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Is there anything unsavory about ProtonMail? (beehaw.org)

submitted 7 months ago by hedge@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

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For some reason I have it in the back of my mind that they were at one point accused of being a honeypot for US intelligence because of their association with MIT. Probably complete BS, but maybe not. Are they as open source as they claim to be? Looks like they're on github. F-Droid seems to think they have some Google libraries or whatever that they use.

ProtonMail users, how do you like/dislike it?

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[–] Zworf@beehaw.org 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Nothing really. They did once put a scan on someone's IP after the authorities asked them to. But it was a court order. Makes sense.

I don't use them because I think Email is beyond saving anyway. 90% of our mail goes to or from Amazon, Google or Microsoft anyway. OpenPGP is not used by anyone, even Phil Zimmermann famously refused to use it. There is so much spam and phishing that most institutions no longer send anything of value by email, it's just a notification service for "please log in to our portal to view your message". Email is just so broken and the workarounds so feeble that it's beyond fixing.

Email as we knew it is just gone and done. I just use O365 because it's cheaper and offers me a lot more (like 1TB cloud storage which I use with Cryptomator). Proton Drive is too expensive for me and I like doing the encryption on the user-end anyway because that offers real end to end security. I applaud what proton are trying to do but it's too little too late and I don't want to use a special email client. If they want to promote privacy they should do it with something where that's still possible.

And for VPN I prefer mullvad anyway because I like the way they sell scratch cards on Amazon. And my password manager I self-host.

But really it's not a bad service if you can afford it and don't want to go for Microsoft and Google.