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Email to avoid email providers from companies like Google or Microsoft.
It's a great deal too! My own domain was 50€ for 10 years, and Purelymail hosting is 10 bucks per year.
Whats some good ones?
I use Tutanota with a private domain, but you can get a free address with them also.
I’m still using the services of Big Email, which means I’m the product in this setting. From a philosophical standpoint, that sucks. From a practical point of view, I don’t really see any downsides. Surely there are some that I’m just not aware of.
If they want to show me some ads, I have ublock origin and NextDNS to take care of that. What else should I know about my situation?
Studies have shown that you see worse online prices than I do, because they know what you are going to buy next and they have a good guess the maximum amount you are willing to pay.
VPNs aren't enough to solve this, but you may be unaffected if you have other strong anti-fingerprinting habits, including routinely deleting all cookies and disabling JavaScript.
A terrible ~~The worst~~ thing they could be doing is providing an annual report to potential employers on how much money you make, helping your employers minimize how much they pay you. Of course, Visa could also be doing this.
The other thing they could be doing is sharing your health history, ethnicity, and any religious or political leanings with potential employers, health insurers, or governments.
In certain cases (cough the USA) we know the government has a legal right to a wire tap, if any of the servers are inside the USA.
How much any of that could affect you long term depends on who has power where, of course.
Sorry to drop all this for you. It got to where I didn't feel the risk was worth it for free email, for me. I wish I had jumped to a privacy respecting solution sooner, since I don't know how long my data will take to age out of their systems.
Edit: Sorry...I realized I used the word "worst" pretty lightly here. Worst is more like...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
I already use several Firefox forks for different purposes, and all of them are reasonably resistant to fingerprinting. I also have a special container for all the corpo trash I have to deal with. When I click a random news articles on Lemmy, those sites are opened in a different container and their creepy cookies get deleted as soon as I close the tab.
I'm doing all of this out of of philosophical reasons. It's also pretty easy to set up, and there are hardly any downsides. Disabling java script is something I have tried too, but it did come with all sorts of severe downsides, so that's where I had to draw the line.
Regardless, I still find the idea of a privacy respecting email appealing. Philosophical reasons again... Recently, I also made a quick and dirty risk assessment about the potential risks, and I still didn't see an urgent need to mitigate them. The practical side of it still requires a bit more reading before I can justify an ongoing expense like this. Naturally, the email provider would have to be EU based.
They get access to all emails used for banking, shopping, social media accounts, etc. Depends on if you are fine with them being able to build a detailed profile off your emails.
Ads is like the least problematic aspect.
Your email is the root of your digital identity, and pretty much everything in your digital life is tied to it. If your email is provided by Big Email, they own your digital identity and it exists at their whim, with no recourse if it gets taken away, compromised, or abused.
If you own your domain and pay for mail hosting, you can at least move your email between providers if something goes wrong, and have some recourse with those providers since you're a customer instead of a product.
You have zero privacy and also generate power for them to do the things they do, which is gargle trump's sharty grey scrote and thus empower trump