Sorry about that.
I just moved the domain for my small business over to ProtonMail (where I already hosted my personal email). The fact that I did that guaranteed that it would go down. :)
ProtonMail Is Down
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Re: ProtonMail Is Down
#62Sorry about that. I just moved the domain for my small business over to ProtonMail (where I already hosted my personal email). The fact that I did that guaranteed that it would go down. :)
I was logged-in -- and composing a message -- a few minutes ago. First there was that cannot reach backup server message followed by a bunch (don't you just love technical jargon?) of messages saying "Could not..." and then lost the message when the site itself apparently went down. (Well, Firefox was seriously unhappy...) I was ready to blame my ISP again but no, this one is on proton mail. (It's pingable and traceroute is happy.)
I'm really glad that we didn't move our business over...
Re: ProtonMail Is Down
#63>there was no way to roll back the software update
oof
>During this period, incoming email, outgoing email, and push notifications were also temporarily delayed
They say no data was lost but I'm not sure how they can know a sending mail server didn't give up trying to deliver a message to Proton
Re: ProtonMail Is Down
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a misfeature using e-mail for 2FA login codes. TOTP is far more reliable. Any service doing e-mail only 2FA should be called out and questioned. Never assume a user has access to their email at all times.
Right, I must admit I had never heard of email being used for 2FA codes. Is that some kind of standardized protocol or something completely homegrown? In the far past (and still today with 2 banks) I use hardware/smartcard based solutions. But everything vaguely IT world seems to use TOTP. They typically advertise it as Google Autenticator, but I use different FOSS implementations on both PC and phone and they have w…
> Right, I must admit I had never heard of email being used for 2FA codes. Is that some kind of standardized protocol or something completely homegrown?
If you don't have 2fa explicitly set up and browse with VPN enabled, you'll frequently get sites that want you to authenticate via email. Amazon does this, for instance.
Re: ProtonMail Is Down
#65>there was no way to roll back the software update oof >During this period, incoming email, outgoing email, and push notifications were also temporarily delayed They say no data was lost but I'm not sure how they can know a sending mail server didn't give up trying to deliver a message to Proton
It would be surprising if a the SMTP retry timeout of the average sending server was less than the duration of this outage.
This is not to say there is no cause for concern, but SMTP was built for scenarios like this, at a time when these things happened far more often.
Re: ProtonMail Is Down
#66I mean, no one cares if accessing mail is down, but it looks like their MX is down, the status page reports incoming mail has a ‘partial’ outage. I don’t care if I can’t access my email for a while. I very much care if email sent to me isn’t received. They should just be dumping all mail received at their MX’s to maildirs or something if it’s this bad and process them properly later. Losing data is not ok.
Fortunately, retries are built into the spec (rfc5321). Typically, you retry for 3 days.
Re: ProtonMail Is Down
#67I'm kind of curious what the source of the outage is. It looks like most of their services are down, including their incident status page¹. The number of things I can think of that so many different services & are not a massively catastrophic failure is pretty small. Though that may be a lack of imagination on my part. 1: https://status.protontech.ch/incidents/195
Maybe they installed a whole lot of SSDs on the same day 4.5 years ago.
Re: ProtonMail Is Down
#68I mean, no one cares if accessing mail is down, but it looks like their MX is down, the status page reports incoming mail has a ‘partial’ outage. I don’t care if I can’t access my email for a while. I very much care if email sent to me isn’t received. They should just be dumping all mail received at their MX’s to maildirs or something if it’s this bad and process them properly later. Losing data is not ok.
> They should just be dumping all mail received at their MX’s to maildirs
Not that it makes all that much difference, but this would break the encryption model for non-pgp inbound emails which are meant to get encrypted with the users public key on arrival.
I have no doubt that manual interception of these messages would be trivial with a court order anyway.
Re: ProtonMail Is Down
#69Re: ProtonMail Is Down
#702 things to ask. 1. why don't people selfhost email more? mailinabox is pretty painless to set up and would give you infinitely more security/privacy whatever you want. 2. why is email deliverability still an issue? why do you need to use third party email tools to ensure your email doesn;t go to spam? i am not concerned with newsletters/ads/ that sort of thing but a replacement to gmail/protonmail?? i have personall…
You can self-host email all you want if you intend only to receive. If you want to be received, by O365/Gmail - that's another story.
It is technically possible to self-host email and send mail to O365/Gmail. They don't block 100% of small mail servers, only a fraction of them. But if you out of lack and their AI decided to block your IP, contacting their mail team is form very hard to impossible.