Comment by that_lurker
3 years ago
Could the title be update to contain the word bridge as the issue is in the Protonmail bridge application and not on Protonmail itself. The entire title is clickbaity, but adding the birdge moves it away from being misleading.
The problem is they've been aware of this very serious bug for more than a year, and haven't tried informing their users. So "Protonmail" in this context refers to the business, and the issues surrounding their responsibility, competence and ethics.
The business is just 'Proton' though, ProtonMail is one of their offerings.
Doesn't matter much, if most refer to them by ProtonMail, by their main product.
Same way people would refer to "Facebook" meaning the whole of Meta
If there is a critical issue with an open source software any user can fix it.
If no user steps up then it might not be that important issue in the first place.
Or it's important, but nobody has the skills/time/familiarity/acceptance from upstream maintainers combo.
Compared to the FOSS origin myths, many huge projects, with tons of end users, including very foundational ones, like GTK+ and OpenSSL and such, are understuffed (or just 1-2 base maintainers heavily overworked, who do 99% of the work and can't take it anymore), and nobody cares or has the time to dive in and fix anything.
Other projects that might have some person interested to bugfix, have maintainers that don't like contributions outside a clique, and ignore bugfixes submitted for years or forever.
So, "any user can fix it" is sometimes just in principle, while actual users than can fix and do fix it are thin on the ground, and othertimes it's just an option for external patches, that will not be merged upstream.
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Proton-bridge is a premium product you only get by being a paid subscriber. If it is open source, they should not be expecting contributions. One pays to make sure issues like this can be fixed, they don't pay to fix the issue themselves.
How is it a click bait? Don't forget bridge is a paid feature of Protonmail.
Current title is "Protonmail can delete the wrong email and nobody cares".
It makes it seem as if using just protonmail could result in deleting a wrong email. This is not the case, you have to be using proton bridge.
People who care about protonmail but don't care about proton bridge have to click the link to learn that.
You don’t have to use the bridge for this to happen. Read the issues.
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"Nobody cares" and "this is a complicated thing that we've spent a year+ building a replacement for" don't seem very congruent to me. That said, it's a rather awful issue for a service like this to have for that long.
Read the issues, it’s happening to people using the web ui too.
I don't think that was the intention of the submitter, but IMO it's significant enough that you providing a link to such an issue would be welcome and appreciated.
Happens occasionally on the mobile app on iOS for me.
I am slowly migrating everything away from my paid ProtonMail account, and I intend to just go back to using a megacorp email... despite absolutely loathing and detesting megacorps. At this point in life, email is simply too important. Notices from government agencies, my accountant, my lawyers, my various banks... I quit self hosting for these reasons (no matter how good I am, I am not full time keeping my self-hosting pristine), and now I apparently cannot fully trust Proton.
I'm a happy fan of fastmail. The company is based in Australia if that's an issue.
I was hovering over the button to start moving from megacorp to Proton. Bleh. Which megacorp will you pick? Are there really no better options? Thx.
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