For the past few years I’ve been using Protonmail as my email provider as well as ProtonVPN. I ended up subscribing to the Unlimited plan for a deal on their cloud storage, which eventually expanded to a password manager which ended up replacing Bitwarden for me.
For the most part I’ve been satisfied with Proton services with the exception of two main gripes:
- VPN app on Android disconnects randomly, forcing you to manually reconnect in the app. This has been happening for probably over a year. Very annoying because I use it 24/7 with the killswitch enabled.
- The Proton Bridge, a program required to use a local client, is extremely annoying to deal with when using anything other than Thunderbird. I consider email to be an inherently insecure form of communication to begin with, so I’d rather have IMAP support than the local encryption provided by the bridge. I can’t be leet unless I use neomutt, dammit!
I’ve dealt with these relatively minor issues because of the convenience of having all these services under one account and “Portal”, but lately I’ve begun to see having all of my eggs in one basket like this as more of an anti-feature than a benefit. Not to mention the feature creep of the service which now includes an AI chatbot, crypto wallet, and probably some other nonsense by now while the existing products sit with unresolved bugs. I want to get a new email provider at the least, but now I might not qualify for the same subscription price without it so now I have to find another provider for this and this…
So I’ve decided to rip the band-aid off and start moving away from Proton.
I’ll be replacing my currently used services with the following:
- Mailbox.org for an email provider combined with Addy.io for aliases
- Based in Germany, not Switzerland, but has a good reputation for privacy.
- I thought about hosting my own mail server, but this looks like way too big of a pain. Maybe someday.
- Simplelogin is the more popular competitor to Addy.io, but is owned by Proton. I thought about subscribing to this on its own for aliases, but I’m a bit worried support will stop it’ll be absorbed entirely into Proton’s password manager.
- KeePassXC synced between devices with Syncthing for password management
- I like this local, private solution more than a cloud-based password manager. Plus, it’s free. Proton’s password manager has been very good but is expensive on its own. Not really worth it unless you use the other services as well.
- Filen for cloud storage
- This might change. I don’t know much about this service other than having heard it is affordable and supports automated backups with tools like rclone.
For the VPN, I’ll probably change this last despite my issues with the Android client because I use it for some things on my home server and I don’t feel like making changes to it right now. I honestly don’t know of any better VPN providers that are open source, have a good reputation for privacy, and offer port forwarding, so if anyone other than my imaginary friends are reading this blog, I’m open to suggestions.