Oddbean new post about login | logout The second best way to spend your Bitcoin is to get a @Proton Mail account. I was skeptical at first, even complained about their free product making it a bit annoying to use. After I got a paid account, I became a Proton Mail maxi. It's such a good service and its really becoming an alternative to the Google Suite.
Proton is the way to go and they have almost all bases covered these days.
And the rumors about their coop to the govs?
No rumors. They publicly say they've turned over everything they have. They don't have a lot if you don't give it to them. nostr:nevent1qqszsun5u7um63qpqnak2kv6f6e6ud2yyc20x4957mly8ck3r43jrugpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmp0qgsgdtejeuhys8ucl7gc3j8v4t04959kvqdvptpq06zuwjkrc6l0x4srqsqqqqqpv5d3lr
Everything they have is some metadata. There is not an email company in the world, I know of at least, that will not comply with the law. They still don’t have your keys. There are a handful of companies out there doing their best for privacy while still trying to not break laws or get themselves in trouble and everyone likes to tear them down, it’s a bit sad in my opinion.
Used it for years, and last year I finally got the paid suite. The SimpleLogin integration is my favorite feature. I do admit that the couple of cases in which it's become public that Proton cooperates to rat people out have upset me and have caused me to start to consider alternatives, before I become too dependent on them and switching is too costly.
I think they addressed this concern Not a 100% on the specifics but by law they had to give the recovery email up which can link to you ID etc, so they advised to avoid this either use another burner as your back up email or just don’t have a recovery one.
@Proton Wallet you have a great endorsement of your suite here. Tagging you and not the main account because I am not sure they look at Nostr.
What are the benefits of the paid versus the free one?
“alternative to Google Suite” - other than email, what other services stand out?
Calendar, contacts, drive, password manager, Email alias (SimpleLogin), VPN. Drive is maybe the less close to GDrive, with no online office apps, but for storage it's good, stillexpensive for anything large like media, I would use only for documents. Personally I use almost excusively for emails, I have a Nextcloud for calendar/contacts sync and for drive and office documents.
They have Docs editor now working for at least word documents. Excel didn’t work for me yet.
Thanks! I’m happy with Bitwarden and Mullvad VPN, but perhaps I should check out their contacts/calendar. I use Apple for those now, which I assume should be more private than Google, but that’s a pretty low bar.
I would assume that Google, Apple and Microsoft are more or less same low level of privacy, maybe Apple is top of the 3 but still way to low. All of them will give anything they got if requested by authorities, Apple just did use a case where they refuse to hack into an iPhone to make it a good PR "we are pro privacy" advertisement but any data and metadata they store unencrypted will be handed over without a question. Proton had to habd over data as well in a couple of cases but at least they try to fight a little and they had only a few data to hand over in the end. It's just a matter of threat model, if your life depend on the security and privacy of your emails, you should not use Proto or many other email providers, in fact you should not communicate over email at all.
If you’re fully bought into any of the big tech platforms, then Apple has by far the best default privacy & security. Of course there is much nuance & tradeoffs… but Google is literally EvilCorp when it comes to user data. At least Apple’s business model is mostly around selling hardware.
Self-host your own online ecosystem with Nextcloud ... in the USA. No thanks to sending my data to another country, especially a socialistic country that is so friendly to tyrannical globalist entities such as the UN, WEF, and the WHO.
Same for me, no way I'm using service from an American company for my emails. I'm Swiss, so I'm fine with Protonmail, they are not of perfect integrity but still way above 99% of the main players in the email market.
Self-host your data. I don't use any Big Tech solutions. Not Google. Not Apple. Not Microsoft. Not Proton. Not Tutanota. Etc... Always keep you data in your own country. In the US, as a US citizen, once your data goes international, it becomes legally easier for the letter agencies to collect and spy on your data. It's sad, but you can't trust anyone. They'll all hand over your data the moment any government agency looks at them mean.
And they have a great company mission going, a privacy first internet!
Baby steps: I started forwarding all my Gmail emails to Proton as a 1st step. Eventually I will get a paid subscription & support Proton.
I have an account and I love the product. But the big drawback is that you can't really search full-text in the body of emails because of encryption on server side. And searching in the subject is most often not enough. I really wonder how people deal with that. If you don't have many emails in your archive, you can use their web storage full-text search, but that's not scalable. You can also use Proton Bridge with Thunderbird to import your emails locally and search full-text, but that's not handy through multiple desktops and mobile. So you're left with over-engineering your email subjects, labeling and folders, which is not manageable. I'd love to give up on Gmail and go 100% ProtonMail but I need to solve that problem first.
I think that is the tradeoff between encryption and searchability. When I need to search something across my e-mails I use Thunderbird with proton bridge on my laptop.
the tradeoff seems obvious at first in favor of privacy. But when I consider that I need to search quite regularly (sometimes on mobile) in thousands of emails of at least the last decade, the tradeoff is not easy anymore.
https://proton.me/support/search While not ideal it can be enabled in web app if your browser allows web storage. See this article.
thanks. yes, I've already tried that. It works with a reasonably small collection of emails, but with an archive over 5Gb it's not really a workable solution.
I assume increasing the cache size doesn't help?
I've not tried that and I don't really want to be tinkering with browsers everywhere (I use 2 desktops, 2 laptops and 1 smartphone). I need something easy enough. I initially hoped that ProtonMail = Gmail + privacy but in its current state and with a big archive, it's ProtonMail = Gmail + privacy - searchability, which is frankly less compelling. So far, I've moved all communications with banks, shopping sites and private conversations to Proton, but Gmail remains important for the rest and I don't find it handy to need managing both.
I don’t like their mail because search sucks. I pay for their vpn though coz bitcoin 😃
Wait till they suspend your account for no reason, then tell you to contact them via email for support. 😂 I was a paying customer for over years and this happen to me. Now I will never use a Proton product ever again. Bottom line, don't piss off your customers.
It’s amazing how a simple Bitcoin payment option allows you to use a quality paid service in a truly anonymous way.
No complaints here
I love @Proton Mail. Would be great to see a "Proton Spreadsheet" feature eventually. Then I'd be all in and off google.
i agree, @Proton Mail is sexy