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Joined 10 天前
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Cake day: 2025年4月2日

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  • The privacy statement shows big words and all, but I’m interested in the legal page of privacy policy. Unfortunately, an orange flag is that it isn’t easily available from anywhere, which is a bad practice. Here is its link: https://mailbox.org/en/data-protection

    It’s not written like ordinary privacy policies, they organized it in categories, which funnily enough makes it harder to read and understand.

    Overall it’s pretty good but a lot of things aren’t mentioned. It seems like the IP with which you registered is permanently stored on their servers. Big red flag if that’s the case. Consider using a VPN/proxy when creating an account if that matters to you.

    It seems like they also let you store your private key encrypted by a password, which is a nice way to do it. Incoming emails are encrypted this way which makes them encrypted at rest. I wonder how it works with other email clients though. Nothing to say more than it’s perfect.

    They don’t use the content of your emails, they don’t sell your data or “track” you. That’s nice!


    NOTE: I actually didn’t read proton’s privacy policy! So I can’t compare both, but in terms of privacy you’re pretty good with mailbox. Their analytics respect your privacy overall. Anonymity isn’t perfect but they allow VPNs and Tor exit nodes. They would benefit from having more transparency around this subject: data collection and time of retention.






  • Do you think that is a good situation?

    Yes, it should be the most important aspect of it. If the devs can live with it through donations and the project becomes their full time work, good, but that should never come at the expense of the user.

    Why “should” it be the goal of the dev? Who are you to decide that for the developer?

    That’s just my vision of it. Everyone is free to do whatever they want, but for me that’s a requirement for FOSS projects.

    That’s a prediction and I don’t know what data you’re basing that off of. Could you share it?

    Just a logical enshitification way. Profits always comes at a price. Keeping your project free while being for-profit often means getting forked and dying, much like ownCloud.

    Those are all assumptions. You do not know if the search engine is making enough money already. They might be trying to make money in the first place and getting it in front of users might be a way to raise awareness popularity. There are also companies like ecosia, duckduckgo, qwant, startpage and others that do care about privacy. Would you be against their sponsorship too?

    Whatever the end goal is, it’s still advertising and it’s impacting users’ freedom of choice by setting a default and virtually discouraging the use of other engines.

    This kind of info is often hidden (didn’t try Waterfox but I bet that it won’t say that the default search engine gives them money when you first start the browser), because they know it might make them look bad.



  • Most free open source projects are hobbies, not jobs. As such, the goal of devs is often (and should be) to deliver a good product to people, no strings attached. Your time then gets partially compensated by donations. Expecting revenues with this project will slowly move you towards the non-free open source projects category, which while better than proprietary closed source, is not the best interest of users.

    I would imagine if a search engine is willing to sponsor a project in a way, then it must make enough money to justify that, and that often comes with bad privacy. I guess the default is Bing or something? The revenue comes at the expense of users on the default settings.