32 Comments
Jun 2, 2022Liked by 2nd Smartest Guy in the World

Agreed! I have dropped Paypal and already moved off of Google. All that is left is to move my pictures out of Google. The time to act is now...

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Jun 2, 2022Liked by 2nd Smartest Guy in the World

I started tutanota.com several months ago for precisely the same reason. Totalitarian spying from the likes of Google et al. If I was in congress I would have drafted legislation a long time ago to criminalize these violations of privacy practices and put everyone behind bars where they belong.

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Jun 2, 2022Liked by 2nd Smartest Guy in the World

yeah, I've been seriously considering setting up email on my own domain instead of using sketchy email providers I have no control over.

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Do you like Proton mail best? Rumors abound regarding every email provider, it seems as soon as they come into existence. Those rumors could start just about anywhere and seem unverifiable.

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I subscribe to more than one list with more than one email address. Gmail often does not deliver mail that it wants to censor, as I receive some email in my other locations that doesn't come through on Gmail. Not only that, I have some email that I have saved as "unread" to deal with the next day, if I am extremely tired in the evening. More than once, I've awakened the next day to find those emails missing entirely, so I know that Gmail also scrubs some of what they don't want you to receive.

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I use all 3: hotmail, yahoo and gmail for mainly as electronic storages or libraries.

Alas, there are no viable alternatives.

They vacuum all electronic comms anyway. The key to avoid being collected is NOT to use electronic comms altogether. People unnecessarily taking their monitoring devices - phones - with them everywhere.

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Important: Many email providers that aren't labeled "Gmail" do, in fact, run on Gmail, even lots of corporate email. Also, if the recipient of your email is a Gmail account, then your content will still be moderated. Robert Epstein goes through a lot of good info like this in his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast. Check it out, you don't need an account. Great but shocking info: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4q0cNkAHQQMBTu4NmeNW7E

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Jun 2, 2022·edited Jun 2, 2022

The fundamental problem with 100% of all the email servers you don't own and are not hosted in datacenters where you also own them is that national security letters can be delivered to the possessor of the server to hand over your data and they are also required to not tell you about it.

Cloud hosting servers is one of the stupidest things people have ever done for secure content. For websites, sure I can see the value there, but no way in hell for anything that cannot be quickly moved to another server or that has quality intellectual property on.

You also cannot own the server and host it in a colo facility. You cannot own the server and host it in AWS, Azure, OrionVM, Google Cloud, or anything like that.

You either have to find someone who owns their own datacenters (which I do) and then become a client, or you invest in your own infrastructure.

The counterparty risk from using things like Azure, AWS, Google Cloud is horrific and hideously expensive. During the April tax season, there was an Azure outage and anyone who was not using reserved instances literally had no capacity in Azure to boot up their junk. They play games keeping their systems offline when not in use in order to save on consumption fees because it is so ridiculously expensive.

If you have to shut down workloads when they are not "in use by users", then when are you doing maintenance, backups, patching, vulnerability scanning, cybersecurity compliance, etc.? And all these people that think that they have less expense and higher availability by cloud hosting workloads that should be on premise have never done the math, nor are they including costs associated with items that are out of their control such as counterparty risk.

I'll give you a great rule of thumb that has been the outcome of most of the real world workload calculations that I have done in the last 8 years regarding cloud hosting workloads. Usually 18 months in Azure or a similar cloud hosted space is equivalent to 7 years of having the same workload on premise. Getting your servers boosted to a 9 year warranty is typically around $2000, so it's quite worth it. Also, no one takes the hardware away from you when you don't pay the monthly fee.

What happened to all the people who could not pay their monthly fees for cloud hosted server workloads in 2020? Well I know a lot of them went out of business. Invest in your own kit and stop relying on the cloud which is owned by the enemy. Stop funding the enemy.

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I have yahoo, I assume that’s just as bad any recommendations?

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Well I better update my subscription with my other email.

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Thank you for the reply. I guess there is no safe site to use.

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when you see a consensus of what to use instead let me know!

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I read through the comments and all were helpful. I think any form of email is subject to spying and I am not sure what I am going to do.

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Thank you, I am one who needed this nudge. Just waiting for Mercury to go direct and then I'll take action ;)

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when you figure out a truly unsurveilled email system, let us know! I keep waiting to see one, but havent seen any yet. I do agree we're all being watched all the time. but waste of my time to switch unless its completely private.

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I have been using a paid version of protonmail for a long time. I can assure you that my mail is being accessed, fully surveiled, and controlled.

A few years ago when I was entirely new to that game and naively belived that there were true "investigative journalists" who really "investigate" anything besides the government-approved "stories," I tried to contact those journalists. My protonmail account was immediately taken over and I could not even see whether anyone responded to me (likely not, but the fact is that password reset was enabled - and not by me, the password was changed, and daily notifications of all emails enabled to the enemies' email address).

I often see people comment that they (protonmail) will "turn you over." The government does not need that. They can and do take and access everything they want directly, all the time.

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