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
Migadu will probably fit all your requirements.
Services that support multi-user accounts, where I can be the admin and manage our domains.
Migadu pricing only cares about storage space used and emails sent/received. You can have any number of domains or mailboxes or accounts otherwise, and there’s a lot of features and flexibility for the admin.
Ability to assign domains for specific user accounts.
Not sure how exactly you mean this but it’s probably more flexible than you intend. You can create any number of mail accounts under any of the domains you add to it.
Ease of use for users to create aliases on the fly within the password manager.
They have a thing called “pattern rewrites” that could be better called “wildcard aliases”. Basically you can have aliases with both variable and fixed parts. For example “shop-*@example.com” will receive email sent to “shop-amazon@” and “shop-walmart@” but not to “amazon@”. It’s a sort of catch-all’s, but mitigates some of the downsides of an actual catch-all because outsiders can’t guess what’s your fixed part of the alias.
They also have regular aliases, domain aliases, catch-all’s and some other stuff.
I typically use those wildcard things for all my needs.
European hosted and privacy focused, with good encryption.
They’re Swiss-based and committed to privacy.
Regarding encryption, if that’s a deal-breaker to you I’d urge you to reconsider. Encryption for email-at-rest is a gimmick. There’s only a handful of providers that even attempt it, because it’s nonsense, but if spinned right it appeals to the public. You will get away from Proton only to get locked down by Tuta or… actually I don’t remember if there was a 3rd.
Preferably open source clients.
You don’t want open source clients, you want standard protocols (IMAP and SMTP). You can use any standard mail client with those protocols, both open- and non-open-source clients.
The problem with “encrypted email” is that it doesn’t work without putting it through non-standard protocols, which lead directly to lock-in. So they’ve spinned it so that you need a “special client” to work with it. But whether Proton’s special client is open-source or not is irrelevant, because they can close down their non-standard protocol at any given moment and close source the client and your mailbox becomes their prisoner.
All you need is a provider with regular IMAP and SMTP, and when a provider starts acting up you can switch to another one with regular IMAP and SMTP as fast as your domain(s)’ DNS can propagate.
This is an excellent answer, and seem to cover all my needs. I’ll definitely check them out!
The pattern rewrites especially are interesting. I had ruled out catch alls not only because of the usual downsides but also becauseci could not direct aliases to specific mailboxes with a catch all. I assume with the pattern rewrites, ibcan direct different fixed parts to different mailboxes?
Yes, you can send each pattern to one mailbox or to multiple.
Also check out port87 https://port87.com/ if you’re looking for an AI-free mail service (as in, they don’t use AI to develop nor have any AI features). They have a blog post about it: https://sciactive.com/2026/01/21/our-stance-on-ai-in-email/
I don’t think Tuta offers the features you need; but at least it’s privacy focused, EU based, and with foss apps (they are even on fdroid!!)
Look at infomaniak.com.
Do you have experience withe their mail hosting? How is account management for other users? I only use them for domains for now, but am considering them for mail.
I tried them at a certain point the first time I left proton. Featurewise they were great, but then they came out against Swiss privacy protections in a very concrete way which I felt was a bridge too far. Went back to proton, but infomaniak does not support email forwarding on free accounts so there was no way to migrate out. Luckily I wasn’t there long but did miss a few emails in the process. Which is to say, I would use your own domain name to make leaving easier or keep this in mind if you switch.
See, this is exactly what question marks are for, so people know whether you’re asking for or giving advice.
Title edited for clarity
So, I guess I will be the one to say it to everyone-
Every single group will likely eventually use AI. If you want to fully minimize it, you should just buy a mini pc and a domain name and set up your own private mail provider with OSS. That is what I would honestly suggest.
This is a good way to get blacklisted by email providers. Not discouraging it but your mileage will vary greatly on this endeavor.
Care to explain? If you are just using the email as an email, it should be fine…
Some things you might face:
- Residential IP blocks from your ISP
- Port 25 is often blocked by ISPs and cloud providers
- Big email providers immediately distrust small email servers; Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo will silently block and move the emails to junk
- You have a multitude of DNS records and they have to be perfect. They’re also fiddly. DKIM, DMARC, reverse DNS. One blip and email ain’t working
- If your security is crap, your server can get turned into a spam cannon and it can take weeks to months to get removed from blacklists
- Managing your own spam filters sucks
- Troubleshooting deliverability can be a nightmare
There’s a difference between using AI where useful (though I still think it’s unethical), and baing job performance on tokenmxing essentially. For me it signals that Proton’s leadership cannot be trusted.
That being said, that was just the last straw. The biggest issue for me is their partnership with a university that supports Israels genocide of the Palestinians.
I considered hosting my own email server, but I do not trust the uptime of my setup for something as important as email. Maybe in the future with some hardware and networking upgrades with redundancy.
I understand your opinion on the matter, I just unfortunately think any corporation you try and use will eventually be revealed to be supporting genocides or data brokering, or some other horrible thing. For profit groups will always cave to money, and money will always be at someone’s expense. So that’s all I got for you. Sorry.
I get what you are saying, but for me it’s not reason enough not to try. That is why I am trying to set things up in a way that makes it easier to migrate.
Just to mention it, addy.io is partnered with Tuta much like SimpleLogin is partnered with Proton.
Good to know. Do you have an opinion on either of them?
Unfortunately no. I’m in a similar place to you, currently using Proton and SimpleLogin but hoping to switch to a custom domain and move from Proton. Tuta has been a strong recommendation here but I don’t have personal experience with them yet.
