> 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?
I use mailbox for the past few years and I think it's the best option out there. But they have one major issue, which is that anyone can impersonate your domain:
I wish they had retained one awesome Thunderbird desktop feature on mobile as well - being able to set the "from" address on the go while composing the email, without having to add an identity/sender-mail in advance. Alas, it seems that hasn't been the case.
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.
Because it's trending. Likely the same reason they ended up outside the EU in the first place.
I find this to be a non article. They moved from Google to Google and Apple, installed Graphene but installed the play store for a "significant number of apps", and didn't even consider self hosting email or git.
I've probably seen a dozen of these articles now, not to mention posts on LinkedIn, and it's a shame that there is almost never any real substance to them because on the surface it's an interesting thought experiment
As a Canadian, I’ve been thinking since last year about migrating to non-US services and applications.
My main goal is simply to avoid giving money or data directly to US corporations. I have no illusions, these non-US services probably still benefit US companies in some ways.
They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed.
I started with this:
Gmail / Drive → Proton Mail / Drive
NameCheap / GoDaddy → Infomaniak
Google Maps → TomTom
Google Chrome → Vivaldi
Google Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default)
GitHub → Codeberg & Codefloe (for private)
I do like Proton Mail. The main thing I hate is how often the app and web versions get out of sync for read and archive states.
I’m really happy with Infomaniak, migrating all my domains was a breeze.
Vivaldi is based on the Chrome codebase, but I really love all the extra customization options. It was a very easy switch.
Startpage took me some time to get used to. It’s not as good as Google, but whatever.
TomTom isn’t great, but it’s not like Maps has been great over the last few years either.
Forgejo is much better than what GitHub has become.
Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that.
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.
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.
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.
* Hetzner.de for servers (I've been using their physical servers for many years now, incredible performance per € spent)
* Fernand as your CRM, it's smooth and nice and so much better and faster than all the zendesks and freshdesks it's not even funny. (https://getfernand.com/)
* AISLER if you design electronics and need to make PCBs (https://aisler.net/)
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...
Lot of discussion about different privacy laws across jurisdictions, and while I understand a lot of users have different approaches to privacy and opinions on political matters, realistically if your threat model is the NSA or some other three-letter agency:
b) if they're taking the time to get a "secret" warrant for you, you have much larger issues. It's like building a car that's resistant to hellfire missiles. It'll help, but if you're getting hellfire missiles thrown at you, you have much larger problems than the structural integrity of your vehicle.
Realistically, there's a reason that a lot of these services are underused. Many of them lack reliable support, many of them aren't as useful, and the vast majority lack the interconnectivity that makes services like Drive and Gmail so useful to the vast majority of consumers. In addition, if your evaluation of the utility of US companies is based on which party is in power, you should know that both parties equally don't care about your privacy, and never have.
Shameless plug: if you think about switching from Google Analytics/Hotjar, check out my project[0] (built in EU, started in Romania, now working on it remotely in Netherlands).
If not, happy to hear any criticism or the alternatives you decided to go with instead.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
- Browser and Mail-Client: Firefox and Thunderbird (since ~2013 - last Opera release)
Costs: ~60 EUR/month and between 2 and 4 hours of work a month to maintain.
Moving away from PayPal and Amazon is quite hard and currently I search for a Slack alternative that don't need a k8-cluster to run stable or cost >50EUR/month (playing around with Matrix, Rocket.Chat and Mattermost).
>For a long time, I was a satisfied Namecheap customer. They offer good prices, a wide selection of available domains, their DNS management has everything you need, and their support team has helped me quickly on several occasions. But now it was time to look for a comparable provider in the EU. In the end, I settled on hosting.de. Some of the reasons were the prices, reviews, the location in Germany, and the availability of .is domains. So far, everything has been running smoothly; support helped me quickly and competently with one issue; and while prices for non-German domains are slightly higher, they’re still within an acceptable range.
Have you tried zone.eu? Think they are related to the Nodemailer people or they acquired them. Would fit the whole Migrating to the EU theme of the article. And it is in English ;-) Couldn't really navigate the hosting.de site without using Google Translator.
Not a fan of Mailbox.org. It's Nextcloud for starters. The UX is clunky. They feel a 30 day web app session expiry is perfectly fine.
I've gone back to FastMail for the time being
I think what I really want is:
- FastMail or similar for sending, and receiving new emails
- An email archive system that syncs from my main email provider, deleting from the remote anything over eg 4 weeks old
I like hosted providers for their IP reputation, spam systems, deliverability etc (and in the case of FM, the excellent web UI) but I don't like them having 15 years of my email which they can read whenever they wish. (edit: yes, I realise they could just keep copies)
Does anyone else have this kind of set up? Any recommendations to remove the pain of having a mailbox split into 2?
For a European alternative to Google Docs / Notion, we made https://kraa.io/about that might work for you if all you need is a simple editor with collab features.
"the EU currently has the most user-friendly laws when it comes to data protection"
I have not done any research into this facet of EU laws, but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?
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.
> Codeberg is a German-based nonprofit organization, and it’s hard to imagine going wrong with this choice.
I like what they're doing, however Codeberg's 14 day uptime is _97.05%_. I've heard from many that downtime is normal there, and is worse than GitHub (which is already... bad). This makes them a non-starter imo, until that improves.
With the current trend of things going down all the time, the best way to compete is just to be available.
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.
> 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?
There are reasons other than privacy to move to non-US companies: e.g. not wanting contribute to the US economy and the further expansion of US tech companies. This is my main motivation in fact.
So criticisms about these kind of posts and initiatives along the lines of "EU privacy bad too" are insufficient and are unpersuasive.
The EU is not a privacy and human rights panacea, as shown by the continuing efforts to impose Chat Control. Switzerland is no better.
Then again one of my wife’s friends is high up in the Canadian policy establishment and some of her positions on surveillance and political control over social media were chilling, and I assume widespread among the Five Eyes. Certainly the UK and Australia have deeply authoritarian policies far beyond even Trump’s wildest dreams.
Small countries like Iceland have enlightened policies but are vulnerable to coercion and in fact were militarily occupied during WW2.
I do not feel that the EU is less likely to surveille me than anywhere else. The laws seem mostly geared toward protecting me from corporations - but those aren't the ones I mostly worry about.
The EU seems to be mandating surveillance by the government, which is a higher-order concern for me.
Migrating away from US services altogether is an admirable goal. In cases where that's not possible, it's still worth moving off the services and platforms offered by large tech companies.
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 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...
I did the same! The only problem with this is the uptime of codeberg.org, it sucks haha, but that is not a problem for me. I have not critical services there.
701 comments
> 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?
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...
> For various reasons
Because it's trending. Likely the same reason they ended up outside the EU in the first place.
I find this to be a non article. They moved from Google to Google and Apple, installed Graphene but installed the play store for a "significant number of apps", and didn't even consider self hosting email or git.
I've probably seen a dozen of these articles now, not to mention posts on LinkedIn, and it's a shame that there is almost never any real substance to them because on the surface it's an interesting thought experiment
My main goal is simply to avoid giving money or data directly to US corporations. I have no illusions, these non-US services probably still benefit US companies in some ways.
They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed.
I started with this:
Gmail / Drive → Proton Mail / Drive
NameCheap / GoDaddy → Infomaniak
Google Maps → TomTom
Google Chrome → Vivaldi
Google Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default)
GitHub → Codeberg & Codefloe (for private)
I do like Proton Mail. The main thing I hate is how often the app and web versions get out of sync for read and archive states.
I’m really happy with Infomaniak, migrating all my domains was a breeze.
Vivaldi is based on the Chrome codebase, but I really love all the extra customization options. It was a very easy switch.
Startpage took me some time to get used to. It’s not as good as Google, but whatever.
TomTom isn’t great, but it’s not like Maps has been great over the last few years either.
Forgejo is much better than what GitHub has become.
Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that.
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.
[1]: https://ecosia.org
[2]: https://qwant.com
[3]: https://uruky.com
* Hetzner.de for servers (I've been using their physical servers for many years now, incredible performance per € spent)
* Fernand as your CRM, it's smooth and nice and so much better and faster than all the zendesks and freshdesks it's not even funny. (https://getfernand.com/)
* AISLER if you design electronics and need to make PCBs (https://aisler.net/)
and ofc, non-CN too
a) migrating to a different jurisdiction isn't realistically a massive barrier for them (related: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf)
b) if they're taking the time to get a "secret" warrant for you, you have much larger issues. It's like building a car that's resistant to hellfire missiles. It'll help, but if you're getting hellfire missiles thrown at you, you have much larger problems than the structural integrity of your vehicle.
Realistically, there's a reason that a lot of these services are underused. Many of them lack reliable support, many of them aren't as useful, and the vast majority lack the interconnectivity that makes services like Drive and Gmail so useful to the vast majority of consumers. In addition, if your evaluation of the utility of US companies is based on which party is in power, you should know that both parties equally don't care about your privacy, and never have.
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)
> The reasons for this are [...] improved data protection.
Didn't the Snowden leaks just prove that the NSA is listening to most things anyway?
I suppose this has more to do with the specific case of a lower-level agency being able to access your data, rather than it being actually secure?
I get that people would be concerned about that scenario, but also it seems like a little bit of hair-splitting.
If not, happy to hear any criticism or the alternatives you decided to go with instead.
[0]: https://www.uxwizz.com
> 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
Issues and PRs would be a bonus, but not a requirement in my case.
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.
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.
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).
Currently, my private setup is:
- VPN: Windscribe [CA]
- AI: Mistral [FR]
- Phone: De-Googled Fairphone [NL] (F-Droid/Aurora/OpenStreetMap)
- Search: Self-hosted SearXNG + YACY (since ~10 years / good setup & documentation)
- Domain Provider: INWX [DE] (since +10 years / good setup & documentation)
- DNS: Self-hosted AdGuard Home / dnscrypt-proxy 2 + dnsdist / resolver (since ~5y / good setup & documentation)
- Git: Self-hosted GitLab (since ~1 year / ok setup & documentation)
- Mail/Cal/Card: Self-hosted with Mailcow (since +5 years / good setup & nice documentation)
- Password Manager: Self-hosted KeePass2 + SSHFS (since +10 years / easy setup)
- Notes: Joplin + self-hosted Joplin-Server (since ~5 years / good setup & documentation)
- Feeds: Self-hosted Miniflux (since +5years / easy setup & good documentation)
- VPS/Server/Storage/Hosting: netcup [DE], Webtropia [DE], IONOS [DE], OVH [FR], Hetzner [DE], Contabo [DE]
- Browser and Mail-Client: Firefox and Thunderbird (since ~2013 - last Opera release)
Costs: ~60 EUR/month and between 2 and 4 hours of work a month to maintain.
Moving away from PayPal and Amazon is quite hard and currently I search for a Slack alternative that don't need a k8-cluster to run stable or cost >50EUR/month (playing around with Matrix, Rocket.Chat and Mattermost).
Recently, I’ve been using https://european-alternatives.eu/ a lot to help friends and family.
>For a long time, I was a satisfied Namecheap customer. They offer good prices, a wide selection of available domains, their DNS management has everything you need, and their support team has helped me quickly on several occasions. But now it was time to look for a comparable provider in the EU. In the end, I settled on hosting.de. Some of the reasons were the prices, reviews, the location in Germany, and the availability of .is domains. So far, everything has been running smoothly; support helped me quickly and competently with one issue; and while prices for non-German domains are slightly higher, they’re still within an acceptable range.
Have you tried zone.eu? Think they are related to the Nodemailer people or they acquired them. Would fit the whole Migrating to the EU theme of the article. And it is in English ;-) Couldn't really navigate the hosting.de site without using Google Translator.
I've gone back to FastMail for the time being
I think what I really want is:
- FastMail or similar for sending, and receiving new emails
- An email archive system that syncs from my main email provider, deleting from the remote anything over eg 4 weeks old
I like hosted providers for their IP reputation, spam systems, deliverability etc (and in the case of FM, the excellent web UI) but I don't like them having 15 years of my email which they can read whenever they wish. (edit: yes, I realise they could just keep copies)
Does anyone else have this kind of set up? Any recommendations to remove the pain of having a mailbox split into 2?
>
"the EU currently has the most user-friendly laws when it comes to data protection"I have not done any research into this facet of EU laws, but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?
> Codeberg is a German-based nonprofit organization, and it’s hard to imagine going wrong with this choice.
I like what they're doing, however Codeberg's 14 day uptime is _97.05%_. I've heard from many that downtime is normal there, and is worse than GitHub (which is already... bad). This makes them a non-starter imo, until that improves.
With the current trend of things going down all the time, the best way to compete is just to be available.
Github: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
It doesn’t have any backend and all data is stored in the browser.
> 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?
So criticisms about these kind of posts and initiatives along the lines of "EU privacy bad too" are insufficient and are unpersuasive.
Then again one of my wife’s friends is high up in the Canadian policy establishment and some of her positions on surveillance and political control over social media were chilling, and I assume widespread among the Five Eyes. Certainly the UK and Australia have deeply authoritarian policies far beyond even Trump’s wildest dreams.
Small countries like Iceland have enlightened policies but are vulnerable to coercion and in fact were militarily occupied during WW2.
The EU seems to be mandating surveillance by the government, which is a higher-order concern for me.
→ https://allquiet.app
> I’ve always been a happy Mullvad customer. For 5 euros a month, I pay a Swedish company that has proven it doesn’t log any data
How did they prove that? Is such proof even possible?