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Ask Slashdot: Advice For a Yahoo Mail Refugee
New submitter ma1wrbu5tr writes: Very shortly after the announcement of Verizon's acquisition of Yahoo, two things happened that caught my attention. First, I was sent an email that basically said "these are our new Terms of Service and if you don't agree to them, you have until June 8th to close your account". Subsequently, I noticed that when working in my mailbox via the browser, I kept seeing messages in the status bar saying "uploading..." and "upload complete". I understand that Y! has started advertising heavily in the webmail app but I find these "uploads" disturbing. I've since broken out a pop client and have downloaded 15 years worth of mail and am going through to ensure there are no other online accounts tied to that address. My question to slashdotters is this: "What paid or free secure email service do you recommend as a replacement and why?" I'm on the hunt for an email service that supports encryption, has a good Privacy Policy, and doesn't have a history of breaches or allowing snooping.
Use gmail.
Run your own mail server, that's the only way you can be reasonably sure that you have control over your mail.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
People are REALLY going to hate this, but there is no 100% secure network service. Computer networks were designed for sharing information between nodes. The idea of keeping others out of that sharing was added on later. On a large interconnected network like the Internet it is impossible to do 100%. I can feel the nerd rage boiling here and the claims that "you don't know what you are talking about!". But save it. Reality tells us otherwise. If it is on a network, it isn't secure.
has a good Privacy Policy and free
Don't match in my experience.
If you want privacy, isn't email the wrong tool? Isn't email like a post card that anyone can read in transit?
If you want private communications, look for a different way, a private way, to communicate.
If you want convenient email for casual use, try GMail. For example, Google will find things in your email, like confirmation emails of your upcoming flights, and then Google will be sure to remind you on your smart phone. But I don't treat communication with my airline the same as I might treat communication with other parties.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Not free, but it works well. Note: Servers are in NY.
I use Apple for personal email. I have had a mac.com email address since Apple came out with it. Their current server name is "me.com" and Apple does not advertise in this service, as it is a paid-for service. It allows pop3 as well as IMAP.
For professional email, I use gmail. Google does a great job of excising spam. It is advertiser-supported email, but I never use a web browser for my gmail account. Instead, I use the pop3 function. It propagates to my cell phone, my desktop and my tablet. When I delete something on my cell phone, it deletes on my tablet, but not on my desktop. For a free service, I do not think you can do any better than gmail.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Same here. I won't be closing my hundreds of email accounts on Yahoo. I haven't used them in a decade. I see no reason to change them, close them, move them, or take any action whatsoever.
When the big Yahoo email breach occurred, how many people had the following questions?
1. I wonder how many of my email accounts (that I haven't used in years) are affected?
2. I wonder what percent of the breached accounts are my email accounts that I haven't used in years?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I've got 2 gmail accounts (no, snotnose@gmal.com is not one of them). I connect to them via Thunderbird, which downloads the messages to my local hard drive. It's worked like a champ for some 8 years or so.
Fastmail for the win. Reasonably priced, don't think they are going anywhere and have been ultra-reliable. I've been with them about 15 years.
I think this is really the important bit.
The OP obviously is looking for an email service that is completely different from the one they are migrating from, however expect that it will exist, and probably want it for approximately the same cost (near zero)
I think this may be asking too much.
For a good alternative to Yahoo mail, you could use Gmail, it has all of the same security issues as Yahoo but I don't think it is in any way worse (and arguably I do trust google more than I trust yahoo, though that doesn't say much) and gmail, simply due to it's popularity, does have a lot of functionality (either native, or third party) so there is that.
Google also doesn't have much of a history of data breaches, and they seem to allow no more government snooping than any other company (which again doesn't say much)
"has a good Privacy Policy, and doesn't have a history of breaches or allowing snooping." -- Runbox fits all of those. Norwegians have very strong laws regarding privacy, which should please you, and the company doesn't do any advertising or crawling through your emails for tracking or anything like that. It's not a free service nor is it the cheapest one available, but I've been their customer for several years and I would at least recommend one to take a look at their offerings.
The main issue with e-mail is that it has two parties involved. If either of the parties is compromised in a communication, then it doesn't matter how secure the other party is. Due to the sheer volume of people using Gmail, it is likely they already have a copy of most of your mail anyway. By using Gmail just like so many other people, you at least only have one system potentially snooping on you. If you believe that you are more secure using other systems, you are likely wrong.
I've had the same question recently and the answer I got was Proton Mail, based in Switzerland. Fully encrypted end-to-end. I'm surprised someone else hasn't mentioned it by now.
Proton Mail is hosted in Switzerland has end to end encryption with Android and IOS app support and has withstood denial of service attacks from suspected state sponsored hacking.
Just the fact that a state actor tried to take them down is a reason to consider them.
You are already going through the pain of changing your address. Make sure you don't have to do it again some time in the future. Mail providers change policies or shut down, sometimes without warning.
Go ahead, and pick a mail provider that you like. But also go out and buy a personal domain. You'll probably be able to find one you like for $10 per year, and you can find DNS providers that will do mail re-direction for free. Have a wildcard redirect set to send any email sent to the domain forwarded to the new mail address. Don't like the way the provider is now doing things? Get a new provider and email address, and change the redirect.
Running your own mail server isn't for everyone, but I'd say absolutely you have to own the domain if you want control. If someone else owns the domain that your account depends on, you have no control over the future of your own account. This is the fundamental error I made 18+ years ago when I started calling Yahoo my permanent email address and thinking only my employer addresses were transitory.
I've been with Fastmail since it was in beta in 2001. The company ONLY does email and associated services. This means they are focused on making it work correctly and users having a good features. I would never consider moving.
B'cos years ago, Yahoo! was a pretty respectable company, and had loads of good stuff associated, like geocities and yahoo chat! If I recall right, it was even there ahead of Google, and were a pretty good bet when Netscape was floundering. My first webmail account was Netscape.net (under Netscape 4), then yahoo & hotmail.
Things changed, & went downhill once Google pioneered the concept of monetizing everything on the internet - be it email, web pages and so on. The biggest evidence of that is the way MICROSOFT has changed - from a pure software company (plus some hardware) to a Google wannabe.
Don't be obtuse.
Of course there's no perfect security. You know, if a burglar wants to get into you house badly enough, he'll get in. So why bother locking your door? In fact, just leave your front door open... Oh, change all of your PINs to 1234 and your passwords to "password" while you're at it. After all, if there's no perfect security, why have any security.
The point of TFS is finding a service that is as secure as reasonably possible, while still being useful.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
To add on to this great advice, PAY for G Suite. It's $50/year for the mailbox, completely ad-free, and comes with business support. It doesn't support complete integration like the free gmail account (Play family sharing is a particular pain point), but it's the best anti-spam solution available today and that's worth the money alone. Add to it the benefits of Drive, Photos, Hangouts, etc and it's a fantastic value for the money.
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It's available via web and on mobile devices, including iOS 8 if you have an older phone. You get 500 MB storage free, uses two passwords (one for account and one for mailbox), and the providers themselves cannot recover your mailbox passwords. You can tag your emails, make folders, identifies spam, and has an easy way to report bugs/features. They also have a bounty program for hacking with no success and are protected by Swiss privacy laws. It was made by CERN and MIT. The servers are located in a bunker 1000 meters below the Swiss Alps that use end-to-end encryption and 4096-bit SSL certificates. No cloud hosting and they manage their own stuff. https://protonmail.com/securit... The only problem is that it uses Azure. I'm not an M$ at all, but it's either this or Enigmail with Thunderbird and Protonmail is very easy to use and the customer support is awesome whether you're a paying member or not.
The Terms of Service are actually pretty strict, and Google has extremely good data center security hygiene. The ToS on gmail are much more lax, even though it's the same software.
If all you care about is convenience and price, gmail is the best bet.
However, gmail has a few weak points:
- Governments and corporations assume you are using it, if you become a target, first thing they do is sue or force google to give them a copy of all your email. You may not find out about it until after the fact. Basically, using gmail/google means you are OK with the surveillance state being able to grab all the details about your digital life whenever it wants.
- Hackers assume that getting access to email is the best path in social networking and they have put together an extensive trick list focusing on gmail since everyone uses it. And, if they gain access, are you sure you would know about it or even if google found out about it, that they would tell you? It's in google's interest that everyone forget about the security of their cloud data.
- Gmail gets coordinated with all the other info that google knows about you and google sells info about you to their customers or targets ads for you on behalf of customers. Frankly, even without email, I think google knows enough already.
- Gmail imap is _wierd_ and google will probably shut it down in favor of some google only protocol if they ever can.
- Google is no longer a _good_ company, as it has become bigger, it has started to act more like a Monopoly and that combined with its ownership of android is pushing us more towards a closed internet. I honestly don't want to support Google's growth anymore.
Another option is office 365:
- Microsoft has its issues, but it realizes it really needs to compete in the cloud space.
- Microsoft email integrates well if you have a mobile hardware device like a Surface Pro/Surface Book.
- Exchange sync for contacts/calendar/groupware is hard to compete with.
That said, MS has its own security issues....so the best solution is likely hosting your own email....and for those who don't have the time to be constantly updating, find a good mail software suite that does get updated automatically and which has a good security history. Zimbra might be a good example - there are many others.