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ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

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Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#71

Post by nopacience »

It is important to pay for email services and support the diversity of email companies.

Paid services tend to have good support and care for their users.

Users of free email service that hit a problem (ie. password lost), are essentially screwed. The free email service (gmail/yahoo/outlook) will not give proper "manual" support to solve that problem. They are so big and this fact essentially makes the users of free email services just another user (worth nothing). The big brands that provide free services will not care about your problem when you go in trouble.

Users that only have free email services, should really consider testing paid email services. And slowly move all their emails into a paid email service. But dont forget, it is very important to use purchase your-domain.com and use that in signups. Never use your-user@gmail/yahoo/hotmail/outlook.com to signup. Because when the user uses @gmail/yahoo/etc they get locked in and it gets hard to move out of the free email services after a while (because all the friends, family and websites will only know your free services email).

Another important point to note is, the only secure encryption is end-to-end encryption that the user has control of. For example openpgp. Users that care so much about encryption should rely on openpgp. If encryption is so important, dont belive the servers and use openpgp. No matter what, when the email is sent, its sent in plain text. So openpgp is the only way to send it in plaintext encrypted.

Paid services will care more about the user than free services.

Start with one of these:

runbox.com fastmail.com hushmail.com protonmail.com tutanota.com lavabit.com mailfence.com posteo.com

and ditch:

gmail.com yahoo.com hotmail.com outlook.com

Spread the word to make your friends and family aware and also make the move to paid email services.

And never forget to purchase a domain and use that to receive email. That is the only way to not get locked in the email service provider.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#72

Post by ta76567656 »

nopacience wrote: post #71

It is important to pay for email services and support the diversity of email companies. Paid services tend to have good support and care for their users. Users of free email service that hit a problem (ie. password lost), are essentially screwed. The free email service (gmail/yahoo/outlook) will not give proper "manual" support to solve that problem. They are so big and this fact essentially makes the users of free e…

mailbox.org

(not affiliated, just a user)

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#73

Post by brynjolf »

mattkevan wrote: post #49

ProtonMail was a bit expensive for me, so recently switched from Gmail to Soverin [0]. Based in the Netherlands, costs less than $4 per month for 25gb storage on a custom domain. Also have a Roundcube web interface, but smtp is fine. [0] http://www.soverin.net

I have only seen this service being mentioned on HN...

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#74

Post by quakenul »

notyourday wrote: post #65
bootlooped wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they may have been saying $50 (the lowest paid tier) per user per year is too expensive. However, the $75 paid tier "Professional" has multi-user support. I think you could probably use just that to run accounts for your family, if you desired.

Fine, even fifty per year per person for an essential service is $4.16 per month which is two cups of small starbucks drip coffee ( + taxes ) per month per person. If this is too much for essential communication tool which does not sell your information to others in the view of HN-reading, tech-working, six-figure-salary-having tech elite then we have a value problem.

The problem is it's not actually a problem unless you consciously remind yourself it is. Put bluntly, me using gmail has 0 negative impact on my everyday life.

What does have negative impact on my life is

1) paying for stuff (always, no matter how wealthy you are) 2) specially when it is less convenient 3) and has worse user experience (hard to beat gmail here) 4) while also having to invest time in educating yourself about alternatives and setting it up 5) and actually migrating to it, spreading the new email address, transferring data, learning all the ins and outs of the webmailer (if you use it)

Solve for some of these, do it really well and you have built something that people will be happy to use.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#75

Post by krn »

nopacience wrote: post #71

It is important to pay for email services and support the diversity of email companies. Paid services tend to have good support and care for their users. Users of free email service that hit a problem (ie. password lost), are essentially screwed. The free email service (gmail/yahoo/outlook) will not give proper "manual" support to solve that problem. They are so big and this fact essentially makes the users of free e…

> Start with one of these:

You are probably joking.

> hushmail.com

"Hushmail supplied cleartext copies of private email messages associated with several addresses at the request of law enforcement agencies under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the United States.; e.g. in the case of U.S. v. Tyler Stumbo. In addition, the contents of emails between Hushmail addresses were analyzed, and 12 CDs were supplied to U.S. authorities."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_...

> lavabit.com

"The court records show that the FBI sought Lavabit's Transport Layer Security (TLS/SSL) private key. Levison objected, saying that the key would allow the government to access communications by all 400,000 customers of Lavabit. He also offered to add code to his servers that would provide the information required just for the target of the order. The court rejected this offer because it would require the government to trust Levison and stated that just because the government could access all customers' communication did not mean they would be legally permitted to do so. Lavabit was ordered to provide the SSL key in machine readable format."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Suspension_and_gag_ord...

> protonmail.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18010648

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#76

Post by ta76567656 »

krn wrote: post #75
nopacience wrote: post #71

It is important to pay for email services and support the diversity of email companies. Paid services tend to have good support and care for their users. Users of free email service that hit a problem (ie. password lost), are essentially screwed. The free email service (gmail/yahoo/outlook) will not give proper "manual" support to solve that problem. They are so big and this fact essentially makes the users of free e…

> Start with one of these: You are probably joking. > hushmail.com "Hushmail supplied cleartext copies of private email messages associated with several addresses at the request of law enforcement agencies under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the United States.; e.g. in the case of U.S. v. Tyler Stumbo. In addition, the contents of emails between Hushmail addresses were analyzed, and 12 CDs were supplied to U.…

Parent doesn't seem to be arguing that these providers are anonymous, just that you get what you pay for in customer service. They explicitly say that end to end encryption (ie client side PGP) is required for privacy.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#77

Post by krn »

ta76567656 wrote: post #76
krn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Start with one of these: You are probably joking. > hushmail.com "Hushmail supplied cleartext copies of private email messages associated with several addresses at the request of law enforcement agencies under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the United States.; e.g. in the case of U.S. v. Tyler Stumbo. In addition, the contents of emails between Hushmail addresses were analyzed, and 12 CDs were supplied to U.…

Parent doesn't seem to be arguing that these providers are anonymous, just that you get what you pay for in customer service. They explicitly say that end to end encryption (ie client side PGP) is required for privacy.

Then his argument is even more flawed, because one can just as well pay for Gmail or Outlook and use PGP with them, without exposing himself to vulnerabilities of smaller email providers.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#78

Post by rootusrootus »

Felz wrote: post #51
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…

I'm curious what you'd think a reasonable price point would be. For context, I'm currently trying to set up a paid email hosting company because $50 a year seemed a bit ridiculous to me, and it seemed like it could be done a lot cheaper.

I'm a bit of a cheapskate, so I think a couple hundred a year for the family would be acceptable. That includes my parents, brothers, nephews, nieces -- I give out accounts under our domain to any blood relative with the same last name. Not a huge number, but it's like ~16 accounts. Only four or five that get any substantial traffic, but the rest are still perfectly valid individual accounts. At about $55/year/account for ProtonMail (if I looked in the right place; prices were in Euros), it pushes a thousand bucks a year. For email, that's simply more than I want to pay. I'd go back to hosting it myself on a Digital Ocean droplet before I'd spend that much on it. But ... I don't yearn to be in charge of security and tech support again ;-)

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#79

Post by rootusrootus »

notyourday wrote: post #65
bootlooped wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they may have been saying $50 (the lowest paid tier) per user per year is too expensive. However, the $75 paid tier "Professional" has multi-user support. I think you could probably use just that to run accounts for your family, if you desired.

Fine, even fifty per year per person for an essential service is $4.16 per month which is two cups of small starbucks drip coffee ( + taxes ) per month per person. If this is too much for essential communication tool which does not sell your information to others in the view of HN-reading, tech-working, six-figure-salary-having tech elite then we have a value problem.

For the whole domain it would basically amount to a new iPhone every year. A pittance, I agree, you make a valid point.

Re: ProtonMail Hits 5M Accounts

#80

Post by sramsay »

I'm seeing lots of posts full of frustration about cost, clients, support, protocols, direction of the company, whatever . . .

I don't care about any of that. Okay, I do. But mainly, I need the thing to be secure (zero knowledge, encrypted between clients), and I'll pay a high premium for it. People are suggesting other providers. Are there other providers that have a better product in terms of security?

I'm not saying there aren't; I'm just having trouble figuring out which providers are judged to be better in terms of security.

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