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I've been a fastmail customer for a bit over a year and I agree. The offerings over at https://protonmail.com/signup https://protonmail.com/signup have been na

I've been a fastmail customer for a bit over a year and I agree. The offerings over at https://protonmail.com/signup https://protonmail.com/signup have been nagging me to give it a try. I now have a reason to try and switch. I'll lose functionality found in fastmail but gain a lot in security.

lvh 9y ago
Unless you have a set of objectives that are very different from what I consider "as secure as e-mail gets", please consider GSuite and not Protonmail. (I don't speak for 'tptacek, but I'm pretty sure he'd agree.) As a corollary: if you really care, use Signal for stuff you can't say over e-mail. Whatsapp's fine too. But they solve a very different security problem than the one you need e-mail to solve, which is mostly "don't leak my emails" and also "don't reset my password for attackers who ask nicely".
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"Whatsapp's fine too. But they solve a very different security problem than the one you need e-mail to solve," Can you elaborate on this? What security problem are they trying to solve?
  - lvh 9y ago
    Sure! Signal and WhatsApp are good at having private conversations. Email is very tough to add private conversation capability to, for a variety of reasons. What you do need your mail provider (and by extension your DNS provider) to do is to not give up access to an attacker who asks nicely, because for most services, email access is account takeover. This makes discussions about email security confusing, because most security professionals I know are thinking about a very different threat model (pop all of your services) than what a lot of people think about (confidentiality). Google is pretty good at not letting random people auth to GSuite as you. (Still turn off SMS recovery, though.) Does that answer your question?
    - wybiral 9y ago
      I get the impression that when non-security people talk about "security" these days it's almost always in the context of preventing government surveillance. So even though Google has a great track record of keeping hackers from taking over your accounts, the news stories about them cooperating with governments makes them seem less "secure" to some people. What's weird is when it leads to a fallacy where people trust services that are less verified and tested in terms of security just because there isn't the association with government cooperation.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        This is irrational. It might be a complicated question if the foreign-jurisdiction alternatives were more secure, rather than drastically less secure. But since that's not the case, switching from Google Mail actually gets you the worst of both worlds: a mail service that is materially less secure, operating in a jurisdiction where there are literally no rules preventing USG-level adversaries from exploiting it.
        wybiral 9y ago
        Agreed. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
    - bogomipz 9y ago
      Yes, thanks for the clarification on that point. Cheers.
- joshuamorton 9y ago
  Just gonna drive by mention https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/ https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/, which is a physical-2fa-security-key-only version of gmail. To my knowledge it also disallows mail forwarding, and the account recovery procedure in the event of losing both second factors is intended to be a long process that involves proof of identity and multiple attempts to notify the account owner. (I work on gmail, but I'm not intimately familiar with this option, other than knowing that it exists and is intended for high value targets like celebrities and politicians).
  - lvh 9y ago
    Yep. I don’t recommend it by default (most people I work with use GSuite in a work context, so recovery is normally administrator-mediated), but the fact that this exists is pretty awesome.
  - Jd 9y ago
    The pricing is very unclear from even three clicks in from that link, only that it is some sort of add on service.
    - Santosh83 9y ago
      I don't use it, but from what I can see, it appears to be free, apart from the keys themselves needing to be purchased.
  - vim_wannabe 9y ago
    That looks amazing. Does any other company provide anything like this?
  - mikecb 9y ago
    I know that GSuite would like to differentiate its enterprise products by features, but allowing basic/business plans to force U2F would be great. Since it's also available in GCP's Cloud Identity product (which is free), I hope this is coming down the road.
  - Tomte 9y ago
bogomipz 9y ago
You have been a customer for over a year but based on someone else's anecdote you feel the need to post a signup link for a competitor?

lvh 9y ago

Unless you have a set of objectives that are very different from what I consider "as secure as e-mail gets", please consider GSuite and not Protonmail. (I don't speak for 'tptacek, but I'm pretty sure he'd agree.) As a corollary: if you really care, use Signal for stuff you can't say over e-mail. Whatsapp's fine too. But they solve a very different security problem than the one you need e-mail to solve, which is mostly "don't leak my emails" and also "don't reset my password for attackers who ask nicely".

bogomipz 9y ago
>"Whatsapp's fine too. But they solve a very different security problem than the one you need e-mail to solve," Can you elaborate on this? What security problem are they trying to solve?
- lvh 9y ago
  Sure! Signal and WhatsApp are good at having private conversations. Email is very tough to add private conversation capability to, for a variety of reasons. What you do need your mail provider (and by extension your DNS provider) to do is to not give up access to an attacker who asks nicely, because for most services, email access is account takeover. This makes discussions about email security confusing, because most security professionals I know are thinking about a very different threat model (pop all of your services) than what a lot of people think about (confidentiality). Google is pretty good at not letting random people auth to GSuite as you. (Still turn off SMS recovery, though.) Does that answer your question?
  - wybiral 9y ago
    I get the impression that when non-security people talk about "security" these days it's almost always in the context of preventing government surveillance. So even though Google has a great track record of keeping hackers from taking over your accounts, the news stories about them cooperating with governments makes them seem less "secure" to some people. What's weird is when it leads to a fallacy where people trust services that are less verified and tested in terms of security just because there isn't the association with government cooperation.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      This is irrational. It might be a complicated question if the foreign-jurisdiction alternatives were more secure, rather than drastically less secure. But since that's not the case, switching from Google Mail actually gets you the worst of both worlds: a mail service that is materially less secure, operating in a jurisdiction where there are literally no rules preventing USG-level adversaries from exploiting it.
      - wybiral 9y ago
        Agreed. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    Yes, thanks for the clarification on that point. Cheers.
joshuamorton 9y ago
Just gonna drive by mention https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/ https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/, which is a physical-2fa-security-key-only version of gmail. To my knowledge it also disallows mail forwarding, and the account recovery procedure in the event of losing both second factors is intended to be a long process that involves proof of identity and multiple attempts to notify the account owner. (I work on gmail, but I'm not intimately familiar with this option, other than knowing that it exists and is intended for high value targets like celebrities and politicians).
- lvh 9y ago
  Yep. I don’t recommend it by default (most people I work with use GSuite in a work context, so recovery is normally administrator-mediated), but the fact that this exists is pretty awesome.
- Jd 9y ago
  The pricing is very unclear from even three clicks in from that link, only that it is some sort of add on service.
  - Santosh83 9y ago
    I don't use it, but from what I can see, it appears to be free, apart from the keys themselves needing to be purchased.
- vim_wannabe 9y ago
  That looks amazing. Does any other company provide anything like this?
- mikecb 9y ago
  I know that GSuite would like to differentiate its enterprise products by features, but allowing basic/business plans to force U2F would be great. Since it's also available in GCP's Cloud Identity product (which is free), I hope this is coming down the road.
- Tomte 9y ago

bogomipz 9y ago

You have been a customer for over a year but based on someone else's anecdote you feel the need to post a signup link for a competitor?