The news last week that Denmark is to drop Microsoft Office and Windows came as no surprise, especially given the current political situation in the US. It signals the shifting sands taking place in Europe in relation to the US. The sleeping giant that Europe is has finally woken up and is starting to take action on de-Americanising their tech-land.
My de-Americanisation has, so far, been around e-mail. I have closed several Gmail and Outlook accounts and have migrated over to EU providers.
The European alternatives
Proton Mail is the poster child of non-US e-mail providers. It’s claim to fame is “As seen on TV” as per Mr. Robot. When I decided to ditch the Empire and go with something a little closer to home, it did seem that Proton was the only alternative in town along with some others like Tuta Mail, Mailfence and GMX.
I recently stumbled upon European Alternatives and realised that the movement is alive and well. The choice of providers is on the up and so is the range of services they offer, putting them all in a perfect position to compete with the ubiquitous American-heavy providers.
Whilst Proton may have at one time been the go-to alternative, I have never personally been too impressed by the fact that the only way to use Proton Mail in a client like Thunderbird is to pay for the privilege. The same goes for Tuta Mail. Mailfence only provides 1GB of storage on their free tier so I’ve never really taken them too seriously. GMX is OK-ish but has a reputation for serving too many ads.
I have recently tried out Infomaniak. Whilst they offer a myriad of attached services bundled as “kSuite”, I’m only interested in e-mail. The deciding factor for me was the ability to connect to my e-mail via IMAP and they give this away for free. Plus, they have a very generous offering on their free tier: 20GB storage for e-mail and the ability to send attachments of up to 3GB in size.
For their other side services such as kDrive (think Google Drive), kSuite comes with 15GB additional storage, so that is in addition to the 20GB for e-mails. That’s a lot and far more generous than one would find on Gmail. The rest is bloat which I’m not really interested in: document editing with versioning, image editing, video conferencing with recording and something called SwissTransfer which can share files of up to 50GB.
It is refreshing to see these European challengers continue to grow and starting to out-compete their American rivals.