Hey everyone,
I know there are a lot of questions about best email providers, but they usually boil down to general questions about privacy and reliability. I have specific questions that I could not find answers to.
I’ve had a Proton Duo plan for my wife and me for about 2 years now. My wife has low tolerance for tech that is not user friendly and works easily. It took a while to migrate all our emails and passwords to Proton and a lot or accounts to passmail aliases, but now we are happy with how the service works.
We both also have our own domains for our main email, and I recently bought another domain to migrate our aliases to. The reason behind this is to ease future migrations if whatever service we use enshitifies. I know that privacy is reduced by using my own domain for aliases, but it’s a consequence I accept to avoid being tied to a single service and to make migration easier in the future.
For that reason, I’ve been burying my head in the sand about what has been happening at Proton. However, with recent news of Proton’s partnership with ETH Zurich and of Proton re-evaluating employee performance based on their AI usage, I can no longer look away.
So here is the ask. I want to migrate to one or more services to specifically replace the functionality I described above. Here are the features that are important to me:
- Services that support multi-user accounts, where I can be the admin and manage our domains.
- Ability to assign domains for specific user accounts.
- Ease of use for users to create aliases on the fly within the password manager.
- European hosted and privacy focused, with good encryption.
- Preferably open source clients.
My domains are hosted by Infomaniak, and I’ve considered them, Tuta and Mailbox.org for email providers. Not sure about the best alias generator, but I heard good things about addy.io
I already self-host a lot of services, so for password management, I was thinking about Vaultwarden with an integration to an alias generator. For the few services I host that are accessible outside my network, I use a reverse proxy (NPM), with Authentik for authentication. I am thinking about setting up NetBird as well.
Finally, I am ok paying a reasonable amount for the services.
If I am way off base, I am also happy to hear suggestions about better ways to set things up.
Thanks in advance
For a password manager, you can use KeePass and synce databases between devices with SyncThing.
And I recently switched to mailbox.org and I like it. It starts off at $1 per month and you get 3 aliases plus your main address at that plan. There’s a $3 per month plan as well that bumps the number of aliases up to over 20, plus some other features
I’ve heard about SyncThing for other applications, and for some reason had assume it would only work within your network like rsync. But I’ll revisit it, thanks. if I understand it correctly by then, all the passwords are kept in each device locally, so if for some reason my server is inaccessible, users will still have access to their passwords
That’s correct.
An extra note if you end up using SyncThing, make sure to update your “File Versioning” settings in the synced folders. You want anything besides “None” or “Trashcan” and set a duration longer than 0. That will allow SyncThing to hold onto some previous verions of files as a backup in case you need to revert.
Also, you’ll want to avoid having it open on multiple devices at the same time, as it can cause sync conflicts. They’re not that hard to clean up but still annoying.