M365 has become an intangible mess of a multitude of different admin dashboards redirecting you around and complicating things beyond comprehension. For the migration, I wanted to backup my entire email backlog. It took me two hours to finally get it connected to thunderbard via IMAP and do the backup. I was redirected from Docs pages to the M365 dashboard, M365 Exchange dashboard, Security dashboard and whatnot. I had to turn on 2FA which only worked afer enabling some hidden "Security defaults" until I finally could enable IMAP login, and then took several AI assisted attempt to get the server and credential details.
When I cancelled my subscription MS asks you to give a reason, and the first bullet point is "This product is too complicated to manage" - so they even know about the mess they created.
For now, Proton replaced my M365 subscription, bitwarden, and Kagi (I use protons LUMO AI, which uses different models in the backend and gives you unlimited requests). I didn't have a VPN plan before, now it is also included. The value proposition of Proton is unbeatable in itself, the privacy on top is just the icing on the cake.
It’s the price of end-to-end encryption.
The only workaround is synchronising everything locally and searching locally.
- No catch-all (yes, I use my own domain just for me, and I want a catchall to my mailbox)
- Outlook 365 webinterface becoming buggy and shitty in so many ways
- I had 2 domains set up (one private, one business) but O365 would not display which email a given was used as target (just display my name), nor would it let me choose FROM which Email I want send/reply to a mail
- O365 required re-authentication every 24h or so, but I always keep the webinterface open in my tab 24/7
Additionally, I had a Bitwarden paid subscription and looking for another VPN subscription, plus a commercial AI subscription. Proton is has all of that in a one-package deal.
2. Agreed
3. Yes, inbox rules could color these
4. Something must wrong in CA, this should not happen (if you don't want it to)
Whatever nostalgic love there has been for the company from the olden days has completely evaporated by now. It will take a decade for the OS competitor to emerge but once that happens, MSFT will hopefully die in the fiery blaze of death it completely deserves at this point.
This opinion comes fresh off of having to had to engage with their partner center "experience", where basic UI functions are broken beyond repair and simple form submissions have to go through three layers of subcontracted customer "support" which is best described as a broken telephone where you have to explain the problem repeatedly to an endless stack of support staff.
Not to mention Windows 11 BSODing every week and failing to make basic functions like bluetooth work on it.
This may seem dramatic but its an 100% true and accurate representation of how everything works with them these days.
I could only wish my own business were this screwed.
Probably
> they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365)
You forgot Github, the once-reliable and once-generally-fast but now pink-unicorn-bedraggled slow-as-molasses 'forge' site. Oh how they messed it up and am I ever glad I only ever used it as a mirror for my own repos.
How they manage to screw up just about every product they purchase remains a mystery to me but by ${deity} are they good at it.
my experience of asian software development is they simply build enterprise for the users, how the users want it. rather than trying to shape consumer behaviour. in some ways it could be argued that it is less innovative, but when big orgs figure out a USD$500 laptop running WPS+Harmony + email client can replace msft enterprise contracts a lot of asia co's will never go back
culturally homogenous dev teams producing software for a culturally homogenous market is quite powerful. then outsiders will adapt. rather than winslop focus on support everything, localise to every market, hardware, whatever
i see future of:
HarmonyOS or MacOS for corps then misc tablet systems
this will acelerate with hardware shortages making unified OS+hardware product like huawei or macbook more competitive
- No search in Mail. You can use Bridge to pull your emails into something else, but this means it's no longer secure, and not really feasible for a non-techy partner!
- No search in Drive
- 3 domain limit for Mail(???)
- Drive sucks. No previewing files, viewing photos etc. due to missing docs suite
- No proper shared folders in Drive
- Pass is woeful at autocomplete
- Pass Aliases are independent of logins, so you end up with double entries for everything
- You can't sync the calendar with native apps, and the calendar doesn't show birthdays
- No contact sync
- Pass doesn't support SSH
- VPN lets you split tunnel by app on PC, app AND IP on Android, IP on the chrome extension. Some let you include, others exlcude. How hard is it to just allow exclude/include for hostnames?
There's tonnes more that I'm missing that I can't think of from the top of my head, but it seems like Proton have stretched themselves very thinly. What I would consider a lot of basic features are missing. One look at their UserVoice community shows a lot of frustration
I think it's probably best to pay for individual services that focus on one area. I ended up with Fastmail, 1Password, and Windscribe for example.
It's not like registrars haven't randomly shut down people's domains due to accidental (or malicious) abuse reports.
Email is really the one that requires lot of caring about so not easy to self host.
By that I mean, could we have like for firefox , heavy clients but with client to client sync. The goal is to not need to have a always online machine while still solving the "i prefer if my emails are copied both on my laptop and my phones" . Especially as nearly all my devices are often if not always on the same LAN
For the experience an average consumer expects, you at a minimum need a central short-lived cache.
Next up I'm moving my TODOs off Todoist to something local-first, and plugging that into my Syncthing setup.
But the blame is on us: we should have known better than to entrust our data to free services run by a company whose entire revenue comes from ads.
Proton is funded by our subscription payments. I think there’s reasonable hope that their incentives will remained aligned with those of their paying users.
> I got my own domain for email
Edit: s/mining/migrating
However, the value of the Google Workspace* mid-tier (approx. 15€) is hard to beat, I think.
I get:
- granular domain \ email controls (blocklists, routing rules, etc.)
- 2tb of google drive space
- and now Gemini, which is quite nice
It’s 2025, and I’m still finding it impossible to leave :(
* note: I use Google Workspace as a personal account, with just one (my) user, because that gives me access to the domain and management tools listed above
Recently they got some Euria AI - i havent tried it i bet it's bad. Rest though i really like.
Regarding Euria, I don't use it much since I have Kagi Assistant and other things via work, but I was quite surprised by the results given its cost.
The only annoying thing I saw was that it kept answering in French even though I prompted in English.
It doesn’t seem like Proton even really cares about the how bad their mail search is and is more focused on releasing new products.
Not sure if it's related but
Proton does not hold your unencrypted email body content
It's not perfect but obviously it's a LOT more than searching only on titles.
So basically they sacrifice a usable search function for a security service that isn't relevant to 99% of people and isn't even effective half the time.
The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows. And thunderbird doesn't work great with M365.
But anyway my point is even supposedly premium services screw this up.
I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding, but on MacOS there is a "proper" application: "Microsoft Outlook for Mac". As I understand this is called the "New Outlook" which is a native, non-Electron version. As it is not Electron based it is only 2.6GB (/s).
Anyways.. the search capabilities are insanely bad for searches outside of your current mailbox. It might be related to handling of large result sets where it just provides a limited set of random hits as opposed to a set with the most recent hits. When you provide from-to dates (from a hideously complicated "advanced" menu) the results seem a bit better.
edit/addition: on MacOS, Outlook supposedly uses the native "Spotlight" search engine. MacOS spotlight, when used from the Finder, actually does a really good job in finding the E-mail .eml files from the file system and, when clicked, they open up in Outlook.
Have you tried Apple Mail? I’d be interested to hear if it’s worse than that.
I use it, the search is very bad.
The desktop client is rubbish, though, agreed.
Apple Mail.app is the fastest search available. I use it with o365 specifically for search.
Proton websearch is by default email title, sender/receiver only. You can enable full body search but Proton will download your emails to your browser so the search is local. They dont support server-side body search. If you have thousands of emails, youll need to download those first.
Instead (and this is the suggested way) you can link it to an email client which stores emails on device unencrypted using proton mail bridge. They could pre-load all content in your browser, but again it's pretty bad UX and you would sit there wondering why the search takes 1-2 minutes on a fresh window session if it was on "by default". You *can* use automatic tagging for assisted search (like "if contains flight, add flight tag") though if you want to continue exclusively using the web app(s).
But there is a pretty valid concern here: why don't the native iOS and android apps have an email index?! I guess they don't want to be caught "storing" your emails unencrypted? I don't know - should really be an option.
They are on my watch list however. The CEO is pro-surveillance, but was forced to back down due to the outrage of their customers, but he seems to be ethically quite questionable. But for the moment, I think they do a good job, but they should change their CEO to someone who unquestionably is against surveillance.
This is wrong. There are loads of alternatives, which I can't remember at the moment. AlternativeTo.net lists Hyvor Blogs (https://blogs.hyvor.com/), which isn't one of the ones I was familiar with and cannot vouch for, but serves as an existence proof. Does anyone know any better ones?
Open-source, managed service, based in Germany, and integrates with Proton. Authoring in a block editor or Markdown. Optional built-in analytics with a focus on preserving privacy. Web-hosted posts added about two weeks ago.
That’s how you end up sending push notifications for your latest Nazi content.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-p...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...
Of course for ordinary people there has always been an alternative to Substack, and it's the Bcc field in their email client. For folks looking to self-publish on the web, Wordpress has been around for decades now - there is no excuse for any serious writer or journalist not to know about it and the multitude of managed hosting options. Even for a newsletter-first option, there is Ghost. But if you discuss this with writers who move to Substack the answer is always the same - they want to try access the money or the fame that may come from being on the most popular social network for writing. I think the only fix for this broken ecosystem is for governments to dismantle these sorts of companies, but the US will never kill their golden geese - they are gladly taking a cut from every other country's content creators.
Zoho's free plan stopped offering custom domains and/or limits imap access.
[0] - https://workspace.google.com/lp/business/ [1] - https://www.zoho.com/us/billing/pricing/
That of course assumes time is free, so I wouldn't compare it to cloud pricing directly. I'd also personally budget in incremental backups.
The only down side I have heard, that people have, is that you cannot use your own domains.
The great part about email is that you can move between providers without issues. I wouldn’t want to use a posteo.de email for all my services when I don’t know if they will be around in 10 years.
For a business email this might not be cool tho. I get that
According to their Privacy Policy, they sure are a German company and have their core infra on Hetzner, but they rely heavily on USA-based providers for CDN and others: https://www.superlist.com/privacy-policy
Also, if they had a paid tier for Todoist, I don't see how the free-tier of Superlist will provide the same level of service/features.
So overall it looks like a fun exercise but the result is not true to the title and honestly feels misleading.
I DON'T WANT my chats to be "full E2E encrypted" with a 6-digit pin, only for me to loose them when I get a new phone. I DON'T WANT having to use a special gateway instead of normal IMAP to access my Proton mail. It really feels like server-side encryption is being forced down my throat and I don't consent. FB Messenger, X Chat, WhatsApp, Signal, etc... NO. Just LET ME CHAT. This is why me and my friend groups are staying on Discord. Becuase it "just works".
I would like to see more EU companies which aggressively focus on being a just-as-good alternative to US tech companies, but HQ'd in EU for european strategic security, and without throwing usability under the bus.
For documents, if you are even slightly techie, hosting your own OwnCloud/NextCloud is pretty easy. It just works. Both also offer a central calendar function, if that is important.
For email, buy your own domain, and host it with a local provider.
All the other things he mentions (to-do lists, password manager, etc.) just pick your favorite app, and store the data in OwnCloud.
Pumping data in and out may take a while, but they expose an imap interface and it’s a right click in thunderbird or whatever to do this or a ./cli to dump an imap mailbox…
It seems document editing is quite an intensive task.
I think privacy services and software will soon run out of safe havens to operate from.
"The biggest impact on this migration has come from Proton".
For standard questions I feel like it doesn't matter too much what you use. When it comes to multi-step searching + reasoning flows like look for alternatives, fetch pricing, feature lists, compare etc, the differences are larger because of the engineering glue and prompting around the pure LLM inference which makes the tools more or less powerful.
I'm moving slowly because this kind of migration is never easy, but I fully intend to move >90% of my stuff to European providers (and 100% of the critical parts).
I admire the motivation though
That's a big deal to some of us.
Especially important it the demonstration that your privacy which Google et al, are so insistent on monetizing, does not mean they are charging you less for the same services that other companies can charge when you are paying only with your money, not your privacy as well.
I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control, and the latest news is that they're still trying / succeeding on some fronts. Please don't reduce such complicated matters to red vs. blue, it's really more complicated and there are no easy solutions anywhere.
I see, the EU propaganda shows effect. Of course a proponent of the non-elected regime doesn't mind the illegal "chat control" and censorship of any wrongthink facilitated by the Digital Services Act.
I've got a bridge to sell you if you think Apple isn't doing the exact same thing. What do you think they are doing with all their focus on their ad business?
> I avoid Google like the plague and only use it when I have to. When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.
HN needs to make an exception for clown emoji.
just untrue lol. people literally just believe any nonsense they read. in a pedantic sense any company, where you send things to them is just "going into a log somewhere to be monetized" if you mean having logs can help improve the product which makes said company money...
so, to narrow things down this is presumably about personalization - in which case that's obviously just untrue.
assuming it's in the pedantic sense, most logs at google are not directly monetized, nor are most logs at google even part of services that even roll-up to ads.
What's more valuable is simply accepting that there are others who are different.
Now, Proton is based in Switzerland (thank god for some sane countries in Europe that still remain), but EU is not friend to your "privacy and data sovereignty".
Countries in EU are going after you (and demanding that external platforms disclosure your anonymous identity so that they can put you in prison) because you write "wrong" stuff on the internet. Like, simply calling a - morbidly obese - politician fat. Imagine if that platform was based in the EU. [1]
So, no. EU is not the solution for your privacy. Unless you only care for businesses using your data (which is still bad, of course), but appreciate having the government (and the unelected European Commission) Big Brother watching over you and policing your words.
They are both bad, but they aren't both equally bad. Sure, the businesses can use what I write and see to put even more silly ads in front of me or even train some LLM. But, at least, they won't put me in a Gulag for re-education because I committed some thought crime.
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/germany-started-criminal-inves...
In America they don't wait for you to commit a thought crime, they throw you into a gulag right after trying to enter the country: https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/03/13/bc-woman-us-detenti...
But they're practicing the thought crime part by requiring your social media history on entry.
One of those being about American exceptionalism and how Americans will only ever make judgement about other countries (including the EU) from the highly deformed perspective of their local news. And they’ll do this, knowingly, with no remorse, because they’ve been taught all their life America is the best so there are no reasons to doubt or consider that things aren’t quite right.
Being a continent away, with no idea what is going on over here, americans don’t understand EU culture, nor how it relates to German culture. Fox News does not understand what exactly happened in that particular case you linked, let alone you who is reading a ragebait-fueled summary of it.
You also clearly don’t understand how the European Commission works and what it is able to actually do.
Should I bother correcting you? Of course not: you are most likely not interested otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation. The information is available freely online if you so desire and if you are willing to get out of your comfortable bubbles that constantly prioritise the aforementioned American exceptionalism.
There is no such thing, and has never been. Europeans are different people with different cultures. No matter how much hackers and global projects want to exterminate those cultures and those people.
The equivalent would be to talk about "Mercosul culture" or "NAFTA culture". Or why not "NATO culture", or "BRICS culture"?