Comment by wolvoleo
3 days ago
Yeah I was thinking of getting infomaniak for my mail. I don't really care for the encryption thing of proton (all email comes in in plain text anyway!) and I want to just be able to do plain imap without bridges.
But their stuff just feels a bit weird somehow. I didn't really want to commit yet. I'm glad to hear you had good experiences.
Proton has mail, calendar, drive, docs, sheets and more coming. Everything is done e2ee where possible. In case of mail, when the peer has no Proton, mail is indeed send plaintext.
Mail is stored e2ee on server, so not even Proton can read it. Proton mail has also made PGP very easy to use. It’s Swiss based and a foundation, not a corporation. They’ve done this so they cannot easily be bought.
It ticks most boxes in terms of privacy and security.
I only want it for the mail. Everything else I self-host anyway. It's just that mail is hard with bad actors like Microsoft demanding certain reputation standards (e.g. you have to send X amount of legit mail per month or you get blocked even if they've never seen spam from you!). But for mail the encryption is just useless in my opinion.
The encrypted mail storage adds no value for me because I pull all my mail from the server immediately anyway. It's just a big hassle to deal with that bridge. And when a mail comes in they have to handle it in plaintext (and also, the other party sees it which is 90% of the time microsoft or google or another bad actor). I just view email as a lost cause really.
The only thing I get from Proton is the VPN.
> Mail is stored e2ee on server
Exclusively, or do they keep caches around? I am asking since everything is clear text in the webmail. I wonder if they handle the rare case of proton to proton (encrypted) mail differently from regular unencrypted mail. I assume they have to decrypt a master key stored on the server with your password, and then decrypt every encrypted email on the fly on the server, or they have to send the master key to the client side.
Now think that through when you have thousands of searchable e-mails, sorted arbitrarily. I won't say it is impossible, but I think that maintaining plain text indexes rather than encrypted ones are really tempting.
You’re post is full of misconceptions and mistakes.
Mail is stored e2ee exculsively. The’ve been summoned to hand over mail many times, which they weren’t able to do. Quick search on Ecosia and find the articles.
They don’t have a master key or else the whole e2ee story is a fad, which it isn’t. The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Part of the password is used to decrypt the data.
Search is done client side. You have to download a big search index in order to have proper search. The iOS app doesn’t support downloading the index so search is limited there.
Please think and do some work before you reply.
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I love Proton but it's really low on usability since their calendar doesn't integrate with anything (by design). If you are used to managing a busy calendar it's quite a shock. And their docs and sheets apps are extremely minimal and basic.
And of course the recent allegations that they hand over your metadata on >90% of requests. See https://x.com/DoingFedTime/status/2030108076531995016
Calender is basic indeed, but good enough for a family sharing a calendar. Proton is working on a new calendar app which is coming out this year.
> Proton has mail, calendar, drive, docs, sheets and more coming
As of today, there is no official Proton Drive client for Linux that I'm aware of. There is unofficial support via Rclone, but it is still beta and I try to avoid mounting via Rclone anyway. I recall that it wasn't a really convincing experience when I tried it with OneDrive.
Proton Drive for Linux (and Drive SDK) are announced for this year. Unfortunately not more specifically than “this year”.
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Proton is moving out of Swiss, because of privacy concerns and new laws...
Just fyi
They aren’t. They do have made their IT such that they can move very easily. If the Swiss government will pass worse privacy laws, Proton said they will move to Norway or Germany.
I'm using it Infomaniak, including their KDrive as a Dropbox replacement (with 2TB of data). I've even used their video conferencing app. No complaints so far. All seems to work just fine.
The infomaniak KDrive has also pretty great pricing and surprisingly great linux client (it even supports “online/offline” files.
Interesting, files on demand is something I'm missing a lot. I'm on BSD though :'( I'll check if it can be made to work (full support is too much to ask I'm sure but perhaps a port can be made).