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ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

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Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#11

Post by elquimico »

totoglazer wrote: post #2

Anyone have thoughts on ProtonMail vs FastMail, as a gmail successor?

In the past 3 months I have setup accounts on all three of FastMail, HushMail, and ProtonMail. I was mainly interested in having an account with a custom domain. I used the domains I got through Amazon AWS Route53. ProtonMail was the only one I could not setup custom domain on. It would get stuck in the TXT field verification step. I contacted their support and they were not interested in helping me figure out what's going on. They just told me that was AWS problem and I needed to contact AWS support. I cancelled that account. I only used it for about 3 weeks, and my impression is that it was least polished (web UI and iOS app-wise) of the 3. FastMail was the best.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#12

Post by adrr »

autotune wrote: post #6
IdontRememberIt wrote: post #5

We had so many scammers using this provider that we require a SMS verification if they use this email address for account creation. Sad. :(

> SMS verification I am sure the scammers are not deterred lol.

It stops most of them. You can buy data on the number to see if its VOIP, or a legitimate cell phone. There are even some data providers that tell you about the subscriber like how long they had service, if its prepaid, or recently forwarded/ported.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#13

Post by ddevault »

Scott_Sanderson wrote: post #9
ddevault wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly recommend FastMail over ProtonMail. ProtonMail doesn't support SMTP or IMAP (standard protocols that are a basic requirement of an email service) without using paid, proprietary software which only supports some platforms and is a major pain to use. They also require a proprietary app to read email on your phone. ProtonMail also makes questionable tradeoffs in the name of questionable security gains.

> ProtonMail also makes questionable tradeoffs in the name of questionable security gains For example?

The IMAP/SMTP issue is the main one. The stated reason they do it is to decrypt/encrypt incoming/outgoing emails on the client rather than on their servers. But the problem with that is that decrypting emails on the client is well supported by PGP in almost every email client, and even if an unencrypted email is sent with SMTP you can easily add encryption on the fly server-side - something they already do for incoming, unencrypted emails. So the tradeoffs don't make sense, it's just a convenient excuse which allows them to take advantage of vendor lock-in.

They also make promises which are based on trusting ProtonMail rather than trusting the math that underlies their security model - for example, they could trivially store a copy of incoming emails in plaintext before encrypting them normally, and they could then keep your emails in plaintext without you being any the wiser. Users who depend on their communications being private shouldn't rely on this, PGP does not require trust from anyone but the sender and recipient and has been working well for years. If they wanted to improve ease-of-use for PGP they should have done that, rather than building their own crap with questionable security promises on top of it.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#14

Post by zaarn »

totoglazer wrote: post #2

Anyone have thoughts on ProtonMail vs FastMail, as a gmail successor?

I'm quite happy with ProtonMail, it does what I need (folders, receives emails, privacy). The bridge is also quite neat and I set it up so I can use offlineimap with it so I get backups of all my mail...

Regardless of which you pick, I do recommend to look into getting a personal mail domain, then it's yours.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#15

Post by Boulth »

elquimico wrote: post #11
totoglazer wrote: post #2

Anyone have thoughts on ProtonMail vs FastMail, as a gmail successor?

In the past 3 months I have setup accounts on all three of FastMail, HushMail, and ProtonMail. I was mainly interested in having an account with a custom domain. I used the domains I got through Amazon AWS Route53. ProtonMail was the only one I could not setup custom domain on. It would get stuck in the TXT field verification step. I contacted their support and they were not interested in helping me figure out what's…

I've also had bad luck with ProtonMail support, such as I send them an inquiry and they never reply back. This definitely doesn't build confidence in the service.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#16

Post by maltalex »

rootusrootus wrote: post #8

There are two reasons I'm still with Google for mail at this point: Inertia, and cost. The former is pretty easy to understand. The latter has more to do with the fact that I have a private domain for our family and I've been using Google Apps since the days when it was free. If I want to convert to another service like ProtonMail then I'm either going to tell a bunch of people in my family to pay up (with all the ac…

How about Zoho? Their free offering comes with support for custom domains and something like 20 accounts.

As a bonus, you can choose between Zoho.com and Zoho.eu. Both offer the same services, but Zoho.eu is hosted in Europe ender the protection if the various privacy and data protection laws.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#17

Post by beart »

totoglazer wrote: post #2

Anyone have thoughts on ProtonMail vs FastMail, as a gmail successor?

The ProtonMail mobile app on Android isn't very good. Swiping emails to archive is very slow and often messes up. Sometimes after archiving an email, it randomly reappears in the list until I manually refresh again. Just a lot of little annoyances such as these has turned me off from ProtonMail.

Also, if you want to have Calendar integration, there is none in ProtonMail.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#18

Post by cs702 »

If ProtonMail manages to offer (a) seamless calendar and contacts syncing and (b) decent office suite functionality, I would consider switching all my accounts.

Let's hope Andy Yen and his team at ProtonMail can it pull off!

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#19

Post by teekert »

rootusrootus wrote: post #8

There are two reasons I'm still with Google for mail at this point: Inertia, and cost. The former is pretty easy to understand. The latter has more to do with the fact that I have a private domain for our family and I've been using Google Apps since the days when it was free. If I want to convert to another service like ProtonMail then I'm either going to tell a bunch of people in my family to pay up (with all the ac…

50+/year? That is a big plus indeed, I also want my family on Protonmail. I donated btc in the beginning and got on board immediately, now that the bridge software is out, regular people can use their MacOS mail and their Thunderbird so the service is really attractive. But... on my own domain with 2 kids and a wife and a father it is 25 euros per month or 240 per year. I email about once every couple of days, as does my wife. Kids do even less... Now I have 3 mail users for 3 euro/month at transip.com. The price difference is pretty big. A family package would be really welcome. Before you ask, be aware that the "Addresses" of the Plus account are not users, they are aliases.

Edit: I still think protonmail is absolutely great, it works well, it looks very nice. I'd love to pay and probably would switch just for me, however, it's pretty hard to route one address of a domain to one server and the other to another.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#20

Post by delbel »

elquimico wrote: post #11
totoglazer wrote: post #2

Anyone have thoughts on ProtonMail vs FastMail, as a gmail successor?

In the past 3 months I have setup accounts on all three of FastMail, HushMail, and ProtonMail. I was mainly interested in having an account with a custom domain. I used the domains I got through Amazon AWS Route53. ProtonMail was the only one I could not setup custom domain on. It would get stuck in the TXT field verification step. I contacted their support and they were not interested in helping me figure out what's…

I got stuck with a custom domain on ProtonMail and opened a ticket, and they responded within 45 minutes to help me. That sucks you had issues.
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