In your case I would start by getting my own custom domain, still bound to proton, and start moving my accounts to it little by little. Once you decide on a different provider you’ll switch your DNS records to it and everything will keep working (potentially also doing a backup of your whole inbox)

it’s just the last drop in the bucket but, tbh, this shouldn’t come as a surprise from Andy seeing his past behaviour. Although I must admit that reading that manifesto from the CTO did make me puke so hard. As a developer myself (and yes, one that does use a mix of hand-written code and LLMs to some degree), seeing a CTO writing a manifesto like that one would basically mean to me: right, fuck these guys, time for a new job.

I’m glad that I’ve been this whole year transitioning all my important accounts to use a custom domain as their main email and seeing all this clusterfuck was the reminder I needed to cancel my Proton account.

My new provider is ForwardEmail, I was unsure between them or Mailbox.org but then went with the former as, since I self-host a lot of my services, I don’t need all the extra bloat. Tuta may be an option for some but for me was out of the options, I want to use Email client without the need of having to install an intermediary local proxy.

Regardless of what you choose to use now, highly recommend you get a custom domain. After that switching provider is as simple and changing DNS entries in your DNS registrar.

No it hasn’t, but with the Proton Mail Bridge you can get close, as it creates a local IMAP server that you can use with any email client - it’s far from ideal though and it has plenty of glitches

If the rise of techno-lords of this neo-feudalist era hasn’t made it clear to people why privacy is important then it isn’t even worth having the conversation with those people anyway. Privacy is an spectrum and 100% privacy is extremelly difficult to achieve and potentially not worth pursuing to the average people unless your life or someone else’s you love is under threat.

But while 100% is not worth it to the average people, getting very close to it isn’t super difficult nowadays granting you have or know someone with the technological knowledge to achieve it: Nowadays you can use Firefox with proper adblocker extensions for free, get a phone that is de-googled out of the box, you can switch social networks from centralised ones to federated ones, self-host a lot of cloud services very cheaply, etc. True that some technical knowledge (and time) is required to achieve a decent level of privacy. Finding the time isn’t that difficult if one cares a little (they are one online search away), the technical bit is the hard one and maybe a good reason for those of us that self-host to start federating more and more services (but this is another conversation). The fact is, who nowadays doesn’t care about privacy is because they have chosen to do so.

So if the conversation even arises, I sometimes flip it by pointing out how shitty their preferred online service (or even operating system) has become in the recent years, just to tell them I have a totally different online experience than them. If they are curious I can show them how, if not, then they shouldn’t care about me as it’s obvious they don’t care about themselves in the first place.