Comment by geofft
10 years ago
I suspect, sadly, this is why Gmail and sites like it will continue to win. Secure email always sounds like a good thing, but it's less important in practice than accessible email. If you have to make a choice between confidentiality, integrity, and availability, for day-to-day email, very few people will choose anything other than availability.
(The email deliverability problem doesn't help matters, of course.)
an email server doesn't need to be accessible 100% of the time to guarantee deliverability
By "the email deliverability problem" I'm referring to the problem that only well-known IP addresses get to send mail that doesn't get arbitrarily thrown into spam filters. See e.g. http://liminality.xyz/the-hostile-email-landscape/ , which was front-page here a few weeks back.
If you're just talking about availability, then yes, but this was a sustained DDoS that took their servers down for hours. While the email protocol does insist that the sender should queue and try later, having no new email for hours is not really what people want out of email.
Protonmail's e-mail servers were off line for multiple days. With an outage of that length mail will start to bounce. It depends on the local configuration. But, 3 days/72 hours is pretty standard.
That length of down-time is unacceptable for any type of connection.... even for residential. But at least I guess that the senders will know that the emails bounced.