Free email addresses
Why?
In the community, we try to prioritize the use of technologies that are open and made for people rather than for profit. Technologies are a very strong vector of surveillance and control nowadays and it's becoming increasingly more important to have an awareness of the impact of the tools we use. Email is an important part of our digital life. We use it to exchange all kinds of information, which are all very revealing about who we are and what we do. It's therefore really important to chose wisely who we give this information to, and therefore, to which provider do we subscribe for an email.
We deeply recommend that instead of using GAFAM emails, you consider using alternative, small scale, privacy oriented email providers.
Also we decided that having a non GAFAM email would be needed to be in our internal mailing list, to try to keep our communications away from the capitalization and surveillance world of these companies.
How?
To create a "free" email, there are many many options (that's the point, not having centralization), therefore it's up to you to choose a provider that has values you feel close to.
Here is a list of providers that are doing valuable work to provide good quality services and privacy to their users:
- protonmail: based in Switzerland for it's data protection laws, very widely used, user friendly and actively developping to make everyones emails encrypted (at least when communicating with other protonmail addresses)
- riseup: created to help protecting activists, with a strong political engagement
- autistici: italian based free privacy friendly services provider
- disroot: in the netherlands, providing many different services openly
- ...
Going further
For more information on the topic, find alternatives to all kinds of services... you can visit this page.
You can also find a very nice list of many types of alternatives, the list is proposed by framasoft here.