> First, I tried mailbox.org, which I can generally recommend without reservation. Unfortunately, you can’t send emails from any address on your own domain without a workaround
I use mailbox for a long time, one account for 2.50EUR/month with multiple custom domains and I can send emails from any address. To send from a different address the process didn't really seem different than other providers.
From Thunderbird mobile on Android I just add a new sender identity. If I need to send from webmail, similarly I just add a new alternative sender. Are these the workarounds you mentioned?
My understanding is that the number of such sender aliases is limited, at most 50 or 250, depending on the plan. There are ways to use a custom domain for sending where you end up using a larger number of localparts fairly quickly, and it would be a hassle to have to manage them, instead of just typing whatever sender you want (or on replies, having the email client automatically use the address from the original email, without having to worry whether it’s still in the set of registered aliases).
The limit is only enforced in the web interface. You can send from any alias using any third party email client, and on the website you can configure a catchall mailbox and create a rule to filter out the aliases that receive spam.
...also migrating AWAY from Fastmail (Australian) and TO an European provider sounds like a very bad idea - I'd kind of want both the US and the EU legally away from my coms at all costs (!)
Is it that different? Being Australia in alliances like "Five Eyes" I don't think you can keep your stuff away from the US at least when using Fastmail.
If you want both US & EU away from your data, I suppose you will have to consider things like Yandex Mail, which comes with its own set of problems too, of course :)
The problem is that, even if Fastmail are Australian, they host exclusively in the US. They state that sure, there is the possibility of interference at the data center level, but they rely on their anti-hacking measures to prevent unlawful access
How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review? Some EU courts will not exclude illegally obtained evidence either, so challenging the warrant later on will be pointless.
Oh, and you might be in a reasonable EU country and still be hit with an EIO from one of the unreasonable countries. This is especially concerning given recent ECJ rulings increasingly directing courts in receiving nations to blindly defer to the requesting party when dealing with EAWs, EIOs and similar.
>How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?
This is a hilarious 'just asking questions' concern that doesn't address the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order it primarily helped build post WWII while threatening other liberal democracies like Canada and Denmark with invasions.
It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
I'm not advertising the US here or trying to troll. I'm an European pointing out things about the European system that many here will not have thought about.
>It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
> How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?
(IANAL.) This was reviewed by the courts themselves:
> The CJEU confirmed that the Belgian, French and Swedish prosecutors were sufficiently independent from the executive to be able to issue EAWs. […]
> […] Public prosecutors will qualify as an issuing judicial authority where two conditions are met: […]
> 2. Second, public prosecutors must be in a position to act in an independent way, specifically with respect to the executive. The CJEU requires that the independence of public prosecutors be organised by a statutory framework and organisational rules that prevent the risk of prosecutors being subject to individual instructions by the executive (as was the case with the German prosecutor). Moreover, the framework must enable prosecutors to assess the necessity and proportionality of issuing an EAW. In the French prosecutor judgment, the CJEU specifically indicated that:
The question that the OP asks is fair enough, but there's a lot of subtly and 'low-level' details on how things operate compared to the high-level question that is being asked. Also depends on where the OP lives and what he's used to: common law (UK/US/CA/etc) and civil law procedures and laws are (AIUI) quite different.
Valid question, which must be put in the context of US-based providers willingly satisfying US out-of-jurisdiction search requests for EU data without even letting the EU know about it. (And when the providers are not willing, they can be forced by U.S. Cloud Act)
Sweden is a country like this. It is just the way it is here. It can be abused, sure. But all things considered, I much rather have my things hosted here than in the US.
Police in many EU countries was systematically searching suspects phones without mandatory due process. This was prima facie illegal, everyone involved knew it. They did it regardless.
Yeah, this decision eventually resulted in many governments issuing new guidance, and some countries rewriting their national legislation.
It took Ireland years from an ECHR ruling to rule buggery was not unlawful, and Ireland was given a special exemption to the EUs abortion laws which remained in place for 26 years.
The baseline level of freedom of speech in the EU, in particular, is much, much worse than in the US. We’re talking about a group of countries with active, enforced blasphemy laws! Completely unthinkable for Americans.
The EU is really more middle-of-the-road in most things, while the US tends to be more extreme: more really good ideas, but also more really bad ideas. But that is also the result of the EU being largely controlled by bureaucrats and compliance officers instead of real leaders.
> How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?
Just to be clear, according to the DOJ, law enforcement officials in the US can search your home without a warrant if they suspect that you are a "Alien Enemy" [1].
Wouldn't source that this is happening in 1 of the member states be enough to raise alarms? Why do all of them need to for you to consider this an issue?
> you might be in a reasonable EU country and still be hit with an EIO from one of the unreasonable countries.
Are you certain this has happened? I never heard that happen in central Europe. I am pretty certain legislation of other countries is irrelevant, unless it would be an EU regulation - and I am unaware of an EU regulation that could bypass local laws and that has not been made a EU law. Which EU law specifically do you refer to?
This isn't a downside against EU services when compared to the US, so what are you actually suggesting? Don't just vaguely hint at stuff. Should we be moving to Singaporean services? Oh shit, similar concerns there. Okay, where do you suggest we move? If you don't have any suggestions then there's little substance behind what you're saying.
How much is this a practical rather than theoretical problem?
One of the problems with being on the US Internet is that we get lots of coverage of US police overreach and much less coverage of EU police overreach. That could have one of three causes:
- actual incidence is low
- it's not being reported
- it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse
(And the counter option: sometimes when you do hear about it, it's been laundered through weird US right-wing politics, like almost anything anyone says about Sweden)
Maybe the motivation is more to stop giving American big tech MAGA fascists money rather than any kind of gain in privacy/security against state level law enforcement.
While the EIO is s controversial instrument (I particularly dislike the excessive power it gives to authorities in issuing countries and the inability to question the warrant), it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process.
I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That said, yeah, EIO in the shape it exists is bad.
>it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process
Only sort of, because some countries have very weird ideas of what a "judicial process" is.
>I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That's fair, but I think it's a mistake. In the worst case the European system grants a village cop in another country the authority to conduct extremely intrusive surveillance on you.
Criminals can easily co-opt this system and steal your crypto or whatever, a far more realistic threat for most people than the NSA.
Our company started migrating our tech stack from USA to EU. We are about 90% there with a few small dependencies that could be resolved but we have not yet tackled.
For search, I'd suggest Ecosia [1] or Qwant [2] if you don't mind ads, or Uruky [3] if you don't want them (full disclosure, I've created Uruky with my wife).
I've migrated just about everything I was relying on a while back. Not only that but I've self-hosted just about everything, with the exception of my email and I've moved whatever I have public on github to codeberg. With the exception of github pages, though I plan on doing that too, when I find motivation to going through the tedious DNS management. I've been on and off on qwant and ecosia for search(lately ecosia has been stepping up their game it seems). But I am considering switching over to searxng, I just want to put it behind a squid proxy somewhere remote, away from my apartment.
how about the OPPOSITE problem: _anyone knows of any non-EU AND non-US email providers_? with email accounts as the roots of trust for many things, i'd really wanna know how can I get a trustworthy one not-attached to eithern an unstable system (US), or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...
Name a country and it probably has its own problems: some combination of instability, corruption, authoritarian governments, collaboration with the US and EU governments that you want to escape…
ProtonMail is in Switzerland, so it’s perhaps the best mainstream bet. But the Swiss are absolutely not immune to US and EU pressure.
...would those "overreach instinct" expand to "handing over access an overreaching and likely corrupt EU or US prosecutor"? (I don't care about 5eyes etc, spyies will spy me, I just don't want stuff to be easily and unexpectedly draggable in a court case, or am email used as bolt-key to access other things to get blocked by a prosecutor's regulation...)
If your threat model includes the USA government then you can only go with obscurity, honestly - preferably self hosted with a completely locked down system that cannot initiate any network communication besides on the relevant mail protocol ports, completely immutable filesystem beyond the mail data with encryption at rest
And with all of that they'll still be able to pwn you through network equipment which relays your mail, eg some router or switch which they backdoored and mirrors all traffic to their datacenter.
If you buy directly from Mullvad, they delete the transaction details after two weeks. Sure, your payment procesor knows you’ve bought from Mullvad, but in this case so does Amazon, no?
Regarding Migadu, after extensive research it seemed to be the best option, but man that 20 outgoing emails limit is just so off-putting and the next tier is so far apart. I would be comfortable paying 50-60 euros per year for 50 outgoing emails, but no, it’s either 20 for 20 euros or 100 for 90 euros
I've heard this before. Is this just to add another hop in the chain to make it harder for someone to track the user down? Apart from someone needing to order Amazon to pony up the details ("Which credit card was this Amazon item bought with?")
The gift cards are sealed, and hence Amazon doesn’t know which gift card (which code printed on it) is sold to which customer. Mullvad also doesn’t keep track of which activation code was used for which account, only that the code has been used. So the only information than can leak is that you did buy a Mullvad card, but it can’t be linked to a specific Mullvad account.
Yes, gitea (and originally gogs) are released under permissive licenses, so it's legally allowed to fork them.
But forking complete working projects with years of work, rebranding with a "good guys" attitude, and progressively erasing the name/history (mentioning a gitea fork has moved down the faq now) is not fair.
Edit: even worse, the word "fork" is not in the FAQ. It is "Comparison with Gitea" now (fork is mentioned on that page).
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software…
Used Chromebooks are plentiful and cheap on eBay and many of them are easy to convert to Linux using the tools and instructions at https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/. I used to have a house full of Chromebooks, but now all but one of them are Linux laptops. My favorite is the Acer CP713 because it comes in flavors with lots of RAM and drive space. I also prefer the convertible touchscreen models because they can go on a shelf and make cheap and attractive Home Assistant dashboards.
You seem to know what you're talking about. I used a cheapie Taiwanese Intel netbook for years, on Linux, with great success. When it came to replace it, there was nothing left in that niche (i.e. small and cheap) except ARM Chromebooks with (apparently) locked bootloaders. So I reluctantly bought a heavy and expensive Intel laptop.
Was I wrong to assume that the average big-box-store Chromebook cannot be jailbroken, or has only driverless hardware, or are things changing here? If the latter, surely this opens a boulevard for Linux? Any insight much appreciated.
I tried it once, it's very opinionated and may not be suitable for what a lot of people think of when they're coming from something like Github. The required old-school patch-by-mail thing is a blocker for a lot of people.
Regarding Forgejo [0] there are a number of other open providers listed on the delightful forgejo [1] curated list. In addition there is a Professional services repository [2] where services are listed in the issue tracker.
I self-host Forgejo on a Docker container. Thinking about it, this is actually the right way to go.
If you got public projects, then something like Codeberg is in fact the place to go. If you got private projects, why push to someone's cloud-hosted git service at all? Push to your own service like Forgejo and sync backups to a local hard-drive or even online using rclone.
Because I don't mind paying github $4 or $7 and not worry about the admin burden.
Of course, this goes for simpler setups where you only use the git hosting part. Because to switch providers you only have to change the remote and push.
If you got yourself dependent on their other pipelines, it's more complicated.
Gitea is one of the easiest projects to to self-host. And to do regular upgrades, you only need to update one file. It has been a joy to self-host for many years now.
Change directory to your local git repository that you want to share with friends and colleagues and do a bare clone git clone --bare . /tmp/repo.git You just created a copy of the .git folder without all the checked out files.
Upload /tmp/repo.git to your linux server over ssh. Don't have one? Just order a tiny cloud server from Hetzner or another European provider. You can place your git repository anywhere, but the best way is to put it in a separate folder, e.g. /var/git. The command would look like with scp -r /tmp/repo.git me@server:/var/git/.
To share the repository with others, create a group, e.g. groupadd --users me git You will be able to add more users to the group with groupmod.
Your git repository is now writable only by me. To make it writable by the git group, you have to change the group on all files in the repository to git with chgrp -R git /var/repo.git and enable the group write bit on them with chmod -R g+w /var/repo.git.
This fixes the shared access for existing files. For new files, we have to make sure the group write bit is always on by changing UMASK from 022 to 002 in /etc/login.defs.
There is one more trick. For now on, all new files and folders in /var/git will be created with the user's primary group. We could change users to have git as the primary group.
But we can also force all new files and folders to be created with the parent folder's group and not user primary group. For that, set the group sticky bit on all folders in /var/git with find /var/git -type d -exec chmod g+s \{\} +
You are done.
Want to host your git repository online? Install caddy and point to /var/git with something like
Git is extremely easy to "self host". What makes things complicated are the web interfaces around code hosting, and all their supposedly important features. These days, Prs, issues, forums, wikis and all that seem to be synonymous with "git", which is pretty weird.
The PR model is pretty much universal for a reason. I get why it is considered out of scope for core git, but it is by no means a weird fixation people have.
Then you have to use email for the review conversation, make the discussion easily available to everyone involved and future devs, track manually which comment refers to which line of the diff due to lack of overlaying, manually ping to warn of updates, rely on manual quoting, no direct information on whether the CI pipeline succeeded...
To me that feels like writing code using only sed. It is possible, but it removes or makes convoluted an absurd degree of regular work.
You are correct, but integration with CI/CD and other services as a part of pull-request process in a modern platform is very convenient. I would not go back to e-mail. Especially since I can self host the whole platform like Gitea.
Because there isn't really a good name. In FOSS circles the name "code forge" is often used, and then OP might say "git-based code forge" instead. But both Github and Gitlab don't consider themself (and aren't) code forges. The term doesn't carry the load of the product positioning. So "hosting provider for git" is a pretty good description imho.
Which is ironic because PR is definitely alien to git. There is no such git concept as a PR, nor git pr command.
Coming from a pure git workflow in mailing lists where branches, and commits(and associated diff and git am metadata) are the unit of work, I struggled to adapt into the PR concept in the beginning.
I liked to work with gerrit, where the unit of the review is the commit. This also ensured a nice little history and curation of the change set. The commit in github is not even in the main tab of the PR. It is like it is a second thought. Even in the review, reviewing by commit is awkward and discouraged.
> set up catch-all addresses but also send emails from any email address I wanted
I have been frustrated with ProtonMail for this exact reason, i have a catch all but responding is a hassle where i have to manually create an address.
I wish Proton would just allow me to respond to an email from the address it was addressed to
Is there a good tool to automatically (and continuously) mirror all GitHub repositories to another provider? Something with GH API integration that also catches newly created projects/repos?
Issues and PRs would be a bonus, but not a requirement in my case.
"Running a €5 Hetzner VPS in Helsinki for 1+ year — CPX22 gives 3vCPU 4GB RAM. For most indie devs the EU infra is genuinely better value than US providers at the same price point."
The EU is going to fail in the next decade or two. It is a financially and politically unsustainable patchwork that will rip apart in the great power conflict that is coming. The sick man of Europe is now Europe itself.
Honestly this is part of a macro trend of everyone outside the US scrambling to get off a US tech stack…these are going to be the longer term economic consequences for the country, as it is no longer seen as a safe option for any kind of data or service exposure.
> First, I tried mailbox.org, which I can generally recommend without reservation. Unfortunately, you can’t send emails from any address on your own domain without a workaround, so the search continued.
I had read about other problems about this mailbox.org service, but not this one. Anyone knows what's the catch when trying to send emails from your own domain?
Uberspace is solid and a lot of fun to try stuff out. For domains, i would also recommend inwx.com, they have been around for ages, good prices and no-fuzz admin stuff.
The author mentions using them as well, but I personally would have a really hard time trusting any service run by any individual and be it just in case something happens to them.
I tried Uberspace for email and what bothered me that you can only set up one email domain per Asteroid. So if you have multiple domains, it gets expensive quickly... (depending on how many users per domain you have). But other than that, great company with a great ethical stance (and as far as I can tell, great technical infrastructure). I will definitely be going back to them if I need a simple VPS.
I have been a customer of OVH’s new Zimbra Starter service. It works for my personal and professional needs, CalDAV and ActiveSync are active. I do not use the web interface so no feedback on this.
Also docs collaboration, and now video calling as well. And they've just bought Standard Notes, so that'll be next. It's definitely chugging along fast.
I recommend Scaleway for cloud hosting. I recently migrated from Digital Ocean who I really loved, to Scaleway and have I have to say impressed with both dashboard interface and pricing so far.
In work we still use AWS but everything is hosted in eu-west (Ireland) in AWS EU Sovereign cloud but not sure how truly compliant this is in a CloudAct vs GDPR showdown.
I've yet to migrate from namecheap but planning on moving my domains to inwx. My MacBook Pro will be hard to replace so that will be years away. Nothing phones look cool but I would like to go with EU solutions rather than British ones. https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-sep-ii-2026 looks cool but some the HackerNews guys have been quite critical so I'm still considering what those next devices will be.
Don't make the same mistake again, get a domain so that you can keep using the same address when switching between providers. Then set up GMail to forward e-mail to your new address. Then slowly update the E-mail address in your account. You could even set up a label that gets attached to e-mails that arrived through your GMail address. In that way, you can easily see the stuff that still needs to be updated.
Untangling yourself from Google (or Apple, which is similarly hard), doesn't have to be all at once. Break it up in small steps that feel like individual wins.
One more note about using your own domain: avoid provider-specifict features like subdomain addressing (made it more work for me to move off Fastmail).
There's no point in switching. Most of these people are dealing with a threat that has an extremely low probability of happening. It is not in any practical way going to affect your life and for most of the people here busy switching to EU services they likely don't have any major example of where it has affect them or anyone one degree away from them.
It's mostly an ideal. Like OSS. The practical reality means that such extreme adherence to only EU services doesn't do anything but make your life harder. It's like saying you only use open source, from the CPU to the GPU to your OS and everything else... make it all from open source, how big of a nightmare would that be? The only time it is practical is if you're doing really illegal shit and you need the data protection.
If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.
Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.
Nowadays, I primarily only use gmail because the mail client is good on Android. But all my accounts have been self-hosted for years now and gmail just reads them via POP3 (never managed to get it happy with IMAP for some reason) and sends via my own SMTP.
Can anyone recommend actually decent and free Android (and also web) mail clients for self-hosted use? Everything I've tried so far (but to be fair, it was a few years ago when I last checked) just felt clunky compared to gmail, so I've ended up sticking with it as a client far longer than I probably should.
Took me a year of slow migration so that my essential emails and connected services don't go over Gmail. Email is the hardest to move because of its central nature as an online identity.
It’s easier than you think when you stop trying to treat it as an all or nothing move and more of a gradual migration. Fastmail makes it really easy to keep the two in sync
I let my old 4 letter .com domain expire around 2000ish and got suckered into the whole gmail etc thing after sitting on university and hotmail for a while
In 2019 I decided enough was enough and registered a new domain and started moving my accounts over as new ones came up, or I updated addressing
I have very little left on gmail now other than spam from old services I no longer use. Top one in the inbox at the moment is Facebook telling my I have "530 notifications about X". Its sad how desperate they are.
Yes, same here. I tried some EU providers like Mailbox, Tuta and Uberspace. In the end, even though Fastmail is not EU-based, at least it's based in Australia (and not US) and they have a solid track record as a company to make the right decisions and not chase every hype. So, this is good enough for me. For now.
One tip in the EU is to consider just renting a Hetzner Storage Share. This is a 1TB (or more) Nextcloud that Hetzner manages for you for 5.11 Euros per month.
A Nextcloud can give you many things at once, file syncing, file shares, contact syncing, calendar syncing, etc.
I have been using this for years now after having hosted my own Nextcloud instance. The space and performance they give you for that price is unbeatable with nearly no downsides. The one downside is that you can't just ssh into the server, but you can even run occ managment commands via their web interface. It is an absolute no-brainer.
Had a self hosted nextcloud instance runnning on my homeserver, but migrated away two years ago to a Hetzner Storage share. All in all I'm quite happy with that.
There are some downsides, though:
- No support for collabora online, so no way for collaborative editing of office files
- Data is not encrypted
Hetzner also has classical web hosting offerings, which are cheap as well. I'm using that for email and a website of mine.
I'm also pretty much using 100% EU services except FastMail. Nothing against the Aussies, but I'd rather use something local, with servers within the EU.
But I don't think there's anything as good as Fastmail this side of the pond, and I'm not prepared to compromise on this just yet. I might self-host email despite all the dangers the day FM decides to enshittify itself.
I like privacy, but a service that's focused on maximum possible privacy for its users paints a target on its back for any three-letter agency, as it will attract a large contingent of unsavoury people.
I just onboarded and was dumbfounded that they do not allow for proper calendar exposure other than a fully public link! The claim of zero knowledge is super cute, for those that need it, but I need a provider which allows me to integrate the calendar elsewhere, as those will not magically move into Proton. I guess I am not in their target market.
Seconding this - reasonable pricing and I haven't had any issues at all with the service. I haven't used FastMail but most things I read suggest they are very similar in terms of what they offer so I would think Mailbox is a good EU alternative for someone who likes FastMail. (There are also other EU providers like Tuta but with slightly different trade-offs, ie, more emphasis on privacy but at the expense of IMAP/SMTP support.)
I switched to mailbox recently and I'm finding it quite good. I set it up with a custom domain, and that did require a bit of fuzting around, but the friction there was almost all on the side of my VPS hosting service, not Mailbox's fault.
migrating to a re gion that votes laws to restrict freedom of speech, wants to remove anonymity from social network and can block your bank account for opinions that do not align with european stance on things like for instance mass migrations from third world countries. Yeah seems a smart move.
I wonder what will happen when Jordan Bardella will be new France president and Alice Weidel will be German Chancellor. Where people are going to migrate to then...
Blast from the past... I really miss fluxbox but I also need Wayland because of different refresh rate monitors and the last time I checked waybox wasn't there yet.
I find it pretty ironical that people seem to want to move to Von der Leyens vision of the future. As a EU citizen, my trust in what recently has been going down is almost non-existant.
I agree, and moved to the EU from the US for related reasons, but Von der Leyen's entire strategy for handling Trump seems to be immediate capitulation to horrendously one-sided deals, which doesn't give a lot of confidence.
Trump will be gone in 2028 and policies may radically change depending on who replaces him. There is no change on the horizon in the EU when Von Der Leyen is replaced (she is just the current public face of the blob...)
Do you believe this ? Even if the Americans get out of their zombie existence and get out to vote (on another candidate), I cannot imagine Trump will accept an election loss.
(A reminder: The US has had a 24% drop in the Liberal Democracy Index score in just one year and your supreme court is owned)
> the EU currently has the most user-friendly laws when it comes to data protection
This is laughable. The EU has the most big-tech regulatory capture friendly data laws that make it really hard for small companies to compete, nicely packaged under consumer protection pretenses.
Those same laws give the institutions of the state complete and total right to silently wiretap the digital existence of anyone, at any time, for any reason.
Some of these European countries such as France are quite authoritarian. They frequently pass (update: propose/push for) laws to ban VPN and even social media, request access to private messages, etc. It seems to me the situation is equally bad in EU.
You have no idea what you are talking about, really. We don’t "frequently" pass such laws. Nobody is accessing private messages, even if there have been such attempts.
The EU has still the strongest privacy laws world wide, and in contrast to others a strong ethical foundation. It may be slow, it may be torn, it may be overly beaurocratic, but sure enough not authoritarian.
> First, I tried mailbox.org, which I can generally recommend without reservation. Unfortunately, you can’t send emails from any address on your own domain without a workaround
I use mailbox for a long time, one account for 2.50EUR/month with multiple custom domains and I can send emails from any address. To send from a different address the process didn't really seem different than other providers.
From Thunderbird mobile on Android I just add a new sender identity. If I need to send from webmail, similarly I just add a new alternative sender. Are these the workarounds you mentioned?
My understanding is that the number of such sender aliases is limited, at most 50 or 250, depending on the plan. There are ways to use a custom domain for sending where you end up using a larger number of localparts fairly quickly, and it would be a hassle to have to manage them, instead of just typing whatever sender you want (or on replies, having the email client automatically use the address from the original email, without having to worry whether it’s still in the set of registered aliases).
The limit is only enforced in the web interface. You can send from any alias using any third party email client, and on the website you can configure a catchall mailbox and create a rule to filter out the aliases that receive spam.
I also use mailbox.org and use my own domain for email. Not sure what issue the author ran into.
...also migrating AWAY from Fastmail (Australian) and TO an European provider sounds like a very bad idea - I'd kind of want both the US and the EU legally away from my coms at all costs (!)
Is it that different? Being Australia in alliances like "Five Eyes" I don't think you can keep your stuff away from the US at least when using Fastmail.
If you want both US & EU away from your data, I suppose you will have to consider things like Yandex Mail, which comes with its own set of problems too, of course :)
Fastmails servers are in the US IIRC.
While I agree in principle, I have to remind you (and to myself) that Australia is part of the Five Eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
The problem is that, even if Fastmail are Australian, they host exclusively in the US. They state that sure, there is the possibility of interference at the data center level, but they rely on their anti-hacking measures to prevent unlawful access
How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review? Some EU courts will not exclude illegally obtained evidence either, so challenging the warrant later on will be pointless.
Oh, and you might be in a reasonable EU country and still be hit with an EIO from one of the unreasonable countries. This is especially concerning given recent ECJ rulings increasingly directing courts in receiving nations to blindly defer to the requesting party when dealing with EAWs, EIOs and similar.
Worth considering when hosting in the EU.
>How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?
This is a hilarious 'just asking questions' concern that doesn't address the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order it primarily helped build post WWII while threatening other liberal democracies like Canada and Denmark with invasions.
It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
> the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism
A similar (though currently a little bit less marked) trend can also be observed for the EU and EU countries.
I'm not advertising the US here or trying to troll. I'm an European pointing out things about the European system that many here will not have thought about.
>It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
Maybe keep your US nonsense to yourself?
> How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?
(IANAL.) This was reviewed by the courts themselves:
> The CJEU confirmed that the Belgian, French and Swedish prosecutors were sufficiently independent from the executive to be able to issue EAWs. […]
> […] Public prosecutors will qualify as an issuing judicial authority where two conditions are met: […]
> 2. Second, public prosecutors must be in a position to act in an independent way, specifically with respect to the executive. The CJEU requires that the independence of public prosecutors be organised by a statutory framework and organisational rules that prevent the risk of prosecutors being subject to individual instructions by the executive (as was the case with the German prosecutor). Moreover, the framework must enable prosecutors to assess the necessity and proportionality of issuing an EAW. In the French prosecutor judgment, the CJEU specifically indicated that:
* https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/legal-analysis/can-belgi...
The question that the OP asks is fair enough, but there's a lot of subtly and 'low-level' details on how things operate compared to the high-level question that is being asked. Also depends on where the OP lives and what he's used to: common law (UK/US/CA/etc) and civil law procedures and laws are (AIUI) quite different.
For anyone wondering:
EAW = European Arrest Warrant
EIO = European Investigative Order (basically lets different jurisdictions demand information from each other)
CJEU = Court of Justice of the EU (think of it as a supreme court)
Also IANAL: I Am Not A Lawyer. If you really want to guard yourself from a legal standpoint, write the full sentence. "IANAL" could mean anything.
That being said, I am not a lawyer, I am not a legal professional, this is not a legal advice.
Valid question, which must be put in the context of US-based providers willingly satisfying US out-of-jurisdiction search requests for EU data without even letting the EU know about it. (And when the providers are not willing, they can be forced by U.S. Cloud Act)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...
US legal protections do not apply to EU citizens keeping their data in the US, do they?
So what's the point of this comparison, since if I host my data in the US they don't need a warrant at all?
The geo-location of where you keep your data is irrelevant to US legal reach.
Sweden is a country like this. It is just the way it is here. It can be abused, sure. But all things considered, I much rather have my things hosted here than in the US.
Yeah, but you also have Hungary who can decide to do things the same way they're done in Sweden and Finland.
In Hungary, sure. But each country has its own jurisdiction.
Yeah, way to not read the thread.
I'll repeat: EIO
So don’t host your stuff in Hungary?
Yeah I think this basically answers this entire sub-thread
At least there is still the rule of law and democracy in the EU
Is there really? Governments routinely go against the ECHR and the ECJ, and do nothing to rectify past violations when ruled against.
On a national level, sure.
Which cases are you talking about? Compliance with actual court rulings is pretty high.
Want a particularly egregious example? Here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:62...
Police in many EU countries was systematically searching suspects phones without mandatory due process. This was prima facie illegal, everyone involved knew it. They did it regardless.
Yeah, this decision eventually resulted in many governments issuing new guidance, and some countries rewriting their national legislation.
It took Ireland years from an ECHR ruling to rule buggery was not unlawful, and Ireland was given a special exemption to the EUs abortion laws which remained in place for 26 years.
Considering who we're comparing it to when discussing this topic: absolutely. Not even a question.
Anyone claiming otherwise is delusional at best.
A whole lot of websites are inaccessible from my country when there's football on, due to a judicial order meant to curb piracy.
The whole deal with Chat Control is also not to be forgotten. I do think you guys see this place with rose tinted glasses sometimes.
The baseline level of freedom of speech in the EU, in particular, is much, much worse than in the US. We’re talking about a group of countries with active, enforced blasphemy laws! Completely unthinkable for Americans.
The US is at position 57 in the world free speech index. Virtually all EU countries do better and a bunch are top 10:
https://rsf.org/en/index
American exceptionalism doesn’t seem to know boundaries.
The more I learn about EU's system the more I realize American exceptionalism is just stating facts.
The EU is really more middle-of-the-road in most things, while the US tends to be more extreme: more really good ideas, but also more really bad ideas. But that is also the result of the EU being largely controlled by bureaucrats and compliance officers instead of real leaders.
> How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?
Just to be clear, according to the DOJ, law enforcement officials in the US can search your home without a warrant if they suspect that you are a "Alien Enemy" [1].
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25915967-doj-march-1...
Don't forget civil forfeiture, which can (an does) happen whether they think you're an enemy or not.
https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/freq...
Wouldn't source that this is happening in 1 of the member states be enough to raise alarms? Why do all of them need to for you to consider this an issue?
No system is perfect. It's more a theoretical risk for now, if you're not running a shady business.
The police will of course decide if you are running a shady business.
Nintendo may also decide this.
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/uk-games-collector-raided-b...
> you might be in a reasonable EU country and still be hit with an EIO from one of the unreasonable countries.
Are you certain this has happened? I never heard that happen in central Europe. I am pretty certain legislation of other countries is irrelevant, unless it would be an EU regulation - and I am unaware of an EU regulation that could bypass local laws and that has not been made a EU law. Which EU law specifically do you refer to?
This isn't a downside against EU services when compared to the US, so what are you actually suggesting? Don't just vaguely hint at stuff. Should we be moving to Singaporean services? Oh shit, similar concerns there. Okay, where do you suggest we move? If you don't have any suggestions then there's little substance behind what you're saying.
>This isn't a point against EU services compared to the US
In the US the cops actually need a search warrant signed by a judge. In the EU they only sometimes need one.
>Should we be moving to Singaporean services? Oh shit, similar concerns there
Really? I've always been under the impression that it is courts who issue search warrants in Singapore, not the police or prosecutors.
Does ICE needs something?
How much is this a practical rather than theoretical problem?
One of the problems with being on the US Internet is that we get lots of coverage of US police overreach and much less coverage of EU police overreach. That could have one of three causes:
- actual incidence is low
- it's not being reported
- it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse
(And the counter option: sometimes when you do hear about it, it's been laundered through weird US right-wing politics, like almost anything anyone says about Sweden)
> That could have one of three causes:
> - actual incidence is low
> - it's not being reported
> - it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse
Fourth possible cause:
- the EU has 24 official languages
i.e. when it is reported, the number of people who are actually capable of understanding the reporting is only a fraction and localized.
Maybe the motivation is more to stop giving American big tech MAGA fascists money rather than any kind of gain in privacy/security against state level law enforcement.
Generally comfortable.
While the EIO is s controversial instrument (I particularly dislike the excessive power it gives to authorities in issuing countries and the inability to question the warrant), it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process.
I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That said, yeah, EIO in the shape it exists is bad.
>it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process
Only sort of, because some countries have very weird ideas of what a "judicial process" is.
>I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That's fair, but I think it's a mistake. In the worst case the European system grants a village cop in another country the authority to conduct extremely intrusive surveillance on you.
Criminals can easily co-opt this system and steal your crypto or whatever, a far more realistic threat for most people than the NSA.
Our company started migrating our tech stack from USA to EU. We are about 90% there with a few small dependencies that could be resolved but we have not yet tackled.
Could you summarize the easy and hard aspects? Have you had any unexpected benefits or downsides?
For search, I'd suggest Ecosia [1] or Qwant [2] if you don't mind ads, or Uruky [3] if you don't want them (full disclosure, I've created Uruky with my wife).
[1]: https://ecosia.org
[2]: https://qwant.com
[3]: https://uruky.com
I've migrated just about everything I was relying on a while back. Not only that but I've self-hosted just about everything, with the exception of my email and I've moved whatever I have public on github to codeberg. With the exception of github pages, though I plan on doing that too, when I find motivation to going through the tedious DNS management. I've been on and off on qwant and ecosia for search(lately ecosia has been stepping up their game it seems). But I am considering switching over to searxng, I just want to put it behind a squid proxy somewhere remote, away from my apartment.
https://bunny.net/ seems solid as a Cloudflare and S3 replacement. I'm not affiliated but they deserve more mentions in these threads.
I use them too. Highly recommend. Have never had an issue with them.
Used them in my last project for around 5 years. They were boring in a good way and inexpensive.
how about the OPPOSITE problem: _anyone knows of any non-EU AND non-US email providers_? with email accounts as the roots of trust for many things, i'd really wanna know how can I get a trustworthy one not-attached to eithern an unstable system (US), or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...
and ofc, non-CN too
So where do you want to host your email?
Name a country and it probably has its own problems: some combination of instability, corruption, authoritarian governments, collaboration with the US and EU governments that you want to escape…
ProtonMail is in Switzerland, so it’s perhaps the best mainstream bet. But the Swiss are absolutely not immune to US and EU pressure.
Isn't Proton planning to move to .de?
I'm using Zoho (Indian company, hosted in Europe). Maybe not perfect from a geopolitical pov, but it will do for now.
lol, you want trustworthy stability without “too many” regulations. Good luck with that.
Maybe there’s a libertarian fantasy novel where you can host your services.
Singapore, Japan have reliable ISPs.
For email and calendaring, Fastmail, although Her Majesty’s Australian government has strong overreach instincts.
> For email and calendaring, Fastmail, although Her Majesty’s Australian government has strong overreach instincts.
The Queen died of 8th September 2022.
...would those "overreach instinct" expand to "handing over access an overreaching and likely corrupt EU or US prosecutor"? (I don't care about 5eyes etc, spyies will spy me, I just don't want stuff to be easily and unexpectedly draggable in a court case, or am email used as bolt-key to access other things to get blocked by a prosecutor's regulation...)
If your threat model includes the USA government then you can only go with obscurity, honestly - preferably self hosted with a completely locked down system that cannot initiate any network communication besides on the relevant mail protocol ports, completely immutable filesystem beyond the mail data with encryption at rest
And with all of that they'll still be able to pwn you through network equipment which relays your mail, eg some router or switch which they backdoored and mirrors all traffic to their datacenter.
Fastmail is australian
But their servers are in the US.
For mail I've been using migadu.
I self host most services: contacts, calendar, git, ..
Agree on mullvad, buy giftcard on amazon.
Tried hetzner, but it wouldn't allow me to create an account. Ovh it is.
I haven't thought about registrars, I don't think it matters for most tld. (Moniker, porkbun)
If you buy directly from Mullvad, they delete the transaction details after two weeks. Sure, your payment procesor knows you’ve bought from Mullvad, but in this case so does Amazon, no?
Regarding Migadu, after extensive research it seemed to be the best option, but man that 20 outgoing emails limit is just so off-putting and the next tier is so far apart. I would be comfortable paying 50-60 euros per year for 50 outgoing emails, but no, it’s either 20 for 20 euros or 100 for 90 euros
> Agree on mullvad, buy giftcard on amazon.
I've heard this before. Is this just to add another hop in the chain to make it harder for someone to track the user down? Apart from someone needing to order Amazon to pony up the details ("Which credit card was this Amazon item bought with?")
Is there another layer of privacy I'm missing?
The gift cards are sealed, and hence Amazon doesn’t know which gift card (which code printed on it) is sold to which customer. Mullvad also doesn’t keep track of which activation code was used for which account, only that the code has been used. So the only information than can leak is that you did buy a Mullvad card, but it can’t be linked to a specific Mullvad account.
Giftcards from Amazon will be enough of a stumbling block to stop copyright trolls and such.
it won't even slow down actual criminal investigations by nation states and might not even stop a determined civil suit.
Or send cash in an envelope.
Doesn't cost extra
No need to share my cc with yet another company.
Still not accepting Codeberg moral stance.
Yes, gitea (and originally gogs) are released under permissive licenses, so it's legally allowed to fork them.
But forking complete working projects with years of work, rebranding with a "good guys" attitude, and progressively erasing the name/history (mentioning a gitea fork has moved down the faq now) is not fair.
Edit: even worse, the word "fork" is not in the FAQ. It is "Comparison with Gitea" now (fork is mentioned on that page).
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software…
– https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/LICENSE
If you don't want your software used like that, don't choose this licence.
You can't post-hoc decide how people behave.
open source is all fun and games until they fork you
Used Chromebooks are plentiful and cheap on eBay and many of them are easy to convert to Linux using the tools and instructions at https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/. I used to have a house full of Chromebooks, but now all but one of them are Linux laptops. My favorite is the Acer CP713 because it comes in flavors with lots of RAM and drive space. I also prefer the convertible touchscreen models because they can go on a shelf and make cheap and attractive Home Assistant dashboards.
You seem to know what you're talking about. I used a cheapie Taiwanese Intel netbook for years, on Linux, with great success. When it came to replace it, there was nothing left in that niche (i.e. small and cheap) except ARM Chromebooks with (apparently) locked bootloaders. So I reluctantly bought a heavy and expensive Intel laptop.
Was I wrong to assume that the average big-box-store Chromebook cannot be jailbroken, or has only driverless hardware, or are things changing here? If the latter, surely this opens a boulevard for Linux? Any insight much appreciated.
You can also get a refurbished thinkpad with Ryzen and 16gb of ram for 400€ or so on european Ebay.
Codeberg is only for FOSS projects. Is there some good European hosting provider for git? I really don't want to self host git.
I am boggled by the number of people who see "I really don't want to X" and then reply with "Here's how to easily do X!"
devault made sourcehut which I think is hosted in the netherlands
https://sr.ht
I tried it once, it's very opinionated and may not be suitable for what a lot of people think of when they're coming from something like Github. The required old-school patch-by-mail thing is a blocker for a lot of people.
Regarding Forgejo [0] there are a number of other open providers listed on the delightful forgejo [1] curated list. In addition there is a Professional services repository [2] where services are listed in the issue tracker.
[0] https://forgejo.org
[1] https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-forgejo/#public-...
[2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/professional-services/issues
I self-host Forgejo on a Docker container. Thinking about it, this is actually the right way to go.
If you got public projects, then something like Codeberg is in fact the place to go. If you got private projects, why push to someone's cloud-hosted git service at all? Push to your own service like Forgejo and sync backups to a local hard-drive or even online using rclone.
Because I don't mind paying github $4 or $7 and not worry about the admin burden.
Of course, this goes for simpler setups where you only use the git hosting part. Because to switch providers you only have to change the remote and push.
If you got yourself dependent on their other pipelines, it's more complicated.
Yes, check out https://www.gitlabhost.com/ It is based in the Netherlands
Crazy expensive for small projects
AFAICS the cheapest option is 250€/month. That seems geared towards businesses, not individuals.
For just the basics, self-hosting of git can be pretty easy. I use gitolite on a VPS.
https://gitolite.com/gitolite/
I think Sourcehut is EU based now.
Gitea is one of the easiest projects to to self-host. And to do regular upgrades, you only need to update one file. It has been a joy to self-host for many years now.
I don't even update one file. I run it in docker with daily automatic container updates and it has been working fine without issues for years.
Here's a step-by step guide:
Change directory to your local git repository that you want to share with friends and colleagues and do a bare clone git clone --bare . /tmp/repo.git You just created a copy of the .git folder without all the checked out files.
Upload /tmp/repo.git to your linux server over ssh. Don't have one? Just order a tiny cloud server from Hetzner or another European provider. You can place your git repository anywhere, but the best way is to put it in a separate folder, e.g. /var/git. The command would look like with scp -r /tmp/repo.git me@server:/var/git/.
To share the repository with others, create a group, e.g. groupadd --users me git You will be able to add more users to the group with groupmod.
Your git repository is now writable only by me. To make it writable by the git group, you have to change the group on all files in the repository to git with chgrp -R git /var/repo.git and enable the group write bit on them with chmod -R g+w /var/repo.git.
This fixes the shared access for existing files. For new files, we have to make sure the group write bit is always on by changing UMASK from 022 to 002 in /etc/login.defs.
There is one more trick. For now on, all new files and folders in /var/git will be created with the user's primary group. We could change users to have git as the primary group.
But we can also force all new files and folders to be created with the parent folder's group and not user primary group. For that, set the group sticky bit on all folders in /var/git with find /var/git -type d -exec chmod g+s \{\} +
You are done.
Want to host your git repository online? Install caddy and point to /var/git with something like
Your git repository will be instantly accessible via https://example.com/repo.git.Uhm, is it? I have some small repos there, which are private and for my company (ie the website). I didn't encounter any warnings?
Edit, it says indeed (right in your face on the front page):
Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting.
I just click... click opened a repo and set it as remote and boom. Never thought anything of it... Perhaps I'm... Tolerated for the time being?
gitlab ce is easy to host.
Git is extremely easy to "self host". What makes things complicated are the web interfaces around code hosting, and all their supposedly important features. These days, Prs, issues, forums, wikis and all that seem to be synonymous with "git", which is pretty weird.
What do you mean by supposedly?
The PR model is pretty much universal for a reason. I get why it is considered out of scope for core git, but it is by no means a weird fixation people have.
Just send me an email with your branches URL, and I will pull from it. Thats pretty much what a Pull Request is.
>Thats pretty much what a Pull Request is.
Then you have to use email for the review conversation, make the discussion easily available to everyone involved and future devs, track manually which comment refers to which line of the diff due to lack of overlaying, manually ping to warn of updates, rely on manual quoting, no direct information on whether the CI pipeline succeeded...
To me that feels like writing code using only sed. It is possible, but it removes or makes convoluted an absurd degree of regular work.
You are correct, but integration with CI/CD and other services as a part of pull-request process in a modern platform is very convenient. I would not go back to e-mail. Especially since I can self host the whole platform like Gitea.
And the discussion about that PR goes in an email chain too?
You can pull, but having the back and forth documented along with the code is not a nice to have imho
Not that it fits everyone, but that is basically how the Linux kernel is being developed.
If it is not in git log, a few months down the drain, nobody will read the PR discussion anyway.
Guys, guys, I'm just vibe coding here; just give me your credentials and mothers maiden name and I'll get it myself.
Because there isn't really a good name. In FOSS circles the name "code forge" is often used, and then OP might say "git-based code forge" instead. But both Github and Gitlab don't consider themself (and aren't) code forges. The term doesn't carry the load of the product positioning. So "hosting provider for git" is a pretty good description imho.
Which is ironic because PR is definitely alien to git. There is no such git concept as a PR, nor git pr command.
Coming from a pure git workflow in mailing lists where branches, and commits(and associated diff and git am metadata) are the unit of work, I struggled to adapt into the PR concept in the beginning.
I liked to work with gerrit, where the unit of the review is the commit. This also ensured a nice little history and curation of the change set. The commit in github is not even in the main tab of the PR. It is like it is a second thought. Even in the review, reviewing by commit is awkward and discouraged.
There are the commands git request-pull and git send-email to work with that workflow, though.
I would add Hetzner for hosting. German based, solid in my experience with virtual servers.
> set up catch-all addresses but also send emails from any email address I wanted
I have been frustrated with ProtonMail for this exact reason, i have a catch all but responding is a hassle where i have to manually create an address.
I wish Proton would just allow me to respond to an email from the address it was addressed to
Is there a good tool to automatically (and continuously) mirror all GitHub repositories to another provider? Something with GH API integration that also catches newly created projects/repos?
Issues and PRs would be a bonus, but not a requirement in my case.
Haven't used it, but I've been intrigued by git-bug (stores issues in got itself) for years, to use as the issue/pr sync.
Bonus that now the issues aren't vendor locked either
https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/trunk/doc/feature-ma...
"Running a €5 Hetzner VPS in Helsinki for 1+ year — CPX22 gives 3vCPU 4GB RAM. For most indie devs the EU infra is genuinely better value than US providers at the same price point."
The EU is going to fail in the next decade or two. It is a financially and politically unsustainable patchwork that will rip apart in the great power conflict that is coming. The sick man of Europe is now Europe itself.
Assuming your assessment is correct, how do you think this will affect the digital sector?
Honestly this is part of a macro trend of everyone outside the US scrambling to get off a US tech stack…these are going to be the longer term economic consequences for the country, as it is no longer seen as a safe option for any kind of data or service exposure.
> First, I tried mailbox.org, which I can generally recommend without reservation. Unfortunately, you can’t send emails from any address on your own domain without a workaround, so the search continued.
I had read about other problems about this mailbox.org service, but not this one. Anyone knows what's the catch when trying to send emails from your own domain?
I think he means that he can have a catch-all, but to reply from that address, there needs to be an alias created on the account
Uberspace is solid and a lot of fun to try stuff out. For domains, i would also recommend inwx.com, they have been around for ages, good prices and no-fuzz admin stuff.
The author mentions using them as well, but I personally would have a really hard time trusting any service run by any individual and be it just in case something happens to them.
It's a team of 10+ people though.
I tried Uberspace for email and what bothered me that you can only set up one email domain per Asteroid. So if you have multiple domains, it gets expensive quickly... (depending on how many users per domain you have). But other than that, great company with a great ethical stance (and as far as I can tell, great technical infrastructure). I will definitely be going back to them if I need a simple VPS.
This is something I've been trying to help people and companies with excipio (shameless plug). Data and digital sovereignty are fundamental nowadays.
I have been a customer of OVH’s new Zimbra Starter service. It works for my personal and professional needs, CalDAV and ActiveSync are active. I do not use the web interface so no feedback on this.
Does their Zimbra implementation support 2FA ?
Proton ticks a few of those boxes for me. Mail, VPN, Cal.
Also docs collaboration, and now video calling as well. And they've just bought Standard Notes, so that'll be next. It's definitely chugging along fast.
proton.me? That is in Switzerland, not the EU.
https://european-alternatives.eu/
I recommend Scaleway for cloud hosting. I recently migrated from Digital Ocean who I really loved, to Scaleway and have I have to say impressed with both dashboard interface and pricing so far.
In work we still use AWS but everything is hosted in eu-west (Ireland) in AWS EU Sovereign cloud but not sure how truly compliant this is in a CloudAct vs GDPR showdown.
I've yet to migrate from namecheap but planning on moving my domains to inwx. My MacBook Pro will be hard to replace so that will be years away. Nothing phones look cool but I would like to go with EU solutions rather than British ones. https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-sep-ii-2026 looks cool but some the HackerNews guys have been quite critical so I'm still considering what those next devices will be.
I’m not with I could ever migrate away from Gmail, even if I wanted to. I have so many accounts and services linked to it.
Don't make the same mistake again, get a domain so that you can keep using the same address when switching between providers. Then set up GMail to forward e-mail to your new address. Then slowly update the E-mail address in your account. You could even set up a label that gets attached to e-mails that arrived through your GMail address. In that way, you can easily see the stuff that still needs to be updated.
Untangling yourself from Google (or Apple, which is similarly hard), doesn't have to be all at once. Break it up in small steps that feel like individual wins.
One more note about using your own domain: avoid provider-specifict features like subdomain addressing (made it more work for me to move off Fastmail).
There's no point in switching. Most of these people are dealing with a threat that has an extremely low probability of happening. It is not in any practical way going to affect your life and for most of the people here busy switching to EU services they likely don't have any major example of where it has affect them or anyone one degree away from them.
It's mostly an ideal. Like OSS. The practical reality means that such extreme adherence to only EU services doesn't do anything but make your life harder. It's like saying you only use open source, from the CPU to the GPU to your OS and everything else... make it all from open source, how big of a nightmare would that be? The only time it is practical is if you're doing really illegal shit and you need the data protection.
If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.
Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.
Nowadays, I primarily only use gmail because the mail client is good on Android. But all my accounts have been self-hosted for years now and gmail just reads them via POP3 (never managed to get it happy with IMAP for some reason) and sends via my own SMTP.
Can anyone recommend actually decent and free Android (and also web) mail clients for self-hosted use? Everything I've tried so far (but to be fair, it was a few years ago when I last checked) just felt clunky compared to gmail, so I've ended up sticking with it as a client far longer than I probably should.
Took me a year of slow migration so that my essential emails and connected services don't go over Gmail. Email is the hardest to move because of its central nature as an online identity.
It’s easier than you think when you stop trying to treat it as an all or nothing move and more of a gradual migration. Fastmail makes it really easy to keep the two in sync
Set up the redirect and change the emails of your services one by one whenever you have a minute of time. It took a year for me, and I am free now.
I let my old 4 letter .com domain expire around 2000ish and got suckered into the whole gmail etc thing after sitting on university and hotmail for a while
In 2019 I decided enough was enough and registered a new domain and started moving my accounts over as new ones came up, or I updated addressing
I have very little left on gmail now other than spam from old services I no longer use. Top one in the inbox at the moment is Facebook telling my I have "530 notifications about X". Its sad how desperate they are.
You can take fastmail from my cold, dead hands :D About the only thing I can rely on to actually work.
Yes, same here. I tried some EU providers like Mailbox, Tuta and Uberspace. In the end, even though Fastmail is not EU-based, at least it's based in Australia (and not US) and they have a solid track record as a company to make the right decisions and not chase every hype. So, this is good enough for me. For now.
Australia is a member of five eyes and the US basically treats them like the 51st state.
Slight detail: EU does not know how to design performant mobile/server/desktop CPUs (and GPUs). But they have ASML and "obsolete" foundries.
yeah the blog is about software, not hardware
One tip in the EU is to consider just renting a Hetzner Storage Share. This is a 1TB (or more) Nextcloud that Hetzner manages for you for 5.11 Euros per month.
A Nextcloud can give you many things at once, file syncing, file shares, contact syncing, calendar syncing, etc.
I have been using this for years now after having hosted my own Nextcloud instance. The space and performance they give you for that price is unbeatable with nearly no downsides. The one downside is that you can't just ssh into the server, but you can even run occ managment commands via their web interface. It is an absolute no-brainer.
Had a self hosted nextcloud instance runnning on my homeserver, but migrated away two years ago to a Hetzner Storage share. All in all I'm quite happy with that.
There are some downsides, though:
Hetzner also has classical web hosting offerings, which are cheap as well. I'm using that for email and a website of mine.I had no idea how cheap this was. Thanks.
I'm also pretty much using 100% EU services except FastMail. Nothing against the Aussies, but I'd rather use something local, with servers within the EU.
But I don't think there's anything as good as Fastmail this side of the pond, and I'm not prepared to compromise on this just yet. I might self-host email despite all the dangers the day FM decides to enshittify itself.
I'm using Startmail, based in NL: https://www.startmail.com
I've used https://migadu.com/ before. Not EU, but EEA (Switzerland).
ProtonMail? Not strictly speaking EU, but atleast EEA
It also comes with a whole suite of software that you don't have to find EU alternatives for like Calendar, Drive, Password manager, etc
I like privacy, but a service that's focused on maximum possible privacy for its users paints a target on its back for any three-letter agency, as it will attract a large contingent of unsavoury people.
I just onboarded and was dumbfounded that they do not allow for proper calendar exposure other than a fully public link! The claim of zero knowledge is super cute, for those that need it, but I need a provider which allows me to integrate the calendar elsewhere, as those will not magically move into Proton. I guess I am not in their target market.
https://tuta.com/ and Protonmail
https://mailbox.org/
German e-mail service
Seconding this - reasonable pricing and I haven't had any issues at all with the service. I haven't used FastMail but most things I read suggest they are very similar in terms of what they offer so I would think Mailbox is a good EU alternative for someone who likes FastMail. (There are also other EU providers like Tuta but with slightly different trade-offs, ie, more emphasis on privacy but at the expense of IMAP/SMTP support.)
I switched to mailbox recently and I'm finding it quite good. I set it up with a custom domain, and that did require a bit of fuzting around, but the friction there was almost all on the side of my VPS hosting service, not Mailbox's fault.
I love fastmail, but I really wish they had servers close to me.
The high ping kills the throughput on davfs and makes their website hosting a pain to update :(
Where abouts are you located?
https://mailcow.email/vps/
migrating to a re gion that votes laws to restrict freedom of speech, wants to remove anonymity from social network and can block your bank account for opinions that do not align with european stance on things like for instance mass migrations from third world countries. Yeah seems a smart move.
And yet the hardware had to stay all American brands, how sad we barely compete there.
That ship had sailed long ago.
I wonder what will happen when Jordan Bardella will be new France president and Alice Weidel will be German Chancellor. Where people are going to migrate to then...
Blast from the past... I really miss fluxbox but I also need Wayland because of different refresh rate monitors and the last time I checked waybox wasn't there yet.
I find it pretty ironical that people seem to want to move to Von der Leyens vision of the future. As a EU citizen, my trust in what recently has been going down is almost non-existant.
I guess when the alternative is Trump's vision of the future ... - at least I know what I would choose.
Von der Leyen has made it clear the values of the EU are exactly the same as those of the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEbQoT3Xlho
I agree, and moved to the EU from the US for related reasons, but Von der Leyen's entire strategy for handling Trump seems to be immediate capitulation to horrendously one-sided deals, which doesn't give a lot of confidence.
Trump will be gone in 2028 and policies may radically change depending on who replaces him. There is no change on the horizon in the EU when Von Der Leyen is replaced (she is just the current public face of the blob...)
Do you believe this ? Even if the Americans get out of their zombie existence and get out to vote (on another candidate), I cannot imagine Trump will accept an election loss. (A reminder: The US has had a 24% drop in the Liberal Democracy Index score in just one year and your supreme court is owned)
Another daily thread on this topic. Interesting. What makes this one unique and not exactly like every other one?
"This way, I can enjoy YouTube ad-free and without an account."
Not having the gumption to actually give it up. Pathetic.
> the EU currently has the most user-friendly laws when it comes to data protection
This is laughable. The EU has the most big-tech regulatory capture friendly data laws that make it really hard for small companies to compete, nicely packaged under consumer protection pretenses.
Those same laws give the institutions of the state complete and total right to silently wiretap the digital existence of anyone, at any time, for any reason.
Some of these European countries such as France are quite authoritarian. They frequently pass (update: propose/push for) laws to ban VPN and even social media, request access to private messages, etc. It seems to me the situation is equally bad in EU.
You have no idea what you are talking about, really. We don’t "frequently" pass such laws. Nobody is accessing private messages, even if there have been such attempts.
The EU has still the strongest privacy laws world wide, and in contrast to others a strong ethical foundation. It may be slow, it may be torn, it may be overly beaurocratic, but sure enough not authoritarian.