Dig Deeper Should Be Taken With A Grain Of Salt
by Nomad
May 16, 2022
https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/email.html
I have to laugh at some of this guy's recommendations.
For email, he ranks Cockmail and Elude higher than Tutanota?
Sure, Tutanota doesn't offer POP/IMAP/SMTP, but at least when using it I can be sure that my emails are making it to their destinations and that I'm receiving everything that's been sent to me. In contrast, I've encountered one reliability issue after another with cock.li over a period of a couple of years. At one point, it would regularly go down on weekends, emails would arrive a day late if at all, and I couldn't get SMTP to work. It's on blacklists, so I wasn't able to communicate with accounts at a major webmail provider (Outlook/Hotmail, I believe it was). Now the service is invite only and for some mysterious reason I wasn't allowed to log in to a newly-created account.
He considers Elude's privacy policy to be better than Tutanota's, but at least I know who's running Tutanota and what jurisdiction the company is in. How seriously can a privacy policy be taken when you don't even know who wrote it or where the company is headquartered? If Elude ever violated its exemplary policy, who would I sue or file a complaint against? Elude runs ads for dark-web markets that sell crystal meth and synthetic heroin. Am I supposed to entrust my data to an organization with such shady affiliations? How do I know it's not being run by a gang of criminals scanning my emails for blackmail material or information that it can use to hack my accounts?
Dig Deeper states, "The most important features a service should have are mail client and anonymization support. If a provider lacks either one, they are disqualified, in my opinion." Maybe he should add "does the service actually work?" and "can the service be held to account if it violates its privacy policy?" to his list of criteria.
Elsewhere on the site he claims Pale Moon is superior to dedicated privacy browsers like LibreWolf and Brave, tells readers to use the orphaned uMatrix add-on instead of uBlock Origin, and recommends a Linux distro (Salix) which hasn't been maintained in years. I'd take his suggestions with a grain of salt.
Dig Deeper mixes up privacy and anonymity. Tutanota doesn't ask for a name or phone number, doesn't mine user data, doesn't prohibit sign-ups via Tor or VPN, strips IP addresses from email headers, and has a good track record of challenging government overreach in court. That makes it private in my book, even if it doesn't guarantee absolute anonymity.
/gemlog/