Privacy

49716 readers

638 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

Are there any truly FOSS email providers? (piefed.blahaj.zone)

submitted 1 week ago by blight@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Tuta and Proton, which are both commonly recommended, have not released their back-end code (read about it here and here). Proton doesn't seem interested in open sourcing their code, and Tuta has claimed they're aiming to do it in the future (the claim was made years ago and nothing has happened yet). They also both claim to be open source in their marketing.

Is there any alternative that is fully FOSS?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Eggymatrix@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Someone has to pay the bills, so they need to earn some money. If you ain't paying you are the product is always a good metric, but in the email case the problem is also that a lot of the effort is manly IT admin rather than just the backend software.

You can roll your own dovecot and run your own emails at home in theory, in practice you need to be trusted by the major email providers to be able to send emails not tagged as malicious by anyone.

To protect their trusted status most providers collaborate on a lot of elements to be mutually sure they are not flooding each other with worthless spam. This is a lot of SPF, and other technical bullshit to be able to run a mail provider someone has to pay for

In case it is not clear: most use foss backend (dovecot or other), but this will not cover the whole software stack needed for an email provider

[–] blight@piefed.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 week ago

To clarify, this isn't about selfhosting or wanting a free service. I already pay for an email provider and I have no intention of hosting one myself. This is only about principles.