Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Protonmail was down

protonstatus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 83 posts

Re: Protonmail was down

#31

Post by de6u99er »

b1476 wrote: post #28

As a paying user I feel that the reliability of their services in recent months has been completely unacceptable for me. That combined with the ridiculously slow rollout of new products (will calendar ever be fully released?) has now made me look at alternatives. I love the product itself and the idea behind it, but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN service is pretty absurd…

Your comment could explain why they need to have downtime for maintaining something. Maybe even a pressing security fix, that breaks things.

That being said, I don't understand why companies don't have test systems for validation of updade and maintenance procedures.

My systems actually always had two test systems. One which was identical with Prod, and another one where test-users could test new features coming out of development system(s).

Re: Protonmail was down

#32

Post by bobsmooth »

b1476 wrote: post #28

As a paying user I feel that the reliability of their services in recent months has been completely unacceptable for me. That combined with the ridiculously slow rollout of new products (will calendar ever be fully released?) has now made me look at alternatives. I love the product itself and the idea behind it, but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN service is pretty absurd…

Consider the unique services offered by Proton, are they available elsewhere at a similar price? They are not Google.

Re: Protonmail was down

#33

Post by codetrotter »

quasirandom wrote: post #27
sammorrowdrums wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an unusual decision. I guess some spammer(s) must have done something to deserve it at some point?

Super unusual. I've never encountered the issue before or since.

Found this thread http://openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/OT-protonmail-mail...

Someone was complaining that mail sent from ProtonMail was unreadable to them. Turned out to be because of base64 encoding. Which is an RFC standard. However, several people in the thread insist that this is a problem.

Theo de Raadt, the founder and leader of OpenBSD says in the thread:

> Maybe it should be blocked. Then the users there can tell them to fix it.

> Would have no downside for me.

I guess this may be what happened?

Really weird IMO. But at the same time I kind of see their point. They have a setup that works for them. And if they want to keep that system the way that it is, it is up to them. Still sad for people that use ProtonMail that they are blocked from even reading the list though if I understood the GP here correctly.

Re: Protonmail was down

#34

Post by dathinab »

b1476 wrote: post #28

As a paying user I feel that the reliability of their services in recent months has been completely unacceptable for me. That combined with the ridiculously slow rollout of new products (will calendar ever be fully released?) has now made me look at alternatives. I love the product itself and the idea behind it, but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN service is pretty absurd…

idk

> reliability of their services in recent months has

Didn't affect me at all, sure they seem to currently slowly do some major infrastructure changes and there seem to have been service interruptions, but again mail is an asynchronous "slow" communication protocol so this didn't really affect me at all and besides today I didn't even notice it.

> ridiculously slow rollout of new products

Do you buy into services because of not yet rolled out products? I at least don't and I prefer them to have a slow rollout leading to a stable product once released then a rushed rollout.

> but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN

I agree that their price for people with many custom domains is high, but then lets be honest most people (I know, in my experience) have sometimes a custom domain very rarely two and hardly ever more. So my guess is for most users it's reasonable priced.

Re: Protonmail was down

#35

Post by gspr »

marcusfrex wrote: post #5

It is not for a few minutes but it had been nearly an hour. Seriously considering to switch to another provider. Damn!!

While I agree with the sibling that an hour's downtime isn't much, and that you can't expect much better performance than that, I'd like to give a shoutout to mailbox.org.

I originally chose them over Proton when degooglifying my life because of Proton's absolutely batshit crazy idea not to offer IMAP access. I've been very very happy with mailbox for years. Their web interface is ugly, but like I said… IMAP.

Re: Protonmail was down

#36

Post by nix23 »

bobsmooth wrote: post #32
b1476 wrote: post #28

As a paying user I feel that the reliability of their services in recent months has been completely unacceptable for me. That combined with the ridiculously slow rollout of new products (will calendar ever be fully released?) has now made me look at alternatives. I love the product itself and the idea behind it, but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN service is pretty absurd…

Consider the unique services offered by Proton, are they available elsewhere at a similar price? They are not Google.

Yes Tutanota...BUT:

https://www.cyberscoop.com/germany-court-ruling-tutanota-ema...

Re: Protonmail was down

#37

Post by b1476 »

bobsmooth wrote: post #32
b1476 wrote: post #28

As a paying user I feel that the reliability of their services in recent months has been completely unacceptable for me. That combined with the ridiculously slow rollout of new products (will calendar ever be fully released?) has now made me look at alternatives. I love the product itself and the idea behind it, but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN service is pretty absurd…

Consider the unique services offered by Proton, are they available elsewhere at a similar price? They are not Google.

Not exactly. But, for me at least, reliability of my mail provider is just as important as them respecting my privacy. There are alternatives that I trust just as much as ProtonMail. For what it’s worth I’ve been a loyal customer since the beginning and have been more than supportive of them (I even own Proton merch..), but from a users perspective all I’ve seen recently is them pumping attention into new product releases as opposed to finishing currently half baked products or making their systems more resilient to downtime (which I’ve noticed a lot more of in the last 6 months than since the very beginning). It’s hard to turn a blind eye and continue supporting them.

Re: Protonmail was down

#38

Post by dathinab »

de6u99er wrote: post #31
b1476 wrote: post #28

As a paying user I feel that the reliability of their services in recent months has been completely unacceptable for me. That combined with the ridiculously slow rollout of new products (will calendar ever be fully released?) has now made me look at alternatives. I love the product itself and the idea behind it, but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN service is pretty absurd…

Your comment could explain why they need to have downtime for maintaining something. Maybe even a pressing security fix, that breaks things. That being said, I don't understand why companies don't have test systems for validation of updade and maintenance procedures. My systems actually always had two test systems. One which was identical with Prod, and another one where test-users could test new features coming out…

Just a guess, but I think they are currently in the process of slowly doing some major infrastructure migrations.

And doing such thinks without downtime can be hard, especially if you did some design mistake at the beginning which wasn't obvious and didn't cause problems until they scaled to a much larger customer base and/or provided additional services (storage, calendar) which originally whern't planed/considered when creating the mail service.

Re: Protonmail was down

#39

Post by dathinab »

b1476 wrote: post #37
bobsmooth wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the unique services offered by Proton, are they available elsewhere at a similar price? They are not Google.

Not exactly. But, for me at least, reliability of my mail provider is just as important as them respecting my privacy. There are alternatives that I trust just as much as ProtonMail. For what it’s worth I’ve been a loyal customer since the beginning and have been more than supportive of them (I even own Proton merch..), but from a users perspective all I’ve seen recently is them pumping attention into new product rel…

Looking at the protostatus history they indeed seem to have an unusual amount of (not too long, but noticable) outages (which I personally didn't notice as I read mails only 1-2 times a day).

My guess is they needed some major infrastructure changes which where at fault, maybe related to them providing additional services.

Or at least so I hope, as this would mean thinks get back to being nearly always reliable soonish.

Would be nice to hear about it from them, but then if my guess(hope) is right we probably only hear about it after it's fully done (at least that is what I would do).

Re: Protonmail was down

#40

Post by mhitza »

b1476 wrote: post #28

As a paying user I feel that the reliability of their services in recent months has been completely unacceptable for me. That combined with the ridiculously slow rollout of new products (will calendar ever be fully released?) has now made me look at alternatives. I love the product itself and the idea behind it, but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN service is pretty absurd…

It's also the only provider that I know of that keeps your emails as ransom if you don't continue payment once you're on an upgraded account, instead of downgrading it for you at the billing cycle.

Good thing I only used my PM email to test things out, paid for an upgrade because I liked their public image, only to come back a year later and have no access to anything unless I pay up.

Post reply on HN