European alternatives to Google's Gmail

only web app

needs client app

What's up with that misleading information as if there's something missing? This just means you can use any mail application you want with the standard mail protocols IMAP and POP3. If a mail provider is offering an app themselves that's fine but that's nothing a mail provider HAS to offer. What's much more important is how they handle you data, how good they filter out spam, how big you mailbox can be, cost, sustainability etc. But the app is the least important thing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Tutanota uses a proprietary protocol to communicate with email clients, so an app is needed. Perhaps "needs client app" means that.

Proton is fairly far in delivering a polished unified experience in commonly used internet services, including mail + calendar, password manager, file/photo storage and vpn services.

Yes but the CEO publicly endorses Trump. I prefer Gmail over that mess.

ProtonMail. Despite the boss likely being a conservative dogebag, their company is headquartered in Switzerland. That is the first big thing I check for my privacy and banking services. It is harder for a service to be poisoned by Yarvin's Cabal if the service's HQ is located in a democratic country, especially one famed for their privacy.

Where's DisRoot, man/girl ?

@Blaze @yunohost and @coopcloud allow you to self host.

Why is Kmail in there?

Kmail is a client: it can't host.

Because it's not the Kmail you think of, but kmail from them: https://www.infomaniak.com/
- Hmmmm likes like a domain host.... Plus productivity suite. I'm confused how to sign up for just and email address

I am using Proton for many years and I can not be happier. They are adding features and new services every month. Fully recommend . If you want to try the email plus you can use my referral: https://pr.tn/ref/W467S6SS1VP0

Cheers

@Blaze @yunohost and @coopcloud allow you to self host.

https://mailfence.com/ Belgian, 1Gb

https://www.gmx.com/ German Restrictions: 50MB attachments. Require an alternate email to sign up.

Just a quick notice about proton here. While it is great, if you tend to forget your passwords be carefull beacuse you will lose all your mail history when you recover. I would reccomend something more casual for casual users.

If you use Proton and forget your passwords, it's okay because the Proton CEO openly praised a US president who has a history of breaking privacy laws and is actively antagonizing allies. With that moral compass running Proton, your privacy and security might be compromised at a later date.
- Wasnt this just one message on X? Though I understand Everyone's worries. Isn’t Proton a company with a board of directors and a binding mission statement. I am sincerely wondering if the whole thing isn’t blown up too much. For me I am with proton for now and keeping my ear to the ground concerning any developments. But in short Proton is a safe and secure EU based alternative for Gmail right now, wouldn’t you agree?
  
  Proton’s whole mission statement is based around privacy so it would take a big shift in the company to actually start registering and selling data… at least that’s my perspective. I’m curious to see if any more developments will occur concerning their CEO
That second sentence could do with a disambiguating comma...
- Oooh i see i will edit it and add comma

I tried posteo and eclipso before settling on mailbox.org.

Coming from gmail.

Anyone tried https://www.codamail.com/ ?

Fuck Proton and their Trumps-ass-kissing CEO though.

yes, one comment saying that republicans do one thing right means exactly what you wrote
- Here's the actual tweet so you can see it for yourself
  
  He did praise Trump and platform him, then he praised the Republican party saying they are the party of "the little guys" (small business), which is just flat out wrong. He does not acknowledge that there are an abundance of things Trump is doing that is fucking awful and disgusting. At best it's an extremely tone-deaf tweet.
  
  What that comment does is paint Trump and the Republican party in a very good light and ignores other things they do that are terrible, illegal, and much more important than a single cherry-picked action. That's effectively an endorsement (i.e. ass-kissing) without saying it in exact words.
  
  Also, it's so very obvious that anyone associated with Trump absolutely needs to abide by Trump's every whim or else he will replace you. So, the point he was trying to make is entirely moot in the first place.
  
  There is just no way to praise Trump or the Republican party without showing your ignorance or alignment with them. Just like you can't just have a little bit of shit in your food. Once you've got even a little bit of shit in your food, then you've got shit-food. Or, in this case, a Trump-shit stained CEO's mouth.
- It's one more than I'd like.

"Needs client app" is a funny way of saying it "supports open protocols as first class citizens".

Yeah, what's up with that? IMAP, SMTP and CardDAV to good for some people or what?

I'm using Soverin myself. Switched a few months back and they've been great so far

Don't hear Soverin get recommended much these days. Been around for a while tho. Your ever heard of CodaMail?
- I haven't tried that one. I had a few choices alongside Soverin. Proton I ruled out because of their weird support of the US government, and apart from that I think Soverin was the only one with unlimited aliases

It might not be for everyone but you could grab a domain + webspace for like 2€/month.

yeah good luck getting through all the spam filtering, and dealing with spam.
aaaand its blocked for spam.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

I'm happy with the Belgian mailfence

Oh nice hadn't heard of KMail and I'm trying to degoogle. Proton's fine but the owner is another tool so options are nice

Oh it's KDE even better

KMail is not a service by KDE, you probably confused it with KMail, the mail client by KDE. It's a service by Infomaniak.
- It was also pretty hard to find information about it, searching for "ikmail" will get you there easier. I also found out it's technically not available in Canada yet, although I'm sure this shouldn't be too hard to circumvent.
- Thanks for clarifying! I'm new ~~

mailbox.org has a web app, so no need for a client app.
And Posteo also supports POP3, IMAP and SMTP, so you can use every mail client with support for it.

I'm in the US and wanted to switch from Gmail to a privacy focused European email provider, so I paid for a year of Posteo and so far I've been really happy with it. The service is excellent, it's inexpensive and their ethics/values as an organization are wonderful.
- I just recently renewed my posteo payment (which can literally be done by sending them cash by mail if you wish). It really just works. Using Thunderbird on PC and Thunderbird + DAVx⁵ on my phone.
  
  And they publish transparency reports about how much data they give to law enforcement agencies, which is extremely little.
- Back then I was deciding between Posteo and mailbox.
  I choose mailbox because, at least at the time, they had unlimited calendars and Posteo only offered 3 free ones.
  Also the website of mailbox seemed more respectable / unspectacular / boring than Posteo. Posteos website got me some typical start-up vibes, means hoping for fast growth and quick exit. But there I guess I was wrong.

I switched from gmail to gmx mail. I like it very much.

Which belongs to 1&1, which belongs to United Internet, which belongs to Ralph Dommermuth, who is one of the 300 richest people in the world. Also GMX often is the target of spam and phishing. And if you want to access the web login you have to go through a shitty news page. Still better than gmail, but there are far superior alternatives. Sincerely, a former web.de user (which is the same shit with a different name).
- I don't know what fishy websites you were on if spam and phishing was a problem for you. It wasn't a problem for me at gmail, outlook or hotmail, so I doubt it will be a problem at gmx, also will not be using web login. Glad you found good email that suits you the best. Have a good day!

You don’t need a client app for mailbox.org? I use it just fine on any standard mail client.

That's what they mean, it doesn't have its own client.
- Ahh I see. Tbh I see that as a definitive plus though, it’s email that uses email standards.

No Nazi supporters please

I switched over to Proton a few weeks ago, so far so good. They had my name available so no more weird convoluted email address anymore yay!

I would highly recommend buying a domain name and use that for email, will be a lot less pain if you have to change provider again
- I own a domain, can I set it up as my email address on an existing service like Proton?

I tried

Proton - too expensive
Tuta - too limited
infomaniak - i like it, but also limited

Created new domain name in cloudflare and got free account at zoho. It's free badic account, but with a symbolic gesture of 0.9 euro a month, you also get smtp, IMAP etc... and it plays very well with cloudflare!

What was missing with tuta?
- Probably the ability to use alternative clients like Thunderbird.
  
  I also miss that on tuta. Their client is pretty barebones.

Been using mailbox.org for a couple of years and I'm quite happy with it. Don't know what "needs client app" is supposed to mean though. If you don't want to use a mail client you can use the web interface. I've used maildroid on Android with it and when it was discontinued switched to Thunderbird, both work fine with mailbox.org.

There's one tiny minor annoyance, they somehow automatically create a new "archive" folder for every year that the web interface uses when you hit the archive button but in your mail client you gotta change the preferences manually once a year. Don't know if you can change but it's such a minor inconvenience I never bothered to check.

I've been happy with mailbox.org for years, too, yeah.

My only complaint is their WebDav experience is...just not very good. It's probably that I wanted a sync client and not a webdav client. But it wasn't quite standard (iirc) so getting everything configured was a pain...
- Yeah I'm using it for mail only but I remember when I first got the account it told me to install some weird extra app to sync tasks and calendars. Never bothered to and kept using Google unfortunately, maybe it's time to look into it.

Tuta has been GREAT, so far. Hard recommend.

I just switched over to it from proton. Do not have the issue that their spam filter is abysmally bad? There is so much spam coming though and even mails that I already reported as spam come through. Also the app is kinda slow and clumsy.
I started used it a month ago. I like it so far and was east to setup with my domain. I also recommend this.

Disroot is based in the netherlands i believe.

https://disroot.org/en

From their page:

“Disroot is a platform providing online services based on principles of freedom, privacy, federation and decentralization.

No tracking, no ads, no profiling, no data mining!”

Apparently not all their services have full encryption (I think their forgejo is unencrypted and plain text?)
- ... what's the point of encrypting a public git forge?
Not sure why Disroot isn't mentioned more often in this kind of discussion.

Been using Posteo since around 2015. They're great.

Same. Posteo is fantastic.

Buy a domain and just use a ISP of your choice, don't lock in again with another domain not under your control.

Although depending on your configuration, it might be a battle against spammers.
- You're confusing a domain name with hosting the actual server.
- Just because you use a custom domain, doesn't mean you are hosting your email yourself.

Proton, no thanks to the Government of Putin supporters. Tuta could be the winner for me.

Switzerland supports putin?
- Proton also donated money to Ukraine in 2022. Some people simply live on a separate reality.
- Switzerland supports putin?
  
  I dunno man, Wikipedia says otherwise.
  
  The country has a history of armed neutralitygoing back to the Reformation; it has not been in a state of war internationally since 1815[5][6] apart from the Sonderbund War(Switzerland civil war), joining the League of Nations in 1920[5] and did not join the United Nations until 2002.[7] It pursues an active foreign policy and is frequently involved in peace-building processes around the world.[8][9]
  
  On February 28, 2022, Switzerland imposed economic sanctions on Russia and froze a significant amount of assets held by Russian civilians and companies as "punishment" for the invasion of Ukraine. Some described this as "a sharp deviation from the country's traditional neutrality."[10] According to Swiss president Ignazio Cassis in 2022 during a World Economic Forum speech, the laws of neutrality for Switzerland are based on The Hague agreement principles which include "no participation in wars; international cooperation but no membership in any military alliance; no provision of troops or weapons to warring parties and no granting of transition rights".[11
Some of the takes in here are bonkers.

Anyone got experience with kMail?

I've been using them for a bit over a year now and don't have any complaints so far. If you don't care about the office suite, their email only package is €1.50/month for 5 users, which is hard to beat. You can use your own domain too. I like that their web/android clients have a proper conversation view that also shows your replies (like Gmail does). This has been missing from other providers I've tried (except Fastmail). Their android app is on F-Droid and open source which is nice. There were a few odd translations, like "Transfer" instead of "Forward", but I think they've fixed those since. It's not been long enough for me to comment on reliability or missing emails, but so far so good.
- Thanks for this
I made an account and I might be too unexperienced with these things, but it seems I have to have my own domain? I can't use a basic one? If sb can show me how to deal with that I'd appreciate it
- I signed up last week and did not need a domain. You may need to choose a personal account. You can pick from three different email endings, I went with @ikmail.com.
  
  So far I really like it! Switched over my google drive to IK file storage.

I made the switch from gmail to Tuta. It's very good. Has desktop app as well as mobile. Highly recommend.

Mailbox.org costs 2gb 1€ in light plan

Mailo from France is another option

What does "only web app" mean for posteo? Can you not use it with a standard mail app?

It just doesn’t have its own app. There is no custom, useless Posteo app.

Which nobody needs, since there’s IMAP and SMTP, so you can use any normal Mail app.
- Better than anything. I like using Thunderbird.

I use eclipso.de. it's free with ads or i think 1€ a month premium

migadu.com

Few points, with them you are required to provide your own domain name. They supports basic CalDav but it's not their main focus.

Their FAQ is really well written, you should take a look.
- You are right - I forgot about the domain name requirement, sorry.

Runbox.com! I've been using them for years after Lavabit was shutdown. Based out of Norway, affordable, and privacy focused.

Really wanted Email.CZ to work but it sticks on verifying my phone for my account :(

GMX

Zero complaints.

the 404 on that link says otherwise.

I've been happy with Belgian based mailfence.com for 4+ years on one of their paid plans.

I think it would also be worth to mention Zoho mail, they're mainly focused on the business side, but they do offer it for free as well up to some point.

Zoho also offers quite a few clones of Google products as a service too.

Quick edit: Forever free plan: Free up to 5 users (5GB/user). One free custom domain (in other words, bring your own domain if you have one!)

Zoho when Iast used was hot trash. I say this with the perspective that office is the gold standard, google docs does ok if you don't have a lot of weird demands and are ok with googles opinionated (ie everything changes every 3 seconds) behaviors. If gdocs are tier 2, Zoho is 4

I have an e-mail adres with my domain name, but my personal mail is still Gmail. However I'm looking into changing that. I'm thinking about proton mail but I'm not sure yet. I'm trying to do research into what's best long term.

Thanks for the list

If what you want is encrypted email, and see it in the form of a chat, take a look at ArcaneChat

Not an email provider by the looks?

Where is Startmail? It is the best e-mail service in the EU. It is not free, but you are not its bargaining chip so.

I wouldn't say it's the best, but it is an option. They are based in Netherlands and they have servers there which is cool.

Proton

Same.

Getting a bit tired of the brigading against Proton. IMO the negativity is overblown and Proton is still a good option.

But do recommend everyone to get a custom domain so it’s easy to switch in case I’m proven wrong and Proton does turn sour.
I felt like leaving gmail for proton was like moving from X to BS. So I bought my own domain via OVH in France and I’m happy with that. If OVH starts going downhill I’ll move my domain somewhere else.
- If you're happy with OVH as it is, then I don't think it can get much worse.
  I really wish OVH would get it together and be a serious competitor to other (US) cloud providers...
Are you aware of recent events? Leadership has shown themselves to be fascist apologists.
- Are you aware that Bernie Sanders praised Trump late last year for his proposed credit card interest rate limit? Perhaps it's time to turn against him too!
- yes, one comment saying that republicans do one thing right means exactly what you wrote