Ditching Proton for Disroot

I migrated to Proton Mail a few months ago but their CEO slobbing off Trump was a sign to move to bluer pastures.

The alternative I chose was disroot.org. Neither company sell your data to marketers, but Disroot is also more clearly aligned w/ my beliefs, and free, so I’m voting w/ my ‘wallet’. (I did shoot them some bail @ 20 Euros to pay it forward)

Migrating can be a headache, but since I use DuckDuckGo email, the email address I share is just a front-end, kinda like having a Google Voice number. I redirected where my emails were forwarded and it was wham, bam, thank you ma’am.

A week in, here are my thoughts:

Disroot is not as secure as Proton

Let me clarify here, that this is comparing the ‘best in the industry’ versus the ‘more than acceptable’ alternative. My understanding is when emailing other Proton users, you get built-in end-to-end encryption, and I believe they have an advantage re: PGP encryption if you need to utilize that? I believe Disroot is in the early stages of implementing something similar, but I have no interest in using it. I briefly tried PGP encryption when I used Proton and it’s a hassle that wasn’t worth the squeeze… For my inbox that comprises mostly of GitHub repo updates and party promoters’ marketing flyers, the additional security wasn’t worth the squeeze.

Mobile: Disroot’s UX isn’t as great (but it is FOSS-Friendly)

Proton is a much more modern UX/UI than Disroot for sure. From the documentation to the standalone apps, it’s clear they are better funded and have more resources there. With that said, even though Disroot doesn’t have a standalone mobile app, I like that I was able to use a free and open source app store like F-Droid to integrate w/ my mobile experience. I installed the K-9 Mail app and although the name doesn’t inspire confidence, it does the job well enough.

Desktop: Much Tighter integration in Linux

As for the desktop, I never intended to use a proprietary standalone app, so Proton’s offerings were irrelevant for me. What matters was how they integrated with the KDE Mail apps (Kmail and Kontact). I had to use hydroxide to set up a bridge so that I could integrate Proton w/ my mail clients and I experienced issues with the self-hosted server like duplicate emails and not being able to log into more than two devices at once. I made it work, but I have been pleasantly surprised w/ the ease of use of disroot thanks to it being IMAP. No custom configurations or server reboots or copy/pasting auth keys. It just works.

Settings: Less is somehow More

IIRC, Proton is more feature-rich, but many of them are handicapped, requiring a paywall for unrestricted use. For example, they limit the amount of mail filters or folders you can create. OTOH, disroot has less features, but those traditional, yet important mail features are available out-of-the-box. Since they allow the basic features unrestricted, it felt more useful to my everyday experience.

Conclusions

I am glad I made the transition to a new email provider. There were a few tradeoffs but Proton Mail was probably overkill for a minimalist like me anyways. I have a better appreciation for disroot’s tight integration with free and open source software (and my personal values).

I may have a follow up post because I did have to run my sieve script past Claude to get it working. To find out whether disroot is right for you, check out their website tutorial.