Truly modern consumer sensibilities are fascinating to me.
Personally I do not use any Apple or Google products. There are so many better choices!
Anyway, might I suggest services that run standard open source mail daemons that never restrict you, like Migadu.
I get that not everyone has the bandwidth or capability to dig into things on their own, but we live in a hostile environment, and we have to either acknowledge that and plan for it, or touch the hot stove over and over again.
There's no need to test mail services first hand. Just read up and do some rudimentary research.
People make all sorts of excuses, but at the end of the day cell networks and the attention, privacy, and sovereignty losses that come with them, are optional. There are -always- alternative paths if you ask, and I do not mind being "that guy" to ensure those paths exist for others that need them more than me and lack the privilege to demand them.
Also my attention span has not been this high in decades. I take on crazy hard shit now I would have never touched in my doom scrolling fugue state years.
I ran my own server for about 25 years. I put in my time and got tired of doing it. I've migrated my own email to Apple's servers mainly because it's the only reasonably priced family host I could find.
[0] https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonym...
Trust eroding on proton sadly.
<rant>if i get popups slowing down my web visit it makes me less likely to upsell to, i'd rather a seperate pricing page that i have to manually click to see, my memory serves that most services ive bought have no popup modal (my memory is probably wrong statistically but right emotionally\
maybe op was a/b tested to something more irritating
Fair. They do advertise plans to existing subscribers, even plans that aren’t even an upgrade from your current one.
However on the other hand they do offer a toggle to turn these off completely in the settings. One could argue that it should be opt-in rather than opt-out though.
I wouldn’t count this as a black mark against their reputation though as it’s not the product inherently getting worse.
Funny enough this has been pointed out a lot pretty frequently this past week.
- They decreased the number of visible digits of unread e-mails from four (untested past four) to three. This is one of the first things the user sees when opening the application.
- Soon after, a further update (7.7.1 and further) brought this value down to two digits.
- The mobile application attachment upload has unclear wording and stopped working like it used to.
- The wording for attachments are:
- "From your photo library" (does not offer third party application selection)
- "Take a new photo"
- "Import from..." (allows third-party application selection)
- It's unclear how one:
- Adds a different attachment type
- Adds a photo in-line, or as an attachment
- "From your photo library" is in-line
- "Import from..." is as an attachment
- This may be Android related but ProtonMail was the system that changed most recently for me.
- I used to be able to upload attachments using a third-party file picker (stock android file selection is not great); the latest version doesn't seem to offer third-party applications as a choice.
- There is a newer Category view feature to roll out (or is in progress now) on mobile devices. Something had triggered this feature on my device without my consent (I assumed they were going through e-mails and adding categories based on content or sender or subject or something). An update was required to fix this. They said "Kindly note that you just got an early glimpse of what’s coming for a future update.".
In the desktop/web client:
- Their original link to e-mail login (which I had bookmarked) was then turned into a General Proton login (https://account.proton.me/login, now https://account.proton.me/mail)
- Meaning each time you'd have to log in then select e-mail (basically advertising their other products).
- I ended up asking them for a corrected link (https://mail.proton.me/login)
- In the web client: Fonts are inconsistent, and can change and adjust on you when typing, or when opening drafts. I had it consistently failing this way in Firefox and Chromium browsers; Tor works better but this is not a preferred solution.
ETA: I said nothing about where I'm planning to host my SMTP server. Apple Mail is a provider-agnostic client-side application, like Thunderbird.
ETA2: Those who read TFA carefully will know that, even though this doesn't affect Workspace aliases, it does affect this feature (Send-As SMTP) for workspace accounts.