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Proton is trying to become Google without your data

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Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#161

Post by dgellow »

tlogan wrote: post #133

The problem with Proton email is that is full of fraudulent accounts this they domain and emails send via proton are blocked by many companies, ISPs and firewalls. I tried it and it was unable to send email to my wife’s work. In short alot of dickheads use it for spam/scam and ruin it for the rest of us. I do not know how they can overcome that…

You should see the @protonmail.com adresses as a demo, people use them for spam so the domain has a bad reputation. If you decide to pay for the service then it’s better to use your own domain, you should have no problem with delivery.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#162

Post by jrockway »

throw10920 wrote: post #152
jrockway wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've definitely blocked protonmail domains before. The calculus is that 100% of the accounts from that domain are fraud and 0% are legitimate, so it just saves a lot of time to block it. Stops fraud before it even starts. This is, of course, annoying for the 1 legitimate customer mixed in with the billions of bots. But basically, they have an abuse problem that they need to solve. Gmail also has plenty of fraudulent…

> Work: https://pachyderm.com/ Well, I know what I'm not using if I ever have a need for an ML pipeline.

Yeah, that's fine. If you want to spend 20,000 hours rewriting our 100% open-source product from scratch because we used to have a hosted offering that was overrun by fraud and I made a rash decision in the middle of the night, feel free! Recommend just downloading the source from Github though and using our work for free. That is absolutely the best way to stick it to me for sharing my thought process on HN. (Use the 19,9999 hours you saved to listen to enjoyable music or hang out with friends! It's fun!)

Like I said, I was paged in the middle of the night because protonmail accounts were being created at a rate of hundreds per second to use our hosted free trial to mine crypto. So I blocked the domain name. I'm not saying this is wonderful or anything, but it is what I had to do at the time.

I see that my post got massively downvoted, but this is the thought process for people administering things. You get overrun and then you make a rash decision. I basically had the choice to to block protonmail from using the free trial, eliminate free trials, or require everyone in the Universe to type in a credit card, pay their bill and not dispute the charges for 90 days. I chose the first one. Free trials continued for the vast majority of the world. But hey, we ended up deciding not to do the cloud offering (in part because of this), so maybe I fucked up that decision.

I'll definitely be thinking about fraud/risk from day 1 the next time I do a cloud service, so that innocent users of email domains abused by fraudsters are not unfairly discriminated against. I didn't do it the first time, and that's on me. I just wanted to share the thought process of someone in the trenches; not make a value judgement of your email provider! You as an individual user of some service can't be held accountable for the actions of the other users of that service. I get that and I feel bad about what I did at the time.

But, having been where the UK government is, I totally get where they're coming from. That's all I wanted to say. Protonmail can do some vetting of their customers, so that their emails become more trustworthy, if they feel like it. That would make their product more valuable for all the legitimate users.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#163

Post by kataklasm »

ptero wrote: post #120
blangk wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it works very well using the bridge on my Manjaro desktop, and was fine on Debian before that.

I have the same experience, for me it works flawlessly with the bridge, but the bridge itself is a complication. I would prefer a straight imap option (in addition to the bridge option). My 2c.

But then you wouldn't have E2EE anymore, and that's kind of their flagship feature.

I'm very happy with the Bridge integrated with Neomutt on Fedora Linux.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#164

Post by mid-kid »

stereoradonc wrote: post #151

VPN is decent (not as good as Mullvad). I haven't tried "Drive", but am not willing to shift from Dropbox. Email and Calendar from Proton are "perpetually in beta", but I prefer Fastmail (over a decade with them). They are trying to spin debate around "privacy" and overselling the "Swiss experience". Nothing prevents them from changing the privacy policy tomorrow (to "conform" to the rules and regulations). As it is,…

Does fastmail do anything with encryption?

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#165

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

0daystock wrote: post #56

Asserting "private email" is a modern litmus test for someone's technical understanding and capabilities, or lack thereof. Snake oil companies will always hide behind "it's encrypted" and "it's hosted in Switzerland" tropes that mean nothing to anyone who has done a modicum of research. Real privacy is not the result of some product, especially not when its so desperately and obviously shilled.

How can I learn more about privacy online.

It seems to me that the only private email would be no email.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#166

Post by wink »

jrockway wrote: post #162
throw10920 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Work: https://pachyderm.com/ Well, I know what I'm not using if I ever have a need for an ML pipeline.

Yeah, that's fine. If you want to spend 20,000 hours rewriting our 100% open-source product from scratch because we used to have a hosted offering that was overrun by fraud and I made a rash decision in the middle of the night, feel free! Recommend just downloading the source from Github though and using our work for free. That is absolutely the best way to stick it to me for sharing my thought process on HN. (Use th…

All you're really saying 'freemail is bad because of abuse, gmail is just too big to fail', which is not a whole lot of news after 25 years on the internet, I guess that's where some of the downvotes come from.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#167

Post by WithinReason »

jibcage wrote: post #61
hammock wrote: post #43

Proton is mired in shenanigans. Evidence points to ProtonVPN being a white-labeled version of Nord VPN. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23571653 and https://archive.is/iZ2l2 (archive of relevant but broken [2] link @ HN thread) Protonmail has its own issues that have been discussed on HN. Source: https://encryp.ch/blog/disturbing-facts-about-protonmail/ Obviously Gmail and such are piped directly into gl…

As someone who works for Proton VPN, I can assure you we do not resell any white label VPN services, and that the people I work with every day are incredibly smart people who truly, deeply care about users’ online privacy. I’ll concede that this isn’t much better evidence than the links you provided, but that archived site in your comment really doesn’t read like a reputable source of truth, either.

It seems to be a link to an archived site because the original comment has been retracted by the author.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#169

Post by ziddoap »

charcircuit wrote: post #157
ziddoap wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The privacy of GMail is good enough, if not better than ProtonMail. How do you figure? Google actively scans both email and drive for CSAM. If they can scan it for CSAM, they can scan it for whatever the hell they want.

Just because they can violate your privacy that doesn't mean that they do. By that logic you can say ProtonMail processes your unencrypted email to encrypt it. If they can process your unencrypted email they can process it in any way they want.

Poster said Google provided better privacy. Your hypothetical puts them at equal footing, so I'm still not seeing how Google provides better privacy.

Re: Proton is trying to become Google without your data

#170

Post by hammock »

WithinReason wrote: post #167
jibcage wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who works for Proton VPN, I can assure you we do not resell any white label VPN services, and that the people I work with every day are incredibly smart people who truly, deeply care about users’ online privacy. I’ll concede that this isn’t much better evidence than the links you provided, but that archived site in your comment really doesn’t read like a reputable source of truth, either.

It seems to be a link to an archived site because the original comment has been retracted by the author.

Source? What’s the reason for given for the retraction?
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