Yep. Exactly this. I’m white and my wife is black. We live in one of the states where our relationship was a crime just 55 years ago.

Her grandfather has stories about what happened to people who crossed the race barrier (of course the law only punished minorities for it, not the white partner). We’re not far removed from those horrors and lunatics are already trying to drag us back.

I know I’m late to the party, but don’t do you think Aeon is ready to be a daily driver?

I currently run Debian stable, but I’m interested in Aeon as an alternative.

I’ve used OnlyOffice (FOSS, really modern) and Softmaker Office, which is a proprietary German alternative with native Linux support. It also has the best docx compatibility of the Microsoft alternatives.

Yes, it’s not only possible, but fairly easy to do! Depending on which registrar you purchased your domain through, you may be able to have them host your email. That may be the easiest option, but your registrar could suck so I can’t recommend that off-hand.

Third party providers, like mailbox.org, mailfence, proton, tuta, runbox, zoho and others can all host your email. You just need DNS records and proof it’s your domain.

Below is a link to mailbox.org’s guide on hosting with them.

I read a few different guides and it seemed like the most comprehensive. The steps should be fairly similar for every potential email host.

https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/e-mail-article/using-e-mail-addresses-of-your-domain/

Depends a lot on what you’re looking for. If you just want email, then you have a lot of options. Mailbox.org, Posteo, tuta, mailfence, fastmail, and runbox all come to mind. If you want a full gsuite replacement, ala proton unlimited, then your options are limited.

If you self host? Absolutely. That’s a nightmare. Paying a provider (like proton, for instance) to manage your custom domain email is easy. I haven’t run into any issues having my email accepted, even by hotmail addresses.

You might run into issues with some newer TLDs, but that is slowly being fixed. Also .xyz domains get sent to spam a lot because they’re usually used for malware.

If you’re willing, I strongly recommend people get their own domains. That way, you’ll always be able to change email providers without changing your address.

I’ve been using them for my domain and email for almost a year now and I have no complaints. I had to talk to customer support twice to fix a couple things that came up and they got back to me right away. Can’t say the same for the last service I used lol

I think it’s fair to point out they’re not designed around encryption like proton is. It’s not a factor in my threat model because I treat email as non-private communication, but it’s something you should know if you’re wanting proton for that reason.

kDrive is a heavily customized Nextcloud/OnlyOffice implementation with a pretty new and well-regarded file sync algorithm they implemented last year. I would recommend cryptomator to client side encrypt anything you want to protect. It’s at rest encrypted, but not end-to-end because there’s nothing client side.Here’s a list of WebDAV urls from the Cryptomator community to help you set it up. KDrive is on there.

Anyway, hope it works out for you!

I ended up settling on Infomaniak’s kSuite after looking around. They’re a mid-sized registrar and hosting company.

They’re partially employee owned (and I believe in the process of becoming fully owned by employees). I’ll grant their privacy policy is just standard EU/Swiss boilerplate, though (stuff like no sharing your data, etc., that you always find in EU paid services like this). GDPR compliance was all I was looking for.

The web client looks nice and kDrive is affordably priced if you need a Google docs/photos/drive alternative.

Edits: clarity and me refreshing my memory on their privacy policy

Self hosted email is its own can of worms. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone outside of experienced IT people. You’ll end up blacklisted before you send your first email if you do anything wrong (and there’s a lot that can go wrong), and it doesn’t solve any security problems email has.

Anything sent over email just isn’t private. That goes for Proton customers when they send or receive anything from a non-Proton address too. The one thing privacy email providers can actually do is keep your inbox from being scanned by LLMs and advertisers. That doesn’t prevent the inboxes and outboxes of your contacts from being scanned, though.

If you use email, the best thing you can do is be mindful of what kinds of information you send through it. Use aliases via services like simple login or anonaddy when possible. Having a leaked email is a security vulnerability. Once bad actors have your email, they now have half of what they need to breach multiple accounts.

I’m also sick of hearing about Swiss privacy laws. Their intelligence service got busted covering for a US and German spy front operation in Switzerland. If it happened once, I promise it has happened before and since.

Edit for those who can’t click: a front company in Switzerland sold fake encrypted communications services around the world for years, possibly decades, with the assistance of Swiss intelligence agencies.

Yeah, I was thinking about changing over, because while I like PopOS, it has some issues on my rig. It wasn’t as troublesome as Fedora, but laggy animations, Pop Shop crashing, and its very outdated version of GNOME were starting to frustrate me.

I’m actually testing EndeavorOS in a live environment right now to get a feel for it! I’ve always been hesitant to try Arch in any form because my main Linux buddy warned me it was a quick way to ruin your system.

I use this PC a lot, so I have no problem updating it several times a week or more. So fingers crossed I don’t screw it up lol.

I thought I was going insane with Fedora. Literally every flatpack I tried had major issues. Went back to an ubuntu-based distro after a month of fix attempts.

It’s got updates from earlier this year. It appears to be updated periodically since it was first written. Some sections are old, while others are fairly new.

I’m glad you like it, but I’m just going to point out that Yahoo, which the AOL privacy policy page refers to, has probably the single most invasive email policy of any major provider.

Yahoo analyzes and stores all communications content, including email content from incoming and outgoing mail. This allows us to deliver, personalize and develop relevant features, content, advertising and Services.

They allude to telemetry, and use additional tracking even when not signed in. I hate saying this, but even Google has a better privacy policy.

That’s kind of the point for a lot of us who opt to pay for an email. When email is free, it’s because your data is the product.

I do like Tutanota’s approach to encryption, but communication outside of other Tutanota addresses is less secure than PGP. It’s just a symmetric, password-based scheme.

Since you will probably deal with a lot of non-tuta email providers, it’s a hard sell for me. In network, though, it’s good.

Second issue I had with it was the email client. I like my third party client and it’s built into my workflow. Tuta doesn’t support third party clients because they consider the storage of emails on your local drive a security risk. (That’s only true if your hard drive isn’t encrypted, and setting up encryption isn’t all that hard to do)

I use K9. It went through a rough patch a few years ago with the UI, but it’s much better now. Mozilla is involved and K9 is in the process of becoming the Thunderbird app.

Yeah, his requirements for an email provider are well above what most people need.

Email is not a secure means of communication in most cases. If the recipient isn’t encrypting, then your communications to them are vulnerable anyway. And in the vast majority of cases, they probably aren’t.

Really, the best thing about getting a more privacy conscious provider is not giving all your data over to Google.

When I was a little kid, maybe 5 years old, my family lived in this old house that used to be a Civil War hospital during a few battles.

All kinds of weird shit happened there, but one event stands out.

I was sleeping between my parents in their bed on the second floor. I woke up. It was late and very dark.

I looked to my right and saw the curtains blowing in. The windows were painted shut. I watched as the curtains start to slide off the wall. It looked like someone was holding them up. I shit you not. Like I could see feet just underneath the bottom.

The curtains moved to the foot of the bed, and fell.

I don’t remember seeing this, but my parents swear I told them that when the curtains fell, a woman with a yellow dress and no eyes had been holding them up, and that she stood at the foot of the bed for a while.

The curtains, according to my parents, we’re in fact on the floor at the foot of the bed. I can’t vouch for that though because I was a kid and frankly, don’t remember.

My best non-supernatural explanation is that I had sleep paralysis that night and hallucinated much of what I saw. I’ve had it chronically since, so it’s possible.

I don’t know though. It’s one of those things I think about late at night when I have too much free time. What the fuck did I see?

Good point! That’s an option for most email providers, and that’s fine for most applications. I just like using a desktop client, but if you don’t, then that’s not even a factor for Tutanota.