hand full of email accounts.
Why is this the case? Without spending too much time digging into the technical specifics, you need to know that the technology that makes email "work" is both extremely complicated to manage successfully, extremely old, and requires almost constant monitoring to ensure reliable and stable service delivery.
Think of it this way; You COULD also deliver all of your own physical mail to ensure your packages and letters get to the intended recipients securely and safely... but do you really want to make that your full time job? Unless you're getting paid to make this your full time job, it's simply not worth the time or headache.
Hence, there are email service providers whose job it is to ensure the data (emails + attachments) you send gets to/from all intended recipients, while weeding out as much of the spam and garbage that is clearly not safe for you to receive or open. When you get an @proton.me, @protonmail.com, @gmail.com, @paxmail.cc or @yourbusinessname.com email account, it is almost always the case that whatever the entity is after the @ is responsible for hosting and managing your email. Companies can essentially outsource their corporate email to Google, Paxmail, Protonmail, Microsoft and hundreds of other email service providers, but this also requires some initial setup and ongoign management by the business owner to ensure stability and reliability.
Our @mark37.com email accounts, for example, are managed by Paxmail and were managed by Protonmail when we first launched. Most businesses still use Google/Gmail to manage their corporate email... even most "conservative" and "Christian Alternative" companies!
Remember when the National GOP publicly complained about a massive % of their email campaigns being blocked and undelivered? Guess who was managing their email at the time? GOOGLE! You'd think their IT team would have known better... but alas most Republican Party leadership, and even most true "patriots" on the front lines fighting on the various spiritual, economic and political battlefronts, are still completely oblivious to how nefarious BigTech is covertly and overtly censoring and monitoring everything they do.
There are also email management platforms/applications that can be entirely separate from the email service provider themselves. Thunderbird is an example of one, that has been around for a long time, is open source, and is focused on desktop/laptop environments. Thunderbird allows someone to view and send/receive emails from their email service provider, or even various different email service providers, all from a single interface. If you have an @gmail account, @protonmail account and @workname account, you could setup Thunderbird as the single repository for all of these emails so that you only have one tool to view/send/receive/manage all of your different accounts from.
K-9 Mail is a similar open source email management tool, but focused on android based mobile devices (The Ghost Phone being one of them).
NextCloud is also similar, and open source, but provides a number of other utilities to the user who might be looking for document storage, calendar, contact management, etc. One needs to host NextCloud on their own server somewhere, however. Paxmail and LiberationTek, listed above, however, offer what is essentially a managed/hosted NextCloud environment so you don't need to worry about managing the environment yourself.
Access Your Email Online
- access via your browser (log in via www.paxmail.cc, for example)
- all your email remains on the servers of the company managing/hosting your email
- simple to use from your desktop and most mobile devices
- keeps data consistent no matter what device you use to access your email
- don't have to deal with configuring a separate email management platform on your local device
Access Your Email Locally
- access via Thunderbird (desktop) or K-9 Mail (smart phone) applications
- requires configuration and setup
- allows for single interface to manage emails across various different personal or work accounts
- Can draft emails and manage emails that have already been received even when offline. Emails will send and changes will be updated with your primary email service provider once you reconnect to the internet.
QUICK TIP: If you MUST continue using your Gmail account, PLEASE STOP USING THEIR APP! Literally uninstall it from your phone or desktop. You don't need it. The web interface, that you can access via your Brave Browser, is super clean and easy to use. Although Google will still have full access to all your emails, you will at least not have to provide Google with another hook into your device and data!
3) Migrating Your Email
One of the best kept secrets of IT support people is that we don't really know the answers to every IT problem we come across. We might act like we do, and it might seem like we do, however, what we do know how to do really well is find answers extremely quickly and think through which options presented might work best for the problem set we are facing. Obviously, experience helps A TON, but if someone understands the basic foundation of how a certain application or system works, it becomes much easier to troubleshoot an issue that comes up related to said application or system.
This is why we are so adamant that our customers LEARN how the technology tools they depend upon work and why we focus on providing so much content and education and point you to resources such as Jeff.Pro and Privacy Academy.
The more YOU learn to help yourself, the better equipped you'll be to solve/resolve your own issues and hopefully help those around you. Especially with the easy stuff!
"I'm just not a techie" is not an excuse. Stop saying this and change your mindset. If you're going to use these tools, even email, you should at least understand the basics of how they work.
I'm not asking you to become an IT expert or engineer. Just that you learn how to learn and start operating with some basic digital situational awareness.
With this in mind, learning how to migrate email service providers is rather straight forward when you understand the basics, outlined above. Although time consuming and somewhat frustrating at times, the process of doing so follows a rather straight forward path:
Step 1 - Export Existing Email
If you have A LOT of emails you want to keep, then exporting your email will be required. Although the exact path you need to take to make this happen may differ between providers, every email service provider allows you to export your emails. So search for where and how you can do this. Often, a simple search in your browser for "how to export my email from X" will give you links to step by step directions on how to make this happen.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10016932?hl=en
https://proton.me/support/export-import-emails
https://www.lifewire.com/export-emails-from-outlook-4165371
There are also countless video tutorials that walk you through how to do all of this already online. Some of them stink, so look through the options until you find one that makes the most sense.
If you only have a few emails you want to migrate from your current account to a new account, the simplest way to do this is to simply send the emails you want to your new email account. Literally just forward them to the new you@yourdomain.com account.
Problem. solved.
Step 2 - Don't be a Digital Hoarder
Do you really need to keep ALL of your old emails?
I pondered this many moons ago when I was looking at all of the emails I had going back 15+ years that I wanted to migrate out of Gmail. It was close to 1 TB of data and I realized nearly 95% of the emails I had in my account were non-essential for keeping. Most of the data was tied to attachments that had been sent and resent multiple times even.
Because our data storage has been so cheap/free for so long we don't even consider how much wasted space we have with our personal data. Do you need 10 pictures of the exact same thing? Do you need all 5 videos of the same event you took trying to capture that 1 moment in that 1 video? The same logic applies to email. If there are key individuals you know you want to keep your correspondence with, then search and sort your emails by those people and delete everything else... or as mentioned above, find the key exchanges and forward them to your new account.
I promise the time you spend cleaning up your old files and data will save you the hassle of trying to export and import massive files of your emails that go back years, of which you really only want/need to keep 5-10% at most! It might take some time initially to learn the process, but once you get in the flow you'll find yourself able to purge a lot very quickly.
Step 3a - Import Emails you Need to a New Service Provider
Similar to exporting, every provider allows for importing of email and nearly all providers have a step by step guide on how to do this. Again, a simple search in your browser, or better yet the FAQ, QA, or Support section of the provider, will point you to directions on how to make this happen.
I would actually suggest you read through the import process FIRST before exporting as some service providers require you import your email via a specific file type, which you can select during the export process. Don't make the mistake of wasting 20 minutes waiting for an export file to download just to find out it's the wrong file type!
Step 3b - Setting up your Existing Email Account w/in Thunderbird and k9Mail
How to setup your Paxmail account on your Ghost Phone (or any Android device)
Step 4 - Learn the difference between POP3 and IMAP
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/differences-between-pop3-and-imap/
Step 5 - Contact Us if you Need Help
Yes, we have staff who can help you through this process. Know, however, that doing so remotely isn't easy. This is especially the case if you want us to do everything for you, which for the various reasons mentioned above, we would prefer not to do when we can teach you how to do this yourself!
Have an Initial FREE Conversation About Support you may Need