AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

Seconded on Tuta. I’m currently pretty locked into the Proton ecosystem, but I have a Tuta account as well, and it’s pretty usable if all you really care about is having an email that works. (haven’t used their calendar yet, so I can’t speak to it)

Definitely less feature-rich than Proton though. Worse spam filter, more basic UI, no auto-categorization of email by topic, etc.

To be clear for anyone who might not want to read the whole article but also doesn’t want to rely solely on the headline:

This isn’t some new surveillance system that was revealed, or even really unprecedented tactics. This was just a larger number of HSI agents assigned to tracking activists, infiltrating meetings and chats, etc than the number previously assigned to investigate suspected foreign influence on the “New Left” and anti-Vietnam War movement. (which had 42 officers at its peak, vs the Minnesota 15 case having 119)

Maybe try Ente then?

Haven’t used it before myself, but I’ve heard good things, and it does have a memories feature, and it seems at least based on the examples on their website that it might generate something more than just “today x years ago”.

Unsure to what degree it works though, and unfortunately Ente is also a paid service (though it is privacy focused, and I believe it has a FOSS app too)

Seems like “Smart Memories” are on the roadmap for Immich though, so you might just have to wait a bit and can then switch once they’re there:

There aren’t really any other mature options out there for self hosted, or even just private Google Photos alternatives in my experience, so you’re kinda just stuck with Immich for the most feature-complete replacement, and Ente for a more “just works” private but not self-hosted one. Everything else is basically just a glorified file browser, but maybe with some smart searching or better media codec support.

Both Tuta and Proton have iOS apps of their own.

I don’t believe either can be used inside the native iPhone Mail app, since they use encryption schemes, which aren’t standard in any commonly used spec for mail apps, so no regularly available mail app can act as a frontend for Proton/Tuta, because no regularly available mail app “speaks” their encryption. (though on PC, Proton does have a Bridge application that can essentially perform the job of a translator in that case, but again, only for PC clients)

One thing to note on this is that after a week, Google told me that my account might be compromised, severed the link between Gmail and my Proton account, and forced me to log back in to my Google account on my computer.

I reconnected to Proton and it did it again a couple weeks later. Not sure if it’s fixed. (or working as intended)

Gmail Forwarding is the old feature that just forwards mail, and that seems to work fine without ever kicking you off, it’s only Gmail Connection (which allows sending emails from your Proton mail and having them send from your Gmail address) that’s done it for me so far.

Proton if you want a clean UI, more fancy features, aliasing, etc.

Tuta if you want just a simple email, don’t care if the UI is a little chunky, and a slightly cheaper price.

100% Immich. Really good UI, and the kinds of quality of life features you don’t normally find in smaller open source apps (auto face tagging, map based on coordinates of photos, built-in non-destructive editor, memories, etc)

The memories feature is mostly just “here’s photos/videos you took on this date”, but it doesn’t compile any sort of custom album based on a theme or place or anything like that. Not hard to do so yourself by just going to the map view and zooming into any location though.

As for image searching it does have that, and I’ve found it to be shockingly reliable even when I run it on just a Raspberry Pi. (though it can take a while to give you the result of your search if you’re on lower-end hardware like that)

I would say if all you care about is having a nice looking, fully-featured, easy to use client, Proton is good, but if you really just need… an inbox with an email attached, then Tuta will be a little cheaper and just as private, just with less bells and whistles.

If you care about removing yourself from other services like calendars, cloud storage, password managers, etc, Proton is way better since it has the full suite.

For example, Proton supports auto-categorizing mail (e.g. newsletters, promotions, updates, transactions, etc), unlimited email aliases, a more modern UI, good integrations with Proton Drive and Proton Calendar if you decide to use those as well instead of Google Drive and Google Calendar, etc.

Tuta is more just an inbox that you can bother to sort as needed, comes with some aliases if you feel like it but probably not enough for every single online service you have, has a basic calendar, but doesn’t have any kind of integrated Drive access (is still in closed beta rn), and has a more… basic UI.

it is a real person, but GPTZero gives it a 100/100, and given she’s a proud “prompt engineer” I’m inclined to believe she doesn’t do all the writing without… “assistance”.