I have noticed a number of ‘hit piece’ articles about Proton Mail. Privacy concerned people obviously want to be informed about their email provider. But self-responsible people need to look a little deeper. Here are a few points to consider and may help clarify why I consider these to be ‘hit piece’ articles.
Proton Mail is probably the #1 competitor of Gmail right now as people flee the big-tech “Oligarchy”
Google is probably more capable than any other institution at pushing and propagating “news” that is favourable to them
None of the articles I read about this mentioned the massive data harvesting done by Gmail
No mention that even a private email server at home would be subject to a legal subpoena
Extreme proliferation of these articles with zero mention of Gmail is suspicious to me
We as consumers need to be more mindful of who runs the internet and stop falling for the same old tricks. None of us can personally verify the integrity of any of these companies but when I see a hit piece campaign like this it make wonder if I should be using Proton Mail (in fact I do).
A paid account at Proton will allow you to use your own domain name. So if you registered a domain name like “your-name.xyz” your email address could be: “brandon@your-name.xyz”. This would allow you to move your email account to another provider or even your own server if you ever wanted to without changing your email address.
Thank you for posting this Will. Over the years as I am sure many of us have had similar stories. We may have used AOL (showing my age) then maybe Yahoo or some other netzero, gmail, etc. “Free Accounts”. Many of us also tried the “Paid” accounts that came with services such as bellsouth.net, ATT, Cox, and others to find that when you no longer wanted that service you lost your email or worse. Found that everything you had saved was gone.
The ability to retain email and have it stored securely has been difficult for your average consumer to identify over the years. It’s that great advertising “Look, this is FREE” that has gotten us where we are. It is really great to see everyone here taking an interest in finally securing something that they should be very concerned about. Investigators can learn a lot about people from their trash, imagine having access to all of their conversations, bills, expenses, travel, purchases, family secrets… I currently use Proton mail and I pay for the service. If Jeff and the Team can direct us to an alternative that we can secure and keep as long as we choose. A small monetary amount is worth it to me and my family for the knowledge that anyone with a company access at one of the Alphabet companies could possibly have access to ALL of my personal information. Truly terrifying if you really think about it.
I’m a happy user of PM, and any legal subpoena against a PM user has to be filed with the Swiss government before it is forwarded to the PM team. The Swiss government has stringent privacy laws, so the “crime” has to be pretty egregious for the Swiss to comply.
The PM team has at least two blog posts on their website that address subpoenas.
Any email service provider, to avoid these subpoenas, would have to be located in International Waters and not on terra firma.
The recent hit piece on protonmail is predictable, people over react and throw their hands up with a ‘see, now even PM is compromised! They turned over everything to LE!!!’
As with most of the ‘hack’ or scare stories, protonmail passed with flying colors, despite the screeching otherwise by the less informed. They provide a zero knowledge encryption service which has done, and continues to do its job; encrypt emails and attachments without flaw to date. Yes, the subject line is visible, and of course they have the ability to log IP addresses, but they typically do not, unless directed to collect a specific IP address by a court from a relevant country. The powers that be can also see the sender/recipients, but that’s it. Privacy, Security and OSINT podcast covered this in fair depth recently (Mike Bazzell) but I’m sure others have chimed in as well. (outstanding podcast by the way)
So ProtonMail continues to be a robust and excellent option for us, and gmail doesn’t even begin to compare when we see how horrendous a job they do at keeping our data private; they pretty much do the exact opposite, and log, record and probably sell for profit anything and everything in your email traffic.
Boo Google/Gmail, yay ProtonMail if all that previous explanation was too long!
I enjoy PM’s paid account, slightly more spendy than most, but also they provide an excellent service, and generally do not track your IP or other information. They have been 3rd party audited as well, and passed without issue as being a zero knowledge service, meaning even they cannot decrypt content.
I’ve used Protonmail now for a year. I moved away from Gmail due to their extreme behavior and spying. I’m thoroughly happy with Protonmail. Their accounts are secure, and I think I get quite a bit for my $50 per year including cloud storage that is free with a paid email account and grows 1GB for each year of use. Eventually I will be able to store the majority of my info with Protonmail confidently.
