What is your threat model? Western intelligence? Both are suspicious and cannot be proven to not be western intel cut-outs or compromised by them and given the history of western intel agencies subverting everything they can in the encryption space (cryptoAG, etc), well you can only trust them so far.
I’m not saying the NSA or CIA is going to rat you out to the FBI about buying some drugs from your dealer for personal use because they’re not. But email is not a very secure medium. The best way to go about it is to encrypt before copying the message over using something like PGP and keys you’ve shared via a secure channel (not email, not compromised instant messengers). Beware of course that most of the value intel agencies in the west get is via metadata, building networks, knowing who you talk to, who they talk to, what times you talk, correlating that with other surveillance data (cell location data, intel on protest participation, etc).
Someone else mentioned Yandex and Russian companies are not a bad idea but beware of expat Russian companies like Yandex that started there and mainly serve there, have most technical employees there, but conveniently moved their legal headquarters into the west within the jurisdiction, legal, and extra-legal powers of western intelligence (probably to avoid sanctions and other issues). I will say I’d sooner use a Russian service (even an ex-Russian one like Yandex) for privacy and security purposes than an American, European or western vassal state one.
Either is probably better than Google though. Honestly whichever fits your needs and budget, go with it.
Neither seem really great. I’ve gotten shit for saying this before, but Protonmail comes across as a honeypot to me. For various reasons I also don’t trust the whole “Swiss hosted super private” marketing.
Here’s a deep dive into various email providers and an analysis of their claims vs. what they actually provide.
Removed
Neither. Of course, both are far better than Gmail, but unless you’re self-hosting and using two-way encryption for all emails (in which case you might as well use something like Matrix), always assume that your emails are available to anyone
Ex-Protonmail, now Tutanota mail user here:
The answer is Tutanota, but it comes down to semantics and they’re both great. Proton is better if you want the full VPN+Email+Calendar suite, Tutanota is better if you don’t want to use Proton VPN (I personally use Mullvad for my VPN which accepts Monero).
I would still be with Protonmail to this day, but they accidentally deleted my account 5 years ago and I lost access to my email. It’s not an issue you will experience (hopefully), but it was obviously enough for me to stop at the time.
Tl;dr use whatever you want more, they both have great privacy
I use both. Proton has the VPN and with Visionary a plan that allows my team to all have email, calendar, and vpn. Tutanota works on GrapheneOS without the need to have Google framework and playservice and still works with push notifications.
Proton allows to interact with PGP users, which is great. Tutanota does not.
Tutanota is cheaper and has a calendar and email working great.
Check also skiff.com as it might be enough for you with the free version. Really depend on what you need.
How does Skiff compare to Proton and Titanota?
It has a lot to offer, including drive, calendar, and pages. It has no option for imap and no PGP but encryption between skiff users… Worth reading up on them and compare
in the process of migrating from google to proton and I like it more. There’s no unnecessary request for personal information, no weird AI features that read your drafts and messages, no bs so far.
Privacy wise it seems better than the other mainstream options but my only motivation is to stop companies like Google from building an ad profile of me.
Beware, tutanota suspend accounts if you don’t use them for too long and they have a policy to allow only one free account per person. Don’t know about proton mail but after tutanota suspended those accounts I moved to proton mail.
