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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2747 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 26, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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No email address required.

What email provider do you use and why? Do you judge people based on what email provider they use? Scott included an email address for an AI Safety group in a recent post and commenters pointed out the irony of them using gmail.

I started using gmail when it was first introduced (invite-only-early), because it wasn't immediately clear we shouldn't have, but have been a longtime ProtonMail user, because I'm cool like that. I don't evangelize Proton... but I sometimes have trouble taking Google users seriously. Scott uses google

I really liked the Skiff suite when it was around and after they got bought out and closed up shop, the next closest provider that suited my needs was mailbox.org.

I have a gmail.

The web experience is fine. The mobile web experience always asks me to use their app. I am profoundly disinterested in adding another piece of shit to my phone for something I check once a week or less; Google does not care. Now even logging in on my desktop occasionally reminds me to put their app on my phone.

As much as I hate the term “enshittification,” this is as good an example as any.

Ok- I have a general personal email address at gmail. I’ve used it since I was in highschool. If I update for web hygiene reasons to a new email provider, what email should I choose?

Proton's pretty good. They've built out a suite, including a VPN, calendar, password manager (with forwarding emails), drive, etc. They even have an LLM assistant, though it's based on open source models and expensive to use without a pretty small token/week limit. (But they gave it a cute purple cat as an avatar.)

If you need their paid features, they do big Cyber Monday sales (and honor the discount in perpetuity), so now would be a good time to try the free tier.

Somebody recommended Proton and then deleted his comment, so I guess I'll replace him.

Note, however, that Proton does seem to have unnecessarily strict spam blacklists. For example, emails from Questionable Questing and Archive of Our Own never get to my inbox or even my spam folder on Proton, so I've been forced to keep using my old Gmail account for those websites.

Proton even has an LLM assistant, though it's based on open-source models and expensive to use with a pretty small token/week limit.

You forgot to mention that it's advertised as having privacy, unlike its competitors.

How is Lumo different from other AI assistants?

Lumo is built with privacy in mind. Unlike other AI assistants, it does not collect your data to train its models or keep any logs of your conversations. Your data is protected by Proton’s strong privacy principles.

How are my chats stored?

Your chats with Lumo are stored with zero-access encryption, so Proton can't see your chat history. Only you can securely access your conversations by logging in to your Proton Account.

It's Proton - that's a given. (Naturally, Proton attracts suspicious people and there's always been controversy about their policies and how they share the metadata they specifically say they can be compelled to share. But they seem fine.)

I use a local email forwarder to gmail. The forwarder is run by a non-profit association with the idea that once you join as a member (currently for a small one time fee), you get to keep that alias forever and only need to point it to a different mailbox if you change your email provider.

Nice. Where does one buy into such a service?

By being Finnish or living in Finland. There may be other similar associations elsewhere but this one relies on both social cohesion (many Finnish internet tech people are members and there's a strong belief that email should have similar privacy and impartiality guarantees as snailmail) and the Finnish law regarding associations (Finland is the promised land of associations with associations for pretty much everything possible) so the membership is restricted to "people with ties to Finland" (in practise people who can navigate the intentionally Finnish only website and pay the membership fee to a Finnish bank account).

I am the normiest normie and use gmail. The only non-normie thing I do is use Thunderbird to access it.

I remember when it was the cool new invite-only service. It had a whole 1 GB of storage, which made it much more desirable than the yahoo and hotmail addresses everyone was using.

I remember when it was the cool new invite-only service.

Which makes us old as dirt, effectively.

Pah. I remember The Good Old Times when you had to call a BBS and use an offline reader to handle email.

Okay Boomer Methuselah

Metsuselah? What is that, some modern teenage slang?!

At least have the decency to stick to tried and tested traditions and call me a dinosaur!

I won't say I look down on someone based on their email... but certain domains make very good fist impressions. An email that is firstname@lastname.com is an easy way to signal good tech talent.

I think self@firstnamelastname.com is a very clever ingroup signal that one has at least decent tech skills.

You can't expect everybody to be able to get lastname dot com. Personally, I use firstnamelastname at firstnamelastname dot com, though some may find it excessively long.

I mainly use Gmail because it is reasonably functional and I already have it. I'd wouldn't judge a man by his email provider. It may not be there only email handle and email may not be their primary means of communication. Google gets my bills and Amazon confirmations and I don't feel bad about that.

Superscript is implemented, just using html codes (E = mc<sup>2</sup> is E = mc2 when unescaped).

I’ll generally use gmail for unimportant stuff, a work email running on a managed service, and have a domain name running with a mid-tier email provider for ‘professional’ but not actual work stuff. Unfortunately enough of my day-to-day operations are normie-interacting enough where protonmail would seem weird or skuzzy, but I do know some of the advantages.

A lot of the difference depends on your use case and threat model. I’m not especially concerned about a google getting email spam notifications for web services I don’t care about, but there’s more serious issues if you work in AI safety or the DoD.

Superscript is implemented, just using html codes (E = mc2 is E = mc2 when unescaped).

Thanks - I'm not going to remember that, but I may remember to check the formatting guide, next time.

A lot of the difference depends on your use case and threat model. I’m not especially concerned about a google getting email spam notifications for web services I don’t care about

That's what proxy email providers like SimpleLogin are for.

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