Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

Summary

This was a tough decision, having used Gmail since 2007/2008. However, I had to draw the line and stop giving Google my data for free.The problem with email is that everything is transmitted in plain text. Technically, Google can store every message you receive and know everything, and U.S. agencies can request access to that data (this include also EU citizens under the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Frameworks).For someone like me, who cares about privacy and runs as much as possible on my own home servers, that felt like way too much.So I decided to switch to another provider, one that respects privacy a bit more. Of course, this meant no longer “paying” with my personal data, but instead paying the actual price of the email service.The beginningLet me start by saying: I use email in a very basic way. I send and receive a lot of messages (at least 50 a day), but they’re plain text/html emails with no attachments or fancy features. I couldn’t care less about the rest of the “suite", like notes, contacts, calendars and all that extra stuff.So, after a bit of research, I narrowed it down to three different services:Mailbox.orgProton MailTutanotaThe last two providers offered true end-to-end encryption, at a cost of about €3/4 per month. Sounds good… but the catch is that to use their end-to-end encryption you’re forced to use their apps (or, on macOS, run a background “bridge”).That’s a no go for me, because I love Apple’s Mail app on macOS and iOS, it just works perfectly for my needs, and I don’t want to give that up.So, I went with mailbox.org that still offers integrated PGP encryption, and if you want, you can always use external PGP too (which I was already doing with Gmail).Mailbox.org has a solid plan: 10GB of email storage plus 5GB of cloud storage starting at €2.50/month (paid annually). You can even expand the mail storage up to 100GB, at €0.20 per gigabyte.I was using around 2.5GB on Gmail, so I had no issues with paying the equivalent of two c...