Private Gmail and Docs alternatives: Proton, Skiff, and more

https://www.fastcompany.com/90649563/google-gmail-docs-drive-privacy-alternatives

by janjones • 5 years ago

134 65 5 years ago

alberth3• 5 years ago

It’s interesting Proton is featured instead of Fastmail … especially given that Vivaldi (who is featured) has a close partnership with Fastmail.

Off topic: I wish Fastmail provided SSO (IdP) services. I want to move my small business over to it but lack of SSO is a blocker. I guess I’ll just continue to use it for personal.

brongondwana3• 5 years ago

On that off topic... I'm interested to know more about your use case. I've been looking at what it would take to integrate SSO into Fastmail. You can email me brong at fastmailteam com or just comment here if you're happy to respond in public. Thanks!

alberth3• 5 years ago

Hi Bron

Really appreciate you noticing my comment and responding. I really love your company for its values (and it doesn't hurt that you have the best webmail interface I've ever used ... and I've used them all).

Essentially, I have a small company of 11 employees. All remote. We have no on-premise infrastructure, cloud for everything. The vast majority of my team use: Github, Zendesk, Zoom, and Slack daily.

Whenever I hire a new employee, without SSO (and identity management), I have setup a multiple account credentials just for that single employee (and off boarding employees to deactivate access is a whole bigger issue).

It's not uncommon that an employee of mine might have 8-10 different username and passwords for all the various systems they use daily. Because of differing username or password retention policies, the usernames might be different and/or the passwords become out of synch because one provider is on a 90 day password change when another is on a 60 day password change. It's a mess and I'm sure people have sticky notes with their username/password written down just to keep up with all of their various username/passwords.

By having SSO/IdP provided by our email provider, I can eliminate all of these problems. Note: I'm not saying for you to accept SSO from a 3rd party - I'm suggesting that Fastmail be the Identity Provider (IdP) for my employees so that they can use their Fastmail (my domain) account with Github/Slack/Zendesk/etc.

Here's some SSO documentation from common 3rd party services we use.

Again, thanks so much for considering this. I would LOVE it if you became an IdP/SSO provider. Happy to answer any more questions.

EDIT: I should mention that I've looked into Okta in the past but for sites that don't support SSO, what Okta does is essentially a formfill/Lastpass like feature. Which kind of makes me uncomfortable. But if Fastmail allow SSO, Okta becomes more appealing (though not required)

EDIT2: this might be more heavy weight that you're looking for but I know at one time the gold standard for open source SSO offerings is OpenAM (it's the forked SSO offering that was from Sun back in the day and Sun at the time was the IAM leader). https://github.com/OpenIdentityPlatform/OpenAM/

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/a...

[2] https://slack.com/help/articles/203772216-SAML-single-sign-o...

[3] https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203663826-Sing...

brongondwana3• 5 years ago

... and on the on-topic, I really do need to get back to writing up that blog post idea about the distinction between secrecy and privacy. Protonmail definitely does more secrecy (with the end-to-end, hidden from themselves encryption, etc) - but I suspect that with our (Fastmail's) image proxying and standards-based integration with regular tooling that the overall balance of usable and effective privacy is more mixed.

jabroni_salad• 5 years ago

The privacy community does not really like fastmail. I stick with FM because I personally value the service and find it reliable, but they aren't zero-knowledge and australia has recently had some unfortunate legislation in regards to digital privacy.

gonehome3• 5 years ago

I think Fastmail is more honest - if you're using email and communicating with 90% of the rest of the world that uses gmail then the 'privacy' provided by proton mail is irrelevant.

They're also based in [edit: I thought Protonmail was Russian based, but they're not]. I think that's probably worse from a country level.

Encrypted email is a bad way to do private communication - services that pretend otherwise set off alarms for me.

The main advantage of Fastmail vs. Google is that it's a separate service focused on providing you a good experience with custom domain support. The business model is not ad driven so incentives are more aligned and it lets you leave Google services.

The privacy people's faith in proton is misplaced (imo).

cutthegrass22• 5 years ago

Are these alternatives even worth adopting if you're using an Android phone?

soco• 5 years ago

Why not? The only thing Google mandates on Android is that you download them from Google Play (and even that can be worked around). Nothing stands in your way to use what you want for email or document editing or storage.

spinax• 5 years ago

Real life +1, Google is used for the basic Android setup needs and that's it, all other needs are non-Google services (well, technically NewPipe is Youtube because who doesn't like a good cat video). One key app most people will want is DAVx5: https://www.davx5.com/ (also available on f-droid)

Natsu• 5 years ago

I assume they mean that you don't gain much privacy from Google if you still have one of their phones. See also: the location tracking stuff lately.

Bayart• 5 years ago

I use Protonmail, including on Android, and it's doing fine. Albeit I don't do anything fancy, save for some filtering.

eterps• 5 years ago

It's weird that Skiff still represent documents in pages. I guess most tech workers make a hardcopy of a document once or twice a year (or even less?).

aamarks97• 5 years ago

I haven't printed a document in 3 or 4 years. Don't think I'll ever own a printer

actuator• 5 years ago

E2E is mentioned in the article as a target for few of the alternatives mentioned but how do you trust these companies to build the E2E tech safely unless it is open and if not E2E, I would trust them way less than big companies like Google to keep my data safe as data security is hard. Almost every other day some service gets breached.

If ads on Gmail are a concern, it is mentioned briefly in the article, you can get Google Workspace for yourself as a single user. It is way cheaper than the alternatives as well and after trying out Hey last year, I personally prefer Gmail.

Here is an excerpt from Google's workspace page (https://workspace.google.com/security):

No ads, ever. Google does not collect, scan, or use your data in Google Workspace services for advertising purposes and we do not display ads in Google Workspace. We use your data to provide Google Workspace services, and for system support, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spell-checking, capacity planning, traffic routing, and the ability to search for emails and files within an individual account.

mark_l_watson2• 5 years ago

I used to do this, but stopped. The deal breaker for me was that I use my personal gmail account to buy Google Play books, TV shows, and movies. I have YouTube subscriptions. Etc… I found switching between Google accounts irritated me.

MiddleEndian• 5 years ago

Google has always been really weird with accounts. Back when they were still pushing Google+, I could not register with my Google Apps account because it didn't end in @gmail.com lol. I have a permanently grandfathered free plan, but if I were paying for it and I cared about Google+, I would have been pissed.

shadowangel• 5 years ago

Gmail is not workspaces. Gmail is designed for ease of use the default security policy is very poor and easily abused.

AzzieElbab• 5 years ago

what is wrong with using encrypted s3 and desktop apps?

tupac_speedrap• 5 years ago

The UX on that website more akin to torture than an actual user experience. Not only an auto playing video but one that actually chases you down the page and I can't block the element because I'm on a work laptop.

leephillips• 5 years ago

I use a bookmarklet that deletes all fixed elements. I seem to be using it on half of the pages I visit these days, because of “front end engineers”. I don’t remember where I got this, but it works well:

javascript:let i, elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *'); for (i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) { if(getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'fixed' || getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'sticky'){ elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]); } }

minton3• 5 years ago

My company recently tried to find an alternative to Google Workspace.

We looked at Hey and really liked it. However, they lacked a calendar and we felt training some of our less technical users would be too much effort.

We tried ProtonMail (Business account) but ran into these issues: - no shared Calendar - no way to enforce MFA - no way to enforce a password policy - no way to forward emails (except manually) so we can use Zapier - no way to help employees with password resets

In the end we just stayed with Google as we couldn’t find a competitor with matching services.

forbiddenvoid• 5 years ago

Curious: Did you evaluate MS Office? I feel like Microsoft gets left out of a lot of these conversations because of a cult-like 'M$ is bad' culture in SV, but a lot of people I've talked to haven't even used or tried their products in years if ever.

kwanbix• 5 years ago

I use both. Google Workspace at work and my personal account which I got free at the time, and Office 365 Family.

Gapps is very good. It does probably 100% of what 90% of the people need. Same for Office.

My only grip with Office is that in Android, the integration seems to be less polished than that of Google.

The advantage for Office is the family plan that for about 50~100 euros per year gives you 6 accounts. Something similar for Google Workspace will be 300~360.

And if you must have office desktop, that is the cheapest way.

minton3• 5 years ago

We looked at Microsoft’s offering, but IT felt the administration burden was too high even compared to Google Workspace.

yonixw• 5 years ago

I had a similar experience searching for MS Office\Google Docs self-hosted alternative. While evaluation ONLYOFFICE, I found that they don't have RTL support (for over 4 years: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19)

yosito• 5 years ago

Did you look into Nextcloud? If you don't have the expertise to maintain it in-house, you might have to pay for a managed instance, but it's been a pretty solid replacement for Google services for me.

josefresco• 5 years ago

Did you evaluate Zoho or Office365?

minton3• 5 years ago

We looked briefly at Zoho but the founder didn't trust the brand for whatever reason. Office365 seemed like too much a burden on IT to setup and configure everything properly.

Also, we're trying to move away from these “suite” type offerings that come with a ton of tools. We just want email and calendar.

pjerem• 5 years ago

It looks like Fastmail checks all your needs (not sure about password policy) and it’s a fantastic product. It deserves the « fast » in its name and the webmail as well as the calendar are really great (and fast, too).

It’s one of those rare products you can feel that they have been crafted with a lot of love.

callahad• 5 years ago

Love Fastmail, and use it both personally and at work, but in business contexts the shared calendaring situation is dire. No free/busy scheduling aids at all.

grammers• 5 years ago

Did you take a look at Tutanota? Very similar & it does have shared calendar, enforce 2FA and password reset for employees. But not sure about mail forwarding.

12ian34• 5 years ago

To truly take on the likes of Google, they need to build ecosystems instead of just one unique service.

I'd like to see this leverage decentralisation and/or open standards rather than see each of these companies building interoperable walled gardens. I think this dream is unlikely because sadly it's less obvious as an option for monetisation which, at the end of the day, is why each of these companies exist.

tut-urut-utut• 5 years ago

Wow, page talking about privacy that get 44% of the page blocked by AdBlock Origin. There are so many trackers that I had to scroll the list to see everything that is blocked.

I'm not even sure I want to check the actual content anymore.

andai• 5 years ago

Ah, but this is how everybody does things now! An article is text, maybe some images, and of course 20MB of JavaScript spyware.

prophesi• 5 years ago

Just wanted to give a quick shoutout to Mailfence[0]. Their support team helped me set up DMARC/SPF/DKIM. Their keystore makes it easy for non-techies to use PGP, and the tech-savvy are free to use their own keys and their own mail client.

[0] https://mailfence.com/

CA0DA• 5 years ago

Protonmail still does not have message threading built into the mobile app. That seems like a minimum requirement in 2021, doesn't it? I don't know how that is still not in there.

wishinghand• 5 years ago

This site has served me well for finding alternatives to companies that sell your data: https://switching.software

meitham• 5 years ago

Being a customer of Fastmail I had briefly assumed incorrectly that fastcompany and fastmail are related and this post was a promotion of fastmail!

sys_64738• 5 years ago

I stick with iCloud myself.

mark_l_watson2• 5 years ago

I don’t really use ProtonMail calendar, but I like the email and VPN functionality. I run the ProtonBridge on my laptop just in case I need to search my email. I can’t search my ProtonMail on my phone ( except subject lines), and that is OK. I use Apple’s calendar.

Apple has hinted at privacy enhanced email with personal domain names. I am not sure what will happen there. I will stay a paying ProtonMail customer but I really hope iCloud+ gets more secure services.

I keep medical records and tax notes in encrypted Apple Pages documents. I think the encryption is good enough for me.

twodayslate• 5 years ago

What alternative has a customizable priority inbox like Gmail? Priority inbox is essential to my workflow and is the main reason I won't switch away from Gmail. I have my unread messages on top, drafts, then everything else.

gnicholas• 5 years ago

Does anyone know if Skiff uses canvas-based rendering? I heard that Google Docs is moving toward a canvas-based rendering system, which will prevent some Chrome extensions (including my own accessibility extension) from working on Docs.

It would be great to know if Skiff could be an alternative for folks who rely on extensions to make document creation/editing more enjoyable and accessible.

danaris• 5 years ago

Not only that, it breaks browser-native search functionality—and apparently replaces it with nothing, at least on Safari, where they've removed the standard search option entirely.

Strangely enough, the in-Google-Doc search function works just fine on Chrome.

I recognize that it sounds somewhat paranoid, but I strongly suspect this is a deliberate attempt to push people to use Chrome over other browsers.

bhl• 5 years ago

Skiff uses https://github.com/chanzuckerberg/czi-prosemirror last time I checked, which just uses the DOM.

sgrove• 5 years ago

Depending on your use case - specifically for notes - Serenity notes [0] might fill the niche:

  * End to end encrypted
  * Fully collaborative via CRDTs
  * Mobile clients

They have some ideas to incorporate zero-knowledge proofs to even remove some of the metadata that leaks from watch encrypted data move around. There was a talk earlier today at worker.sh on how it works and their ambitions [1].

Next Wednesday they'll have a very technical deep dive into all the inner workings https://www.meetup.com/Security-Meetup-by-SBA-Research/event...

And I believe the source is available if you care to audit it yourself!

[0] https://www.serenity.re/en/notes

[1] https://youtu.be/3p1uQ4Fzilk?t=6344

yewenjie• 5 years ago

Is there some webextension and/or email provider that supports quickly creating calendar events to CalDAV servers?

temp8964• 5 years ago

May I ask, what's wrong with using the email service provided by your domain / web hosting company? Many times they are free.

imagine992• 5 years ago

I've said this before but I've been waiting for almost five years now to switch to Protonmail personally - and with several clients, SMEs and startups.

Why haven't I done it?

Well, for one, to this day their pricing and feature structure is utterly unattractive, orders of magnitude more expensive than competitors (especially Gsuite/Google Workspace and Microsoft 365) and thoroughly confusing.

Some examples:

- Want to put your whole family on the "visionary plan" (~$350/year)? Tough luck, it's limited to 6 users, so your wife's parents are out.

- No multi-user support in tiers below "Professional", i.e. a family of 7 (incl. e.g. grandma) pays at least $560 per year.

- Work as a consultant, juggling several projects or startups? Tough luck, 2 custom domains and 5 measly aliases included only, even on the professional plan (~$90/user)! Also a mere 5 GB of storage. Google offered twice that 10 years ago and currently 3x - for free. Google's paid accounts include up to 2 TB (!) at that price point. As for the custom domains, on my private Gsuite I currently run about 10 without problem plus and at least fifty aliases (I make new ones for many services I sign up for, my #1 spam-avoidance trick). Even if I wanted, I couldn't switch without losing a ton of functionality, security and convenience. Getting most of this in Protonmail would probably cost me an eye-watering additional ~$360 - per user!

What on earth is their value proposition? Switzerland + encryption, okay, all well and good. Happy to pay some extra money for that. But not more than 10 times the amount a user costs on Google Workspace.

They also have no discounts, let alone free accounts for EDU or NGOs which makes it hard very hard to convince any of these orgs to switch there seeing as they get a lot more value from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, completely for free - and these companies know that people will be more likely to privately sign up for Gmail, Office etc. if they use it at work or at school all day.

Bottom-line, I've longed for a service like Protonmail for almost half a decade now but at least the people and companies I work with don't want to pay close to what they're asking and are not willing to be nickel-and-dimed for something trivial like aliases, a catch-all address or a reasonable amount of storage (2 TB would cost ~$21,500 per year on Protonmail, according to their published price list!!).

From statements of their management I suspect that they're trying to manage (and limit) growth and thus have positioned their product in a way that makes it a premium/high-end offer, certainly without the goal of getting "everyone" to switch to them. The price and feature/addon policy makes it extremely difficult to convince anybody to switch for whom privacy and encryption is "nice to have" but not worth $$$.

I am a bit frustrated by this and have been for a long time.

Here's to hoping that a competitor appears and offers a more attractive bundle. Or that they finally get together a growth plan or funding that allows them to reduce costs and scale to more customers quickly.

bredren2• 5 years ago

Is the pricing really too high or just lacking in subsidy due to monetization of your data?

imagine992• 5 years ago

Look, I completely get what you're saying.

It probably would be more precise to say the price points of Protonmail's tiers are not competitive. Sure, Google can offer cheaper prices due to exploitation of data (even though on Gsuite Business and EDU plans they claim not to mine the data). But I find it difficult to believe that Google (on average) pulls a value of $21,500 out of every 2 TB of data stored on their servers (maybe I'm wrong).

I'm not saying Protonmail (or any other viable competitor offering security and full encryption) needs to beat Google, MS etc. on pricing. People are willing to pay a (sensible) premium for that. Just not 5 or 10 times. Probably not even double. But a 30%-50% markup (with feature parity!) sounds absolutely fair.

I can only say that personally, I just found it impossible over the years - even though I really tried multiple times - to "sell" Protonmail's offering to clients. It always failed, ultimately, because of the pricing structure and the "nickel-and-diming". Their plans are just not attractive or convincing at all, from multiple angles, that's it.

ampdepolymerase• 5 years ago

CDRT used to be “outrageously slow” for something like a document editor, Milich says, but that’s not the case anymore.

What is their trick for this?

jehanrizla• 5 years ago

I use Mailfence. Offers encrypted email but also alternative to Google Docs, Google Calendar and Groups to share and collaborate.

Private Gmail and Docs alternatives: Proton, Skiff, and more

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