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Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

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Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#31

I have to mention the Direct Project. This is secure email that is in use today by a vast number of healthcare professionals. https://www.healthit.gov/providers-professionals/faqs/what-d... It uses trust bundles that hold the public key. Identity is vetted so there is no spam and it helps guarantee you are communicating with the right person. https://www.directmdemail.com/info/how-it-works/Direct-excha... edit: I wou…

What is a "trust bundle"?

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#32

I don't understand this. Let's say I receive a newsletter from some website. That newsletter is not PGP-encrypted, so at some point the Proton Mail servers must be able to see a plaintext version of it. That means I have to trust that they never store that plaintext version. In addition, even if they immediately encrypt it and store the encrypted version, how can they do so such that only I can read it? Is the key ge…

The key is indeed generated from your password - to be pedantic, the key is encrypted by your password with a hardening function.

I believe a copy of the key is sent to the recovery email. Not completely sure, I haven’t entered one.

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#33

The engineer in me loves the promised End-End encryption and all the cool stuff. But, the inconvenience of "unable to search contents of emails" is a deal breaker towards encrypted email for me. My primary concern was Google/Microsoft scraping my emails to build a profile of me. My emails could give away very personal information that I do not want to be used for advertising. My money finally went to Fastmail. Excell…

G Suite (former Google Apps) has a different Terms of Use compared with Google's user oriented products, like Gmail.com, otherwise usage wouldn't fly in most big companies, especially in Europe.

In general, if you aren't paying, then you're the product.

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#34
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the same idea when I read the comment. However, training your ML models in the browser is probably not the best thing you could do. Granted, it could potentially offer a more personalized service.

Search doesn't really need ML to be effective

If you search for travel, and the SE brings up all your reservations from flights, ferries, bus, etc. It requires some sort of ML. Stupid example but you get the point.

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#36
post #31

I have to mention the Direct Project. This is secure email that is in use today by a vast number of healthcare professionals. https://www.healthit.gov/providers-professionals/faqs/what-d... It uses trust bundles that hold the public key. Identity is vetted so there is no spam and it helps guarantee you are communicating with the right person. https://www.directmdemail.com/info/how-it-works/Direct-excha... edit: I wou…

What is a "trust bundle"?

To add to the trust bundle a vendor needs to be accredited. The trust bundle holds the public key for every "email" address.

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#37
post #9

Hows the spam filter? I fell in love with the idea of switching to other services before on their marketing copy but I'm back in Gmail. It all rests on how good the spam filtering is by default not after I've received x good and y bad emails. Unfortunately in this case it sounds like there might be a tradeoff between securing my internet postcards[1] and training spam filters. [1] and that's all they are really, post…

> by default not after I've received x good and y bad emails

That's fair for you to demand. I run my own personal email server with SpamAssassin and I definitely got a lot of spam in the first week. Then I told SA to learn what spam and ham looks like based on what I received and it's been excellent ever since. I have retrained it about once every 2 years but it's really not that bad. Personally, I'm happy to manually filter a handful of spams and then have top-notch filtering plus added privacy.

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#38

It's so cute that they think that the NSA can't read PGP-encrypted messages.

There is no evidence that PGP is compromised. In fact, the snowden leaks revealed that the NSA has "serious problems" following people through TOR, and is unable to decrypt some OTR and PGP encrypted messages.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/28/7458159/encryption-stand...

Re: Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

#40

Unfortunately this doesn’t work with IMAP. That’s understandable given the encryption at their end, but it does tie you into their apps.

It certainly does, but require client software that's capable to decrypt the data.

I think almost every desktop mail client support S/MIME. Many support PGP/MIME, using plugin/extension or natively. Unfortunately, the situation is much worse on mobile.

Anyway, if the client software is capable - which is rarely true but sometimes is the case - any classic mail server can store everything encrypted.

If you self-host - just make your MDA pipe the unencrypted emails to GnuPG or OpenSSL (and encrypted emails are already okay) and that's it. You'll be as good as ProtonMail (note: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/does-protonmai...). IIRC, there also was some hosted email service that works this way, although I forgot where I saw it and how it was called.

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