So I have recently found out about forward email just a few months ago.

I am currently using tuta as my email provider, and I have been doing so for the last three years. But I am not very happy with the closed ecosystem and locking of basic features behind paywalls.

So I decided to give forwardemail a go after reading about it on free software foundation’s webmail systems (this is a web archive link, more on that later)

Now the thing is, the service works. But things don’t really feel legit. They claim to have thousands of users but there’s surprisingly little information about them other than their own website. The branding seems completely generic and pretty much all of their code seems to be coming from one single account with no real information.

There’s a couple reviews about them on trust pilot but the positive ones mostly come from accounts where the only review is for forwardmail.net

I’ve read some discussion about them getting recommended on privacy guides, they sounded very professional and mentioned even wanting to get auditioned, but to the best of my knowledge that has not happened yet (please correct me if I am wrong). Worse than that they seemed to stop replying to the thread a couple months ago.

Finally, I realized today that FSF has removed their recommendation for forwardemail from their website

In conclusion, I have tested and the service does work, but I can’t tell if there is something shady happening. What do you all think?

  • voracitude@lemmy.world
    1·
    5 months ago

    You want privacy and security but you want it over plain IMAP/SMTP, then you’ll have to manually encrypt and decrypt every message. It’s a good thing they don’t offer IMAP/SMTP support as those protocols are old and insecure by nature - SSL and TLS are bandaids, they can only do so much.

    There are compromises to keeping yourself safe online, one of which is to convenience, and the other is to your wallet - yes, privacy costs. If you don’t want to make those compromises, just open up and let Google in and get comfortable watching your data get siphoned away.