SimpleLogin joins ProtonMail

[ioneja]

I get what you are saying, and I've seen that too, particularly with big corporations buying small companies or independent developers with a great product. I think what's different here is that Proton is not Microsoft or Google or Apple. It's not some megalithic closed-sourced corporation with massive layers of management and thousands of shareholders to please, etc.. Proton is still basically an independent developer themselves and actually *very* small in the scale of things, especially when people bring up examples of big tech. They are also very much in the open source community side of things, which is overall a different culture than anything like Microsoft, etc., so there's just no direct comparison with those here.

Even a comparison to Fastmail buying Pobox is not a perfect example (although it's a better example than Microsoft vs Proton) -- Fastmail is *mostly* closed source and that's a specific culture difference. Fastmail is employee-owned (last time I checked) and yes, they do participate in the open source community with Cyrus and JMAP, so there are comparisons there. And I don't think Pobox suffered under Fastmail's ownership, except from what I understand, their customer support went down. However, Pobox has benefited in other ways, so maybe it's a wash for Pobox.

So I get your point, and time will of course tell with Proton and SimpleLogin. You could be right. But I think in this case there's no red flags so far that will happen, but rather good signals about audits, security, infrastructure, integrations... that's pretty good stuff. I think they've also indicated that there will be special deals both ways, so that's good for the customer's pocketbook too. But who knows?

Now if Proton stifles Son Nguyen Kim (the main guy at SimpleLogin), then that would be a red flag of course and I'd tend to agree there could be problems ahead. But as of April 2022, seems like it's a healthy match. Will cross fingers and stick with custom domains!

[pjroutledge]

Originally Posted by TenFour

... the brilliant and enthusiastic person who created the product becomes just another team member in the bigger organization, put in charge of his product and instead of designing cool new stuff he is tasked with figuring out how to make more money from the product. He becomes a manager of people, dealing with spreadsheets and giving others commands instead of actually doing the fun work that created the product in the first place. Eventually, often after only a year or two that creative originator moves on ...

This!

Couldn't have put it better, may I quote you?

[TenFour]

Couldn't have put it better, may I quote you?

Go right ahead!

[TenFour]

So, I'm curious as to how reliable is email forwarding from services like SimpleLogin? I tested it out briefly awhile ago and the tests worked fine. Has anyone encountered issues with major services like Gmail or Microsoft blocking their forwarded messages? I was thinking mainly about emails at your own domain.

[trikotret]

Originally Posted by TenFour

So, I'm curious as to how reliable is email forwarding from services like SimpleLogin? I tested it out briefly awhile ago and the tests worked fine. Has anyone encountered issues with major services like Gmail or Microsoft blocking their forwarded messages? I was thinking mainly about emails at your own domain.

I am using it and its working fine. Others complained that SL spam detection is aggressive and it'll block the email. There's no way to access the spammed mail. You only can check the bounced emails. Per SL "When an email is refused (or bounced) by your mailbox provider or flagged by SimpleLogin anti-phishing program, SimpleLogin keeps a copy of this email for 7 days so you can take a look at its content and take appropriate actions.
The emails are deleted in 7 days".

[TenFour]

I've been experimenting with DuckDuckGo's private email forwarding and so far have not detected any lost emails, and they are forwarded very quickly--almost instantly. Of course, it is hard to know when you aren't receiving emails if it isn't something you were waiting for!

[trikotret]

Originally Posted by TenFour

I've been experimenting with DuckDuckGo's private email forwarding and so far have not detected any lost emails, and they are forwarded very quickly--almost instantly. Of course, it is hard to know when you aren't receiving emails if it isn't something you were waiting for!

Can you reply with your duck aliases? SL allows you to send from an alias and reply. Just like fastmail. But fastmail is a full email service

[TenFour]

Can you reply with your duck aliases?

Yes, I can reply. Works great in my limited testing. https://duckduckgo.com/email/faq

[trikotret]

Originally Posted by TenFour

Yes, I can reply. Works great in my limited testing. https://duckduckgo.com/email/faq

Does DUCK support custom domains?

[TenFour]

Only the duck.com domain. But it is short and easy to type, which I like.

[TenFour]

So, I tested out SimpleLogin again and they have a very slick setup process for emails at your own domain. Still, I find the process for sending to a new contact a bit awkward, requiring a few steps. Much preferred the old POBox.com forwarding service that just sets up like any other ordinary email for sending and receiving via Gmail. Not sure what the advantage of using SimpleLogin aliases is vs. DuckDuckGo unless you need the aliases at your own domain.

[jeffpan]

Originally Posted by TenFour

So, I tested out SimpleLogin again and they have a very slick setup process for emails at your own domain. Still, I find the process for sending to a new contact a bit awkward, requiring a few steps. Much preferred the old POBox.com forwarding service that just sets up like any other ordinary email for sending and receiving via Gmail. Not sure what the advantage of using SimpleLogin aliases is vs. DuckDuckGo unless you need the aliases at your own domain.

for customized domains, I have pobox.com for forwarding. if not pobox, i prefer cloudflare's email route. i don't think simplelogin has much advantages than pobox/cloudflare.

[jeffpan]

There are many similar sites to simplelogin, like this one:
https://eml.monster/#pricing

[truemagic]

Originally Posted by jeffpan

There are many similar sites to simplelogin, like this one:
https://eml.monster/#pricing

This is a great find (again). It's pretty affordable at $1/month but the downside is that it doesn't host your custom domain and doesn't offer any other domain other than the default @username.eml.monster for all your aliases.

Apart from the weekly digest feature that stands out from the rest, I wonder how can it compete with the likes of say Addy.io which has the same subscription fee for their lite package.