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One thing I’ve heard in the past but I am not educated enough on the subject to understand, is that proton mail‘s privacy features only work if both sides of an
by jb1991 5y ago
One thing I’ve heard in the past but I am not educated enough on the subject to understand, is that proton mail‘s privacy features only work if both sides of an email are encrypted, and since most people are not using proton mail, there isn’t a lot of value in it most of the time.
Is this true? Is this a service mainly for people who are emailing other people on similar services?
- teekert 5y agoSure, if the person you send your message to receives his email on "leaky outdated OS with leaky outdated software" and refuses to use TLS. The chain is as strong as the weakest link in this case.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoI don't use ProtonMail because I expect a secure chain of communication for all my correspondence. I use it because I want to avoid having my inbox in the hands of Google/Microsoft. But I'm only a casual user and maybe one day I'll be more serious about ProtonMail's privacy features.
- jb1991 5y agoWhat about the other alternatives, like fastmail? I mean what made you choose proton mail specifically?
- BitwiseFool 5y agoA colleague recommended it to me. I haven't heard of fastmail but I'll check it out now that you've mentioned it.
- willis936 5y agoI used fastmail for a bit but kept with gmail. I recently switched everything to protonmail. The key advantage of protonmail over fastmail is that protonmail doesn't have the private keys to your email storage.
- jb1991 5y agoWhat’s the usability or interface difference like between proton mail or fastmail, have you noticed any key differences in things like syncing or accessing with a mail client, etc.? Or just general features?
- jackson1442 5y agoI’ve been very happy with Fastmail. Their webmail is fast and simple and you get essentially unlimited domains and aliases in your subscription. PM’s interface by comparison is significantly clunkier and more expensive.
- willis936 5y agoProtonmail now supports bridging (IMAP, SMTP, and POP3), but to get the benefit of an encrypted email store I exclusively use their clients (mobile and web app). It's not a perfect interface, but I don't have many complaints. The old web interface was annoying so I've been using the beta. It seemed well polished at the time so I'm happy to see that they consider it ready for their entire customer base. I don't have experience with the protonmail's bridge, but so far I haven't experienced any outages or slow behavior. I use a custom domain and I think protonmail and fastmail are feature parity in this area. Protonmail just offers fewer domains and addresses at a given tier.
- upofadown 5y agoThey support OpenPGP in general so they interoperate as much as is practical. Their open source software is used in other contexts as well. For example, their OpenPGP.js project is used by Mailvelope to add PGP to generic webmail.
- beermonster 5y agoSecurity is only as good as the weakest link. If you send an email to a non-ProtonMail address, then it is sent as normal emails are: no security but maybe some encryption in transit if you're lucky. You can either get your recipient to get their own ProtonMail account (for free!), or use a protocol that was designed respecting security and privacy in the first place i.e. don't use any email service. You can in theory get transparent pgp e2ee using two MUAs on separate PM accounts communicating with PM via PM Bridge. But it's simpler/easier to just use their web front end. No configuration/installation of MUA or Bridge required. At least this way you don't end up with a plaintext copy sitting in your MUA's outbox. In essence the encryption is applied one hop too late (by the Bridge) if you're concerned about the security of your client endpoint or filesystem. This is a good resource: https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-threat-model/ https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-threat-model/