this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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Yup, this is the worst thing about ProtonMail. They must patch this. Not being able to use my own GPG encryption when needed is crazy for a private & secure service.
That's not true at all, you just upload your key into the encrypted account storage, and it gets automatically applied.
I don’t want to upload anything. Why would they ever not allow that?
The point being made is that that means you must trust them with your private key, and you can't have say two private keys - one for low security content they store, and one for more sensitive stuff where the key stays on hardware under your control.
You are literally trusting them to encrypt all your mail.
If you don't trust their encryption, respectfully, don't use them. It's faux logic to "need" a secondary key that isn't cloud synced in an end to end encrypted mail vault.
This is an unnecessary product complication, and I agree with proton that you're more than likely to get it wrong and your "more secure" key will be used in a less secure manor.
It's the same reason most people shouldn't self host things like Bitwarden. Doing it yourself is not a security feature anymore than wiring your own home is protecting it.
This privacy community and the conspiracies or flat out misunderstandings that are coming back from the Reddit grave feel like they are coming from the anonymouse joker and Rob Braxman.
Why is that a fault in logic? The features are orthogonal. One doesn't restrict the other. All other, normal, email providers allow client side gpg use.
What is the benefit to using your own key on top of protons encryption? Why not just use your own encryption with any other provider?
One less email to have? Wdym???
Put another way...
You went to a custom shoe maker and said "make me a custom shoe" then you went back to them and said "I wanted to do it myself! Why won't you let me change out the insoles in these shoes!"
Yes, what's the problem with that? Services should provide as much flexibility as possible.
That mentality is part of the problem. More options is not inherently better, it's more to maintain, more complexity, more feature requests in that direction ("well can I store a PGP key in the browser that isn't uploaded to your servers so I can read my non-synced PGP mail", "can I write mail using that", "oh I changed my mind, can I convert mail to your PGP key from my PGP key", "oh I changed my mind again, I'd actually like all my emails changed to my PGP key", "oh could you sync my PGP key for me", etc).
It happens all the time, bending over backwards as a company for niche customers that want to use your toaster as a waffle iron rarely works out well.
It's a simple ask, not bending over backwards. I bet they haven't touched the email encryption part of code in years, so it doesn't add any maintenance burden either. I've looked at what they do - the only thing they'd need to change is their handling of email headers!
https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge/issues/320#issuecomment-1350901372
Sounds more like an attempt to kill off gpg to win the market.
Jesus, they literally use GPG and integrate with 3rd party GPG. How did you make that leap?
Internally, yes. So, they only allow it if it's under their control. This wouldn't be a customer servie nightmare because only people who know how to use it would use it. Plus, their version of PGP doesn't encrypt the subject.
No, you can set up PGP encryption to send PGP encrypted mail to non-proton customers via Proton. They've also been trying to work on standards that would make retrieving public keys/knowing the recipient accepts PGP automatic.
You're blatantly misinformed, and it's irritating.
Edit: I've blocked this person following their reply, but to their last point, "via Proton" literally means you use their service as a standard PGP mail client no strings attached, that can interact with any other PGP, and with no vendor lockin. That is literally the definition of using an open standard. There's no insidious plot here.
Your tone and your assumption that everyone else is an idiot is irritating.
The key part of your first sentence is "via Proton". Support for client side gpg is easy and they're not doing it either out of some strategic play or purely out of stubbornness. Working on standarts is great! I've had a "Visionary" subscription to Proton for years, since before the VPN and all the extra stuff. I like the company, overall. But, as mentioned in my first comment, this is the singular most annoying part of their service to me.