ProtonMail Unifies Encrypted Mail, Calendar, VPN, and Storage Services Under New 'Proton' Brand (macrumors.com) 37
Swiss-based encrypted email provider ProtonMail today announced a restructuring of its privacy-first services, bringing them under a new unifying brand name: Proton. "Today, we are undertaking our biggest step forward in the movement for an internet that respects your privacy. The new, updated Proton offers one account, many services, and one privacy-by-default ecosystem. You can now enjoy unified protection with a modernized look and feel. Evolving into a unified Proton reflects our growth from an end-to-end encrypted email provider to an entire privacy ecosystem, allowing us to deliver even more benefits to the Proton community and make privacy accessible to everyone," the company said. MacRumors adds: Previously, users could only subscribe to each service the company offered individually. Going forward, the new Proton offers one account to access all the services offered in the company's privacy-by-default ecosystem, including Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, and Proton Drive, all of which can be accessed from proton.me. All Proton services remain available as a free tier, with more advanced features and more storage available via paid plans. The free Proton tier includes up to 1GB of storage and one Proton email address, as well as access to Proton's encrypted Calendar and VPN services. Further reading: Proton Is Trying to Become Google -- Without Your Data.
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In order to index and search the body of your mail, it would need to be decrypted.
Seems like not being able to search it would be a necessary trade off of them not being able to read it.
Can you use a pop or imap mail client with the service to download, decrypt, and then index/search locally?
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Yes - Proton bridge is a local client that allows you access the proton mail servers (via encryption) but locally decrypt and interface with any mail client.
https://proton.me/mail/bridge [proton.me]
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Yes - Proton bridge is a local client that allows you access the proton mail servers (via encryption) but locally decrypt and interface with any mail client.
https://proton.me/mail/bridge [proton.me]
I went to go and try out this new, improved, proton.me. And quickly discovered that in order to continue to use my regular e-mail client (Thunderbird), I have to have a paid account and download and then download and install the above bridge program. That suggests that something about the client/server interaction is non-standard; in any case, I'm not inclined to get a paid account just to try something out to see if it is actually useful for my situation.
Also, as far as I can tell, the bridge program isn't
Re:Proton has/had a problem for me. (Score:4, Informative)
Clicking through the links on the technical details [proton.me], I found a link to the GitHub page for proton-bridge [github.com], so it is indeed open source. It sounds like it's a PGP key manager of sorts. It's not explicit, but it sounds like ProtonMail stores all of their users' PGP keys with the private keys encrypted with your password such that they never see your password so they can't decrypt the key. And the bridge just handles doing the key requests and encryption/decryption for any emails sent to/from other ProtonMail accounts.
It seems like if you were a more technical user and had an email client with PGP support, your email client should be able to just have a plugin for dealing with ProtonMail's key distribution and then you wouldn't need the bridge.
Re: Proton has/had a problem for me. (Score:3, Informative)
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"These are not the emails you are seeking" (Score:2)
At least that's my initial reaction to the list of feature. Nothing there I'd be interested in paying for in competition with the free versions that are already available without payment. In other words, I already have "enough" of all of them and don't need no more.
But I'll spare you my list of NEW email features furnishing my sky castle. Instead, I'll ask "What would you want from an email system before you'd switch?"
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I'm willing to pay just for Proton Calendar frankly, since fuck Google, I don't want the government having the details of everything I do for the past and future x years
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Opera, Tor, etc. But do you realize that you sound paranoid enough to give them probable case for the warrant? What are you up to?
However mostly you sound like you're suffering from some form of PTSD. "The Government" hasn't done much of anything negative to me lately. Not denying the potential for government-sponsored abuse of my personal information, but these days almost all of the abuse is coming from inside the house... Ergo, I strongly agree with you about what the increasingly EVIL google needs, and
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Odd random fact, I
Revokable temporary email addresses (Score:2)
I'd like a reasonably automated system to generate and (if necessary) revoke temporary email addresses used to sign up for various services that require email "conformation". Yes, I know some providers like Google allow you to add suffixes (like name+tag@gmail.com if you email is name@gmail.com) and then you can latter block emails arriving with that suffix if you start getting spam, but that is way too manual for my liking. I'd like an auto-generated unique address that gets forwarded to my primary addre
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I implemented that ages ago in our email security product (now sadly defunct since I sold the company.)
The manual [manualzz.com] is still online, amazingly. Search for "Locked Addresses".
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. Yes, I know some providers like Google allow you to add suffixes (like name+tag@gmail.com if you email is name@gmail.com) and then you can latter block emails arriving with that suffix if you start getting spam, but that is way too manual for my liking.
How is adding "name+tag@" too difficult? If you want to block them after you are registered then you click the filter icon on the confirmation email.
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I didn't say it was too difficult, I said it was too manual. Computers are supposed to work for us, not the other way around.
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How is "click here to get `temporary-random-address-XYZ@domain`" less work than "just use `name+temporary@domain` then click filter when you're done"? Seriously, it's the same amount of work.
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I already do that. I freely hand out businessname@spam.mydomain.com to businesses. In Fastmail, I have *@spam.mydomain.com set up as an alias for my main address, so those emails automatically arrive in my inbox with zero additional setup. When someone misbehaves, I simply create an alias that links badbusinessname@spam.mydomain.com to nothing at all, effectively sending any subsequent messages into the “your message was unable to be delivered” void.
Fastmail recently added a Masked Email feature
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Hmm... Interesting suggestion. I can definitely sympathize with your position that the google's implementation is troublesome, but I'm not sure how to automate it along the lines you seem to be thinking of. I think the real key to your feature is the nature of time, but you aren't approaching it that way.
On the one hand, I feel like an email address should be regarded as a permanent token of your identity, but you certainly should have the right to sever that linkage to you whenever you want to. On the othe
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For me, the killer requirement for an email system is that it's self-hosted. So... uh... sorry, ProtonMail and everyone else. You can't help me with that.
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Not clear to me who the "You" in your reply is addressed to. Are you trying to exclude the other people who crafted SMTP in the first place? I get the impression that you are running a mail server and regard that as a good thing, but the local evidence is that you are still dissatisfied enough with your solution to read a Slashdot story about email...
As I would try to reinterpret the problem you seem to be raising, I'd prefer to simplify it to monetary terms: What features would I be willing to pay for? Who
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Most, if not all, of the mail providers suck for one simple reason: If they "detect" something is wrong with your login then you can get permanently locked out of your account. Doesn't matter if you know all the answers, passwords, keys, whatever, you still get locked out for reasons only they know and this is all done by an algorithm that no one seems to be able to control. Once this happens, if you have anything important tied to that account you are screwed.
What would make me use and stick to a provider
Seems silly (Score:3)
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Sweden isn't likely to be invaded.
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Sweden isn't likely to be invaded.
Hold my vodka.
--Putin
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And by "Sweden" you meant "Switzerland," yes?
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If you're a security conscious individual, do you want any third party holding your VPN/calendar/email? Same entity or not?
The upside is, as usual, convenience. One account to manage, probably cheaper to bundle them together if you're going for the paid tier, and maybe there are nice features for integrating events from your email with your calendar.
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It is almost certain that a third party will be orders of magnitude more secure than most people can manage on their own. The only question is whether you trust that third party to maintain their security to the levels they're telling you they do.
In the broadest sense if you're doing something dodgy enough to bring yourself to the attention of serious actors such as the intelligence services in any country, I'd still venture you are way safer trusting a commercial third party who's entire focus is on securi
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That very much depends on your threat model. Maybe your calendar isn't security critical, and the convenience of having it integrated with email is nice to have.
The bigger issue is that they are based in Switzerland. It's not the best location for a VPN company. Norway is probably the best right now, or maybe Finland. Again though, it depends who your adversary is. For US users Switzerland is probably a decent choice.
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I appears to be a honeypot now since you can't sign up without giving up a non-anonymous IP, credit card, or phone number.
Years ago I had an account there, to check it out, that I bought with bitcoin over Tor.
They shut it down without notice.
finally 15 GB (for paid accounts) (Score:2)
The increase of storage is actually in my view more important than it may seem. I had a Google Business account that was free until recently. I switched to a paid Proton account as a result. The fact that it was free was the only reason I stayed there. As Proton had only 5GB at the time and my inbox at Google was much larger I chose to just backup all the old Gmail stuff and start fresh on Proton. Had it been 15 GB as it is now I could simply have used the very simple migration option in Proton and had it c