Sun Sep 15 12:10:43 UTC 2024: ## Security-Conscious Blogger Switches to Proton Mail After Years of Self-Hosting

**[City, Date]** – OpenBSD developer and security consultant Solène Rapenne, known for her blog about privacy and security, has made a surprising decision: she has moved her emails to Proton Mail, a paid email service, after years of self-hosting. This decision, she says, was a difficult one, born out of her desire for improved security and a growing dissatisfaction with the current state of email security.

Rapenne, a seasoned tech enthusiast, had been self-hosting her email server since 2009, constantly experimenting with different operating systems and configurations. However, she found her setup lacking in crucial aspects, particularly in terms of email encryption and spam filtering. Despite her efforts to secure her server with GPG encryption and VPNs, she felt the risk of compromise was too high.

“I was never really happy with how emails work at all,” Rapenne states in her blog post. “My dovecot server has access to all my emails, unencrypted, and a single password is enough to connect to the server.”

Proton Mail’s zero-knowledge encryption, multi-factor authentication, and paid service model appealed to Rapenne, who believes a free service would be too good to be true, potentially jeopardizing user data. While she acknowledges the possibility of Proton Mail holding private keys or manipulating applications, she believes the likelihood of such actions impacting many users would leave evidence, leading her to trust the service.

Rapenne also points out that Proton Mail has addressed issues she faced with self-hosting, like spam filtering and email deliverability. She now enjoys features like email scheduling and aliases, which simplify her email workflow.

However, she remains concerned about the limitations of email security in general, and is still exploring ways to achieve her ideal setup. She emphasizes the need for a solution that eliminates the dependency on remote servers and provides a robust archive system.

Rapenne concludes her blog post with a call to action, urging readers to consider hiring her for freelance work or financially supporting her open source projects. She invites followers to stay tuned as she continues to explore solutions to the ongoing challenges of email security.

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