Safer email, part 1

I saw it unfold on social media elsewhere, but then a post went by on my timeline talking about how the CEO of Proton revealed himself to be aligned with the US fascist regime. This concerned me from when I first saw it, since my present strategy is an old Gmail for most things (no way to undo all of what they've collected on me over the years since it was in beta) and a Proton for financial, medical, political—any content I didn't want Google to be selling about me.

In comments elsewhere, I shared a link I'd come across on Mastodon with a thoughtful summary of non-US, privacy-respecting, and ethical email companies. I commented at some length about my current efforts, being unhappy with my new trial of Tuta's calendar and looking into Runbox as an appealing email.

While thanks is due to the original conversation for getting me started writing about this, I thought that as I go on, it's politer not to monopolize their thread and maybe I should start my own. So this is me liveblogging my journeys through email.

Runbox

All day yesterday, more or less, was devoted to setting up a free account on Runbox. I won't go into why they're appealing since it's in the link on ethical companies.

They let you have a 30-day trial with quotas set on the number of emails you can send and your bandwidth. The site is very difficult to navigate, being non-linear with many internal pages holding crucial information that you can only get to from another page. It took me hours to get a sense of what they offered. The biggest surprise, but perhaps not from a green-energy company, was that in addition to a data storage quota, an account has a bandwidth quota so all of your refreshes and anything else that uses their server and, hence, energy, is tallied. There was also some vague mention in a couple places that they offer a calDAV space, but not much more so I couldn't decide whether they offered a calendar or not, nor whether I'd be able to set that up on my devices.

I signed up. They had an interesting note (by now I was opening every single link because you couldn't tell what information it held that wasn't anywhere else) on usernames: for security, they said, you might be better off not using your name, since that's easy for a spammer to guess and use. Instead, they suggested, make your account name something more secure and then use an alias (the site said you get 100, but once I got the account, it was only 5) if you want it more readable. That seems like a good idea, especially since my Gmail account testifies to how many people share my name and don't seem to know their own email address.

So I signed up and was taken to Runbox 7, their still-beta web interface (according to the posts I scanned in their help forum, it's been that way for a long time). They only offer webmail, although there was talk—but no links to, nor could I find it in the Google Play Store—of web-as-service apps for devices. Unlike the illustration on their website, the interface does not show the data and bandwidth meters. But as I explored, I found that some features under settings weren't available in R7 and took you back to Runbox6. There were the meters. Oh, there was a page in R7 that had quotas, although they didn't increment while I was using the account in any sensible way: I used one of 500 emails in my trial quota and that was shown as 20%, not 0.20%.

There are folders in the email account, but no tags. There is also no starring or flagging function. Well, there's a single flag function but I couldn't get it to work in R7 and once applied in R6, couldn't remove it in either interface. So it's folders or nothing for organization and that is really too skimpy for how I manage my emails with labels for pending and todo.

I went and looked at the calendar, which is shown on a header bar in both R7 and R6. Oh, hey, a calendar. But it runs so slowly that entering something, especially for multi-day events, hops around and displays randomly until it finally settles up to 5 minutes later. And while you can have different colors for your different calendars, the entries themselves are not distinguished between which calendar they are on. That, again, limits the utility for the way I use calendars, especially in sharing with my spouse. Sharing isn't done at the Runbox level; it's done at the level—I think—at the level of the app you use with calDAV to pull the stored calendar data from Runbox to display. I've never done this so can't say how easy that all might be to set up or use.

In short, the whole service felt janky and slow. It takes time (several minutes) for an email (tested by sending from my Proton and Gmail accounts) to show up in their interface. It would be hard to carry on an emailed conversation at their pace and I'd be afraid that emailed login tokens would expire before I'd receive them. There are no notifications, not just actual notifications but indications on the tab or minimized window to show new email has come in. Without the bandwidth meter registering, I couldn't tell how much of my bandwidth I was using keeping my connection with the service open.

And, finally, I use a fairly wide monitor with most of my windows sized to half-screen. But in order to see the inbox management controls, I had to tear that tab out of the browser and run it about 20% wider to see them. Any more narrow and they defaulted to a partial set vertically down the side. Folders are in a sidebar that overlaps the emails if the window is too narrow, meaning you can't drag/drop emails into them. I'm honestly not sure how it runs on something small like a phone because I was too disenchanted by then to try that aspect out.

So I decided to sleep on my decision that this is not the email service for me. And today, yeah, I'm going to go delete that account. It's just not what I need. Perhaps for someone who only uses it on a laptop rather than phone, who can log in once a day to pick up their mail and then close it, it might be fine. I applaud their company values. But it's just not functional in the ways I need it to be for the way I use email.

Where next? I think I'll read up on three of the German companies. Tuta's out already: I don't like the calendar I tried from them, and they have a sketchy history of changing things in midstream. So for now, I'll be looking at Fastmail, Posteo, and Mailbox. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Oh ffs! I've spent an hour going around in circles, logged in again and again to get away from an account details page that there's no way to click out of, and couldn't find a way to cancel my account anywhere. And several things (like registering my alternate email, which yesterday showed as completed but today wanted me to do it again) didn't take from yesterday. You can't open a support ticket without setting up another account with support. I give up. I was going to cancel rather than let the account continue to use their server space, but fuck it. I've wasted too much time on this unwieldy and unstable service. I'll let the month wear down and they'll cancel it. Good riddance! Onward!

Part 2