Friendship with Proton is over Thu, 30 Oct 2025 Technology, Oppinion ================================== I have used Proton Mail (and related services) for many years now. I switched to it (and away from Google) at the end of highschool, and I have been generally happy with it over this period. At the time, my needs were fairly simple: I wanted an email provider which had a good privacy record, which was free, and which was easy to use. Back then, I had no need for using email clients, so I didn't feel limited by Proton's restriction to official apps. Over the years, Proton expanded to include many more services, most of which I adopted. As this happened however, I grew more and more frustrated with Proton's development direction. For example, the mobile apps for Proton Mail have always been much more limited in comparison With the web-version. Most notably for me, the mobile apps cannot send plain-text emails, and you cannot toggle the attachment of your gpg-key. These limits (and others) went ignored for many years while Proton developed a passwords app, a crypto wallet, a 2FA authenticator, a VPN client, a file-storage-, and collaboration- drive, etcetera. Furthermore, as my needs changed, I grew more and more frustrated with the inability for Proton services to be used with "standard" tools. The most notable offender is of course Proton mail; which does not allow for IMAP and SMTP connections, instead requiring an official app or a bridge application (which does not run on mobile). This is supposedly necessary for the zero-access encryption to work (more on this later). Proton drive is also problematic, giving neither webdav access nor working well with standard tools like rsync or rclone. While Proton continued being a worse fit for me every year, I didn't really see any viable alternatives other than self-hosting. Just over a month ago, I finally took that jump and switched over to my own email server (the same VPS hosts this blog now; both the web and gopher versions). Selfhosting ----------- Email ===== Email was rather complicated to set up, though there are many good guides available. My email is now set up with zero-access encryption while also allowing for regular IMAP and SMTP connections (which really made me wonder what the point of Proton's "bridge" application was). This finally (for the first time since I got it in 2019) allowed me to login to my email on my phone. Furthermore, while I always received comments on this blog at , I was never able to SEND from this address. Once the server was set up, it was trivial to make a new account for the "blog" user, now allowing me to send from that address. Setting up my own email server also showed me the insane amount of trust one places on their email provider. The postmaster (or system administrator) is easily capable of intercepting or altering emails, changing your password, and may even be able to bypass encryption (if they even have it) by backing up your keys. If the provider does not use on-disk encryption, all your emails are readable by anyone with access to the server or its files. This includes the company, law-enforcement, and potential thieves. Self-hosting your email still requires SOME degree of trust in one's hosting provider, but at least I know that I have set up the encryption system properly, and that no one -- not even someone with physical access to the disk -- can read my emails without my password. Calendar ======== Another non-standard Proton application is Proton Calendar. Sadly, not using standard protocols (calDAV in this case) is much more common in the calendar space compared to email, but hosting your own calendar allows you to bypass all of this. Much like with mail, this allowed me to finally log in to my calendar on my phone, meaning that I no-longer need to stand around notice boards at the university to see what room my lectures are in. Furthermore, much like with the email, the calendar data is encrypted on-disk. Yet; no bridge needed! Files ===== I installed NextCloud on my server which handles file storage (wait for it) using standard protocols (!) accessible from many many services. Now, I can mount the remove drive on my laptop as if it is a local folder, I can quickly send files over with rclone, I can log in from all my mobile devices because support for webDAV is much more wide-spread compared to proton-drive. Conclusion ---------- While setting up the email server was rather complicated, especially making sure everything is secure and up-to-spec for sending emails to external servers, I think it was definitely worth it. More generally, I think it is worth it for many people to rent their own server as it allows you to do SO MUCH with just a single (low) monthly payment. My server now handles pretty much my entire could/online life, from my personal email/files, to this public-blog, to other simple services which I would like to have running at all times. For now, I still use Codeberg for hosting my programming projects, but perhaps I will migrate this in the future as well. The feeling -- honestly -- is a lot like moving out of one's parents' house. Previously, I depended on services provided by others. Now, I have my own place (still rented), but one which I can arrange and use as I see fit. If you have a comment -- and want to try out the new email server -- you can reach me at . ----------------------------------------------------------------- All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. 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