recently_folded

My least favorite event. Oh, chemo was bad, but short-lived. Dentist agony has been lifelong from when I was a child and had all of my major fillings put in without local anesthetic ("Children don't feel pain because their nerves aren't mature; all of that screaming is just acting up.") Braces just hurt the usual amount, except worse because I had apthous ulcers (canker sores) from the wear points for the three solid years I wore them. The dentist told my mother it was because I had "a dirty mouth." I still have big scars on the insides of my lips from that, that new hygienists look at with horror and ask "what IS that?" And now that I'm on bone density drugs (thanks, cancer), I have the risk of developing jaw osteonecrosis to worry about. I have a bite guard so that I don't grind my teeth into shards at night, but at my last visit I was told that I had worn through one of my crowns and it might need replacing. What is my most common nightmare fodder? Yeah.

The practice I go to is good. They are okay with practical decisions and don't try to upsell. The hygienist is fairly gentle and offers good advice on wringing more years out of my teeth. But it's hard to reverse a lifetime of dread.

There are a lot of unordinary things I've done in my life that people associate with bravery. I don't consider myself brave; it's more a matter of doing what needs to be done in the moment. My spouse reminds me, at times like this, that I once stood down a patrol boat holding automatic weapons aimed at me, called them names, reprimanded them, and got them to apologize for running into our boat. In French. I don't particularly think that was brave; it was a matter of being extremely pissed off in a culture where being yelled at by an older woman means something.

I'll be fine. I'll be home again by midday. I'll remember my deep breathing and try not to drive my fingernails through the arms of the chair. I'll survive. Automatic weapons will not be involved. Probably.

It's a clear, frosty morning. The shop roof is solidly white with steam rising as the sun slowly sweeps across it. The sun is just 6° above the horizon (at zenith it will reach only 13°), making this a long-shadow day that's striping the lawn with fence prints.  The apple trees have a few final dried brown leaves and the backyard lilac holds it green leaves to drop them randomly through the winter. Green or brown, they're crowned in frost today. Down the block, a shrub is casting a spray of white branches into a patch of sun like that thrown by the bow of a boat sailing hard on the wind. 

Here, we call this the "grey winter." It comes between fall, a brief season given over to rains, rushing about to get the yard and gardens put away, and the random color of the trees and shrubs and tundra, and winter, when there is a good snowpack and skiers go past on the street. Grey winter is hard and cold and leaches the color out of the world. More critically, there's just not as much appeal to do things outdoors. Grey winter is when a lot of people go to Arizona or Hawaii, not to return until winter is established and they can enjoy the snow. Every year it starts earlier. Except that it doesn't actually; it just feels as though it starts sooner than it should.

Spouse is getting ready for a grocery shopping trip, mumbling under his breath about when to put the studded snow tires on. We hate running them on streets before there's snowpack, but we live on a sidehill and there's no making that turn into or out of the driveway in the winter without them. Carrying on downhill sideways into the neighbors' flower beds would just be rude. I see that the postal trucks have switched to their winter mode of stopping at the top of the hill and walking down, although I suspect it's more about lost time getting stuck than for precisely the same consideration.

The cat is making her purposeful round of the house, evaluating where she will settle in for her day's Serious Nap. Will it be the heating pad in the cardboard box atop my study work island? The cupboard under it? The sun's too low to make for good basking in the conservatory in the morning although it will hold appeal later in the day as it sweeps around south and west. It's too cold, now, for the princess window and besides, that's all disrupted due to a touch-up-the-window-trim-paint project and everyone knows that disruption is not compatible with a Serious Nap. 

So, a quick read around the news and then it'll be time to rally for putting groceries away.

I'm relieved that the election went off relatively smoothly without a lot of horrible interference from the federal government. As well, of course, as being giddy over the results. Here in Alaska it takes a long time to count ballots (and we had a lot of absentee ballots voted) and with early results close, we won't know for a couple weeks who really will have won.

So that's the first hurdle. I'll feel better, though, once the incoming legislators are seated. I mean, remember what happened just a few years ago. I'm sure that the strategic fascist minds are working hard on how they can derail things this January. My only hope is that Trump and his gang of clowns take charge, because if anything, they can be expected to screw up.

But for today, let's all be hung over from too much political news. It's kind of like Halloween sugar, only much, much more important.

So, after the massive email uproar of the past few days, I'm down to just a few tidying-up chores like archiving all of the various backups and downloads from the process. Aside from some ongoing not-spam marking as emails come in to the new accounts, it's all working. I'm hoping that the last few people who had my original Proton address manage to update their address books to the new one I sent them (an anonaddy forward since NO ONE will get my real email address, just to simplify future migration). 

Now I can turn my attention back to the rest of things. Today's my twice-weekly Strong Women Strong Bones workout, which bores me witless but is better than the alternative, namely having my bones turn to splinters and dust. And this evening, a cancer support group I facilitate on zoom, so an early dinner, menu tbd. 

With Halloween over, it's now full speed ahead on our national overeating day, nominally in celebration of colonialism and football but in our household, just a nice meal. The neighbors dropped off a bag of decorative gourds as they are prepping to head off to their winter home, and they'll make a nice bit of seasonal decor while we wait for time to switch to the Christmas stuff. Which, due to Spouse's Very Strong Feelings on the Matter, cannot start until after Thanksgiving. In fact, I caught him last night snorting at the lights on a house down the block that were just switched from purple to red/green/white.

But right now, there's a little cat curled up in my inbasket (idk, it was her choice), basking under my desk lamp as she digests her breakfast. The sky is starting to get light and I can see that there must be some weather coming since the silhouetted tree branches are moving in a light breeze and we rarely have wind at night unless there's a front nearby. There's a pot of freshly-made coffee upstairs and I think I'll go pour another mug. 

A couple years ago I went through this and ended up choosing inertia and sticking with Proton. Proton has moved from just having a MAGA asshole for CEO to adding a toxic workplace AND security risks from pushing AI slop without human supervision. Enough being enough, then, this time I really am switching. No, really.

That previous hunt ruled out:

• Mailfence
• Fastmail
• Mailbox

And I’ll add Tuta to the reject list thanks to the latest revelations of assholery there. Plus, I really don’t don’t like their user interface. There’s also the concern of far-right politics in Germany making that country less hospitable for services like this, so who knows how long it’ll last.

I’ve no inclination to pay for a domain and then pay second-tier or higher to couple it with an email service, especially since that opens your email address(es) to inescapable spam. That rules out a lot of email services that are domain-based only. (I do pay for an alias service, which is how I can face shifting email providers with some equanimity.)

So here’s round two. First up, ones I’ve rejected for various shortcomings:

• Aster: I really like the look of it, what they say about privacy. But it’s only months old, the company officers are obfuscated on the site and one has a shady past in malware, their competition has noted some outright lies on their site relative to what’s actually in their code, and I ended up feeling as though the whole thing looks just like a honeypot would.

• Posteo: Love the green and privacy focuses, have a solid user base that recommends them, but limits to their spam inbox and broken conversation threading such that cc emails aren’t captured in a thread don’t meet my email use needs.

• Disroot and RiseUp: don’t want a link with political or other action; under the radar is my intention

• Soverin: pricey

• Wölkli: expensive for any storage space (free gets you 200 MB)

• Murena: mainly a phone company but you can use the service without. No zero-access encryption and they talk privacy but it’s not really the focus. Under French law.

• Freenet Mail: advertising in free tier, otherwise pricey

• Kolab NOW: just email is >$5/month, no free tier

• A whole whack of email services examined for privacy, a bit dated

• mail.de: “registration for our FreeMail offer is only possible if you agree to the use of your data for advertising purposes with the registration”

• Secria: new but unlike Aster have actual people in their subreddit and a fleshed-out about page, a good privacy policy page. Limited free account comparable to Proton; have own Android app but so new it has no reviews; no IMAP because of security focus. Domain name may be difficult to spell out on phone (unable to tell without signing up what they offer).

So where am I now (other than frustrated and, frankly, quite tired of the whole issue)?

I already had an account at Infomaniak. It is Swiss, privacy-focused, has AI in their paid accounts & cloud storage but not in the free account I use. Their free "MykSuite" account also has calDAV, and is the only one I've found that does allows you to share calendars on a free account (using Fossify Calendar on Android; Thunderbird on desktop). I don't know anything particularly bad about them...so far, other than that their name is silly. I got the account to aggregate newsletters but I swapped them out (via alias direction) and will use this at least temporarily as my Proton escape general email account. They do have their own Android mail app.

But procedurally, I need one more account. I get a bunch of city government email newsletters and a few other things that are non-urgent reading. I don’t want to have to download them via mobile data when I’m off camping and happen to have a moment’s connectivity (it’s always the crap that downloads and the important stuff gets cut off) and I don’t want to have to listen to email notification alerts for things that are non-urgent reading. I decided to try out the free account level on Murena (you can’t get there once you choose a country from the home page popup but you can get there from the non-country url linked here). Quick and easy signup, ready to go in moments.

I still had a SimpleLogin account (Proton owns them) for all of my newsletters, and for now I’ve dodged re-doing that by making a new account there for the Murena email account and transfering the aliases in my Infomaniak SimpleLogin account there. Yes, it’s getting confusing by now. But it all went through and now I have ikmail.com for personal email and murena.io for newsletters. And both working quite well (along with my Infomaniak calendar & Spouse’s) in Thunderbird.

I deleted the spare Infomaniak SimpleLogin account, the myrealname Proton email account and cleaned everything out of my working Proton account. I’ll leave that one for a couple days to sweep up anything I’ve missed, then delete it. I also redirected my Addy.io and DuckDuckGo aliases to my Infomaniak account. All of which got notes in the relevant entries in my KeePass database.

Still to come when I have a moment: change email address of the one site that uses my Tuta account and then delete that. Install the Infomaniak mail app on my phone and delete the Proton one. And clean up my Thunderbird address books to clear out multiples and poorly-imported cruft. But hey, I just discovered I can make email groups in Thunderbird, which Proton didn’t allow in the free account. That’s worth some of the inconvenience right there!

And then I can help Spouse shift his stuff over.

Sigh.

Less than two years ago I did months of research, tried out various free accounts, wrote it all up on Pillowfort (gonna migrate those posts over here as soon as I have a moment done, starts here). I've been using (free) Proton with ($12/yr) addy.io just fine since then.

So now half the internet blows up because the Proton CEO, previously revealed as MAGA, is now further revealed as an AI-psychotic. Assholes are one thing; security issues are an entirely different one. Having just browbeat a group I volunteer to run a wordpress site for into updating their PHP (see last week's internet blowup), I'm wearing down on security vulnerabilities.

( The rest... )

I saw that term in someone else's post about their farm share and had to chuckle. Yes, we subscribed to a CSA this summer as a trial thing and "produce situation" pretty much characterized our summer menus even though we run a vegetarian household all the time. 

It felt as though the weekly shares were small, but it still took us the week or more to use one up, and that's even with freezing a fair bit of things like the greens. I still have an accumulated excess of small potatoes, tasty but way more potato carbs than we typically eat that quickly. The share did keep us nicely in lettuce we felt we could safely eat, especially pertinent after the commercial lettuce contamination events this summer made us quit buying supermarket lettuce. 

But it seemed as though the stuff we got was what was left over from their farmers' market stall and thinning the rows: tiny carrots, 3 skinny battered leeks, two folded-over scallions, some tiny bolting celery, brussels sprouts smaller in diameter than my pinkie, so-called celeriac that was more celery root and was the size of said pinkie when peeled. Every week there was something that was so small that there was no use for it that felt consequential enough to be worth the bother. 

We wanted to support this CSA because it's an agriculture teaching project of a local college and our state desperately needs more small agriculture. But at the price, we could go to the weekly farmers' market and spend as much on the pricey veggies there and end up with something we can use. It was interesting to sample what can be grown in this climate/soil, but we didn't really encounter anything new we felt we want to add to our own backyard garden, which provides frozen greens for most of the year and carrots for at least half, even after the slugs have had their giddy way with it. 

It's winter here now, though. The farmers' markets have closed or moved indoors to sell off their remaining potatoes, eggs, meat, and fermented/preserved products—nothing we particularly need. I suppose we should look into that hydroponic lettuce place across town and treat (by which I of course mean "pay for") lettuce like the rare jewel it is at 62°N. And learn to make more salads with cabbage. 

It's taken me the year and a half since my email survey to find a shared calendar with a more private service than Gmail. We used Zoho in the interim but it's Indian, so also politically questionable. It's also annoying when loading it online and has to be reloaded several times. It does send a daily agenda, has finally released an Android app (had to use it as a PWA before that), and does allow sharing via CalDAV (which let me keep a Thunderbird copy for archive), so it met my minimal requirements. 

But I kept looking. I looked at all of the providers mentioned in discussions of privacy. Most don't offer a true shared calendar. Those that do, or stand-alone calendars that offer sharing, also have long lists of who they share sell all your information to. I branched out to team communications apps and similar sorts of office suites, but it was still hard to find privacy and functionality at the same time.

For the past year or so I've been seeing mentions of Infomaniak, another Swiss company touting privacy. I just recently signed up for a free "myKSuite" (there are several different kinds of accounts and you need to be careful as to what you're signing up for) account with email, CalDAV calendar, cloud storage (which I don't really need).

The email interface is more gmail-like than most and the emails come through briskly. I'm not putting it to general use right now, but I did set up a free SimpleLogin account (yeah, I know, back to Proton, but at least I'm crossing the stream) and use it to subscribe to a bunch of municipal notices, legislative newsletters, and such, thus getting them out of my Proton email and off my addy.io quota. Those are things I don't need to read promptly, so when I'm traveling and camping, they're not clotting things up with downloading their massive size. I had no trouble using their documentation to set up Thunderbird to sync the account. I haven't bothered setting up anything on my Android phone because it's not something I need to use on it, but they do have an email app.

And they do have a decent (so far)(I think) calendar app. The free myKSuite account gives you just one calendar, but you can let someone else share it (adjustable permissions from view-only to full edit). By Spouse and I sharing, we each get a view of both calendars, which means we can each enter things and the other can see it—the whole point of this endeavor. 

There were two things that got a little more complicated, but not fatal. One was the agenda, which Spouse wanted served to their Proton email account. Infomaniak only delivers that to their own email account and while you can set up folder filters, you can't set up any sort of auto-forward (in the free account; I don't know about the paid accounts). I set up a forward from Thunderbird to Proton, which works fine...so long as you open Thunderbird. So nope, not especially useful. After a long conversation and a lot of pouty-lip action, they conceded that maybe they could open their calendar on their phone and look at the nice daily list. We'll see how that goes. And I've told them that there's an Infomaniak email app if they want to read whatever they have sent to that account on their phone or tablet.

The phone app situation is a bit convoluted. I didn't want to use the built-in Android calendar which of course feeds straight to Google. So I installed Fossify Calendar (I use a number of other Fossify apps and while they aren't perfect, they're quite functional). This supposedly uses Android calendar somehow without giving the calendar contents to it, which is beyond my understanding but, okay. Then, because the Fossify app doesn't have CalDAV (the calendar communication protocol), you need another app to do that. F-Droid has a free one, Google Play has a paid one (the same one), and Infomaniak has their own free one: ksync. Their documentation (which includes the settings you need for your own personal account) looked detailed enough for me to follow and that had worked out with syncing email, so I decided to try it. Once the sharing had propagated, I installed both Fossify Calendar and ksync. Once I had ksync set up, it gave me toggles to turn on both of our calendars. And then when I went to the CalDAV portion of the Fossify Calendar settings (not the manage calendars settings) and turned that on, both of the calendars showed up. I had to tweak colors to distinguish them but that was easy. And the Fossify calendar has a nice selectable daily display that lists just the day's entries, not all the empty hours between them.

With Spouse's computer upstairs and mine downstairs, I think I spent more time running up and down (exercise!) than I did actually setting stuff up. It all went through promptly. Spouse didn't want the SimpleLogin addition, but that's up to them to manage and I have already warned them that I will have no sympathy if that account fills up with spam due to whatever they decide to subscribe to with it. 

Spouse additionally wanted the calendar setup on their tablet. I wasn't sure that would work since it's a Samsung and they use their own proprietary OS which maximizes what they can harvest and sell. But in fact it did set up as straight-forwardly as on the phones (one Moto, one Nokia). 

What about contacts? Ksync also handles the CardDAV protocol that syncs them and contacts are included in the myKSuite account. I do use Fossify Contacts on my phone and it works well enough even though I only really use it for phone numbers. I keep my main address book in Thunderbird and only keep such contacts as I use in each account in that account's contacts, just to minimize exposure. Since I'm only using the Infomaniak account to receive newsletters, I don't need any contacts for it. But it wouldn't take much more to set all that up to include them. 

As for the company Infomaniak, they do have an AI (which is only in the paid accounts) and their data centers are purportedly used for heating 6000 homes. Their software is either open source or developed in-house. For signup, they want your name and you are given a phone number to call that hangs up after one ring, just to verify that there's a responsive individual doing the signup; they do retain your phone number so that you can do two-step verification or "in case of emergency." Here's their data confidentiality policy and more information about them. Do they have any dirty secrets like Proton's? I've not encountered any, which of course doesn't mean they don't exist. But so far as careful research would indicate, they're an adequately private service for those who don't need total encryption/anonymity.

We'll see how it works out over time.

After following discussion elsewhere about Mozilla taking their Firefox browser further AI, I decided that I don't want to be playing whack-a-mole with AI features, even if they claim I can disable them if I can find them all. Just noped right out of that. 

The recs I saw were Waterfox if I didn't want to go full-lockdown with IronFox (I don't). So I did the flatpak install per their support page on my Xubuntu desktop and that worked just fine. I'd exported my NoScript and bookmarks, so had them in hand. Which was good since the import function in the new browser setup didn't work at all, including the passwords it claimed to have stored. It turns out you can't use the store passwords function unless you set a browser password, which is hard to argue against even though I don't feel that my desktop needs quite that level of security. But, fine, password it is and then the exported password file transferred over in seconds. 

I imported my bookmarks via html export from Firefox. It took a little fiddling to configure the toolbars the way I want and get the proper folders where I wanted them, but I eventually prevailed after some back-and-forth. 

I installed extensions: TextNote, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, NoScript and either imported the exports from the extensions in Firefox or configured them from scratch, copy/paste, with Waterfox and Firefox open side by side. Everything just worked as it had done, no fuss.

Installed Multi-Account Containers extension and had to screencap my Firefox list in order to manually transcribe it into Waterfox. There's no bulk way to do this and each bookmark will have to be opened, then reopened by right-clicking to the correct tab container, then told to make it the default. 

I had to manually enter the delete-cookies exceptions, copying them from Firefox.

Pinned tabs, keyboard commands—just like Firefox. I do find it a little disorienting not to have a top window bar as is my system default since using the dark them against a dark wallpaper makes it iffy to grab to reposition, but I'll learn. If that's my only real quibble, I'm getting off pretty easily. Unless things fall apart, I've invested two hours and I'm good to go. 

Now to go install the Android versions on my phone and tablet. I don't use sync since I've had bad luck in the past with Firefox sync getting confused and multiplying my bookmarks endlessly.  

(Edited because I forgot the right-click container opening, which removed a step and made the process a little faster.)

The dust is starting to settle and my emails are tapering off. At this point, gmail has some lingering "we'll delete your account next week" messages sitting around, plus some rarely-read stuff that I'll leave there for now to continue a picture of relative normality. I've got one nonprofit volunteer account that apparently requires some high level server security hijinks to let me change an email and verify it, and that's still pending. 

Moving my little family newsletter mailing list went about as well as one might expect. One person keeps sending me emails that his provider keeps marking my (proton) emails as spam and my sister sent my new email address back to gmail rather than confirming it otherwise, so thanks for giving them that link to follow me on. Proton is known to be blocked by gmail randomly, and this bears that out since several other gmail users are having no problem with the exact same emails.

I'm surprised—but I suppose shouldn't be—at the number of companies who let you change your email address and then go on using the old one. Including one medical provider who sends their confirm-your-appointment emails from some different source and no one seemed to know how to update it. And whose medical records rep spent some time on the phone trying to convince me that I was giving them an impossible address because it had "too many period things" after the @. I suppose that they assume that since I'm not 20 years old, I don't know how computer stuff works. And who then went into my portal and changed the address I'd already changed to the one I wanted for the portal to the one I'd given them for the confirmation emails, which were intentionally different so I could be sure to change both should I move again. 

Still, despite all of these efforts to make this more difficult, traffic to my old accounts is tapering off. Given the lag, though, it'll obviously take some time before I dare cancel the old (my-name-based) proton account. And I'm not sure about the gmail account: I've used it for so many years now that I'm tempted to keep it, continuing to feed it inconsequential stuff, to cloud the profile they're selling on me and in case someone turns up in the future to try to reach me that way. Well, undecided but for now, it'll stay, safely quarantined within its own tab.

Which reminds me: this would all have been MUCH more difficult without the Firefox extension "Container Tabs," which keeps things open in the same browser instance carefully quarantined from each other. Not only does that balkanize the information each site can gather about me, but it allows having more than one account with the same service open at once. And not having to sign in and out and in and out ad nauseam really helps this process move along. 

The other thing that I hadn't planned for that came up along the way was that I decided not to keep any information about people in my address books. I pruned my gmail contacts down to just those required for the phone numbers I regularly use, and removed other information from their entries. In my new email, it's just name and address. But there was a lot of information that I'd collected over the years, so I took the big old contacts export from gmail and pulled all of that personal info and entered it into a CherryTree database. I'm not sure that one's the best format since it works only on a desktop and has no mobile version, but I'm familiar with it and could get it organized and running pretty quickly. So now that's saved, backed up, and no longer in Google's greedy hands. That obviously doesn't make their old records go away, but this whole process is about accepting the past and going forward from here.

So that pretty much ends my process. I expect that old name-based proton to dry up over the next month, at which point I'll delete it. I had to jump through some hoops to get the 1 GB of email storage and I sort of hate to let that go, but then, what good is it if I'm not using it? And I did the thing and got the 1 GB in the new account, so there I am. Right. Don't need it; don't want it. So unless something changes that makes a difference to this whole picture, I think I'm done. Phew. Finally. It was a week of work and a week of tidying up, but now I'm a bit more distant from my old activities and a bit more difficult to follow. And in today's world, that's a good thing.

Part 9