There are few alternatives to Proton Drive. Filen.io is the closest one in features. But it's a small company, so it development takes time.
Another alternative is Tresorit. Feature wise it is far beyond Proton Drive and Filen, with more advanced sharing possibilities. But it's quite expensive, closed source and uses Azure under the hood on the server side.
Filen and Tresorit are the only ones with Linux apps. Proton Drive can be accessed via rclone, but that is quite slow tbh.
Regarding Proton VPN. That is probably the only consumer VPN service I'm willing to give some trust. But consumer VPNs are in general questionable services. They promise a lot more than they can really deliver.
Since I trust one of the ISPs I use where I live, I host my own VPN server there and use that instead. I would even claim that you probably get a more reliable with the same type of privacy if you just use a VPS host in a trusted country and set it up as a VPN server for only your own stuff.
This one is worth a read: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29
VPNs do have a purpose, when used correctly and for the problem a VPN was designed to solve. Consumer VPN services generally falls out of that scope.
So I use Proton VPN only when my direct access to my own VPN server is inaccessible. And I use Proton VPN to get through restricted networks, so I can get a connection to my own VPN server (double tunnel/tunnel in tunnel).
@unruhe @Tutanota @protonprivacy
Give both a shot. Both are the only ones (I know of) having zero storage access as the only option; meaning #e2ee is enforced. You may have mailbox.org as a third one (E2EE must be enabled manually there).
I ended up with Proton as I experienced it far more feature rich, flexible and mature. And the Bridge is a must for my use case. In addition, it builds on PGP which can be used to have E2EE communication with people outside of Proton. (yes, I've tried Mailvelope with Tuta; that does not work at all. And doing it manually with copy/paste and PGP in an ordinary text esitor is a waste of time and also turned out error prone one the receiving end; Tuta mails gets mangled on the way).
But if you're a very lightweight mail user, Tuta might fit your need. I generally think of Tuta more like a messenger service with SMTP transport support.
Also beware, importing mails to Tuta is still not possible (unless that has changed the last months). And exporting mails are also a mess. I have migrated one user from Tuta to Proton, and I had to manually fix mail headers to get them imported. The mail export was quite poor, tbh. It took me longer than importing a handful of users from a Zimbra server to Proton - using the same Proton Mail Import/Export tool.
Finally, I just want to mention that Tuta is a company with less than 20-30 employees, serving something like 10 million users. Proton is probably closer to 500 employees these days, serving more than 100 million users. So these organisations are quite different. Which also means they have quite different approaches for developing services further and capabilities to handle sudden challenges.
@LinkOpensChest_wav @helenslunch
I've done the self-hosting of e-mail for over a decade. But it got so annoying and troublesome in the end it was a delight to migrate to Proton (because of all the spammers making this whole e-mail infrastructure a nightmare).
Incoming e-mail is still doable for self-hosting. But outgoing is getting incredibly hard when you're a tiny actor; you get blocked by all these larger mail providers (gmail, hotmail/outlook.com, yahoo) and your just lucky if you're able to get in touch with anyone willing to look into the issues. Most times you get a mail template back claiming a bad IP address/range reputation (despite being able to document it several years back). The worst one even claimed I did aggressive marketing spam (which would be absurd for the handful users I served, used it for private emailing). And then they close the support ticket and ignore you.
Proton is definitely big enough to fight back such abusive behaviours by these large actors.
@unruhe @Tutanota @protonprivacy
I dunno. I more often feel people who complain loudest about poor support comes from people who want a specific outcome but gets angry when they don't get what they want and expect. And then let their steam out in social media angling it in a way that they are the victims.
And this trend isn't specific to Proton, but more as a general impression.
The best way to check the support level is to actually reach out to them with an issue and then see how they respond to you.
@unruhe @Tutanota @protonprivacy
I've been in touch with both. I've let Tuta behind. The Proton support was superb. It was delightful to actually be in touch with support personnel actually understanding how e-mail and the delivery mechanisms work. Solved my issues pretty quickly.
But was on Proton business and Visionary plans when I reached out, so the support level expectations are quite higher there.
Yes, I'll be hanging around _here_ 😁
I'll contribute when something interesting appears in my streams.
All this conversation is happening on Matodon in my case. I don't even know or care what Lemmy is.
You're the one who said "Here". And to me "Here" is on Mastodon.
Be precise in your questions if you want precise answers.
@LinkOpensChest_wav
Yeah, some. You need to learn some new tools, like ssh, command line usage and how to keep the system up-to-date. That's the bare minimum. Then it's good to learn a bit of network firewalling, to secure the host better.
Then you need to deploy a VPN server. OpenVPN Access Server is easily installed and can help settings things up reasonably quickly. The unpaid install allows you to have 2 devices connected at the same time.
Alternatively, there is the Cloud Connexa service. That will function a bit more like the Proton VPN Secure Core when fully set up (you can can connect from your devices from a different region from your VPS's location). You run a few commands on your VPS which the Cloud Connexa wizard setup guides you through. The free plan here includes 3 connected devices (in your case VPS + 2 devices).
With both alternatives you can install the OpenVPN Connect app on your devices, provide the username/password/otp for the account you've created in Access Server or Cloud Connexa, and you're basically ready. The Connect app downloads the proper config file and you can connect just as the consumer VPNs.