mailbox.org launches ‘GoEuropean’ promotion: 6 months free for new customers

Figures, I just purchased an account last week. That's fine, it's not that expensive anyway and hopefully this helps more people decide to move from Google, like I'm in the process of doing.

If you want I guess you could send them an email and hope to get the other months for free?

The voucher can be redeemed until 31 May 2025 when registering a new private email account on the Premium or Standard plan. It is entered in the second step of registration and automatically credited with your first payment for a term of 12 months. Instead of paying for 12 months, you only pay for 6! The first month is generally free. A change of plan is only possible after the 12-month term has expired. The voucher is non-refundable, cannot be cashed in, and cannot be transferred to existing accounts

So it's 50% discount in case anyone wonders. Standard plan is 3€/mo (so I guess €18 for the first year), premium is €9/mo (so i guess €54 for the first year). There is also a lite plan for 1€/mo but then you don't get a discount.

One of the few mail providers to integrate OpenPGP and also support custom domains.

You can have them encrypt your mail with your public key as soon as it arrives, so that your mailbox is always encrypted.

If you trust them to store your private key, you can use their web interface to decrypt your messages in the browser. Or you can have complete custody of your own keys and use your own external mail client.

You can also turn off mailbox encryption (the default) and just use it as a regular mail provider.

You can have them encrypt your mail with your public key as soon as it arrives, so that your mailbox is always encrypted.
I like the idea, but can't they read the mail on arrival and before encryption anyway?
- Yes, but this is true of all standard email services. If you want end-to-end encryption then you need to have your correspondent encrypt their message with your public key before sending, as with any E2EE email.
  The purpose of encrypting incoming mail is for mail that arrives unencrypted (most mail) so it does not sit in plaintext on their servers.
- They can read them, obviously, but this way they are stored in an encrypted format in case of breaches or warrants.

Wish I'd held off, or this happened sooner. But can't complain, let's get more onboard! 🎉🎉🎈

I've had a paid mail service before and then life happened and I couldn't afford it and lost my main email address. This is going back probably 20 years or more.

I'm not sure I want to pay for my email but then I'm not sure what the alternative might be.

I'm open to suggestions!

It depends a bit what couldn't afford means in your context, but I would recommend paying for your own (cheap) domain. That way you can move between email providers if for example Google suddenly bundles AI in its plan and becomes too expensive. The whole package would come to ca. 30€/year here in Norway.
- I'd like to do this in principle, but losing my entire email history would be terrible. Then I'd have to make local backups that I have to keep track of and ensure it's always up to date.
I thought the same. That’s why I am on Proton which has a sufficient free tier (1GB). If I am not able to pay any of the higher tiers anymore, I can always fall back to the free one
- Also, this supports growth of the “small” email providers which will allow them to get traction in the B2B sector.
  Once they have grown, they can afford running consumer tiers at a loss and compensating this with other revenue streams - similar to what big tech is currently doing
- Thanks, I'll check Proton out as I've seen it mentioned quite a lot. Just found out I'm going to be a dad at 47 so I've been a bit distracted!
Proton, for example, offers a free tier. Your storage is limited, but at least it forces you to keep your inbox tidy. Looking back at my Gmail account, hard to believe I was happy with that mess for such a long time
Custom domain

I tried this, but unfortunately the two factor authentication (2fa) doesn’t work very well. I couldn’t use carddav, caldav or active sync with app passwords (which also reduce the login to one factor) on my iPhone. So I won’t switch without proper security.

Did you have better results with android?

They're currently rolling out this feature, starting with the login, you can now create app passwords für IMAP, DAV and the sync-client. Don't know if it's just for new users or when existing users are transferred but I recently noticed that something has changed to the positive.
- Oh, ok, this is new. Then I might try again in a few weeks again. 2 Weeks ago there were only for IMAP and Pop3

Can someone tell me how the aliases exactly work? I am currently at proton but plan to move as soon as my subscription ends. I have quite a lot of aloases like example+alias1@my.domain and example+alias2@my.domain while having just example@my.domain taking a slot of the 25 custom addressss I can register with proton. Just want to know how easy it is to migrate or if I have to change email adresses that I've already used. I've read that they also support catch all, so maybe that's enough.

Mail extensions with plus are free. With your own domain you can set up a catchall alias ad well if you want to accept mail for any mail address https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/e-mail-article/how-to-use-mail-extensions/
https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/e-mail-article/using-catch-all-alias-with-own-domain/
- Thank you very much! The question is now only, if I should get the account now and then switch in October over.

I'm already at web.de, but it's a very nice offer.

Geil 🤩