I recently left ProtonMail and went back to Fastmail. My reason was that they will never be able to fully support IMAP and now CalDAV because of the encryption they use. I grew to accept that email is not for secure messaging and my paranoia of "I'm being watched" just went away.
If you need secure messaging, use something other than email.
I came to a similar conclusion. You should write every email as if it were public, because it's entirely likely that it will be. They can be forwarded, made public through legal discovery, or exposed in a data breach (eg. Sony/North Korea).
Forget security for a second, imagining every email as public record will make you more considerate and less biased writer. And from a business perspective, email should be viewed as a public legal record, because in some cases it will be used that way.
That's not to say that there shouldn't be private messaging options, it's just that email isn't one of them and was never really built to be. PGP was always sort of a tacked on solution with a lot of faults (no forward secrecy, plenty of meta data leakage, usability issues)
All that being said, I still left Gmail for Fastmail. Just because I consider every email I write to be public doesn't mean I want Google getting a free pass to mine and sell my data.
I agree that email shouldn't be considered secure but disagree that you should just give up as a result.
It's trivial to use an email provider in a more privacy-friendly jurisdiction (e.g. Mailbox.org in Germany) and with a bit of effort you can even move to a provider the PGP-encrypts incoming email which can then be decrypted by your email client (which can connect with IMAP).
Given that the first measure is near-zero effort and saves you from silent/warrantless law enforcement requests, I think it's worth it.
Encryption is a bit more annoying but it does save you from later disclosure of your emails.
Please note that Fastmail is an Australian service. I would not trust Fastmail with my email privacy. Not because of the company, but because of the encryption laws in Australia.
Same deal, I loved the service but I don’t love living in my browser. I wanted IMAP and eventually that meant installing an app that ran a local IMAP sever that your client needed to connect to.
I suppose it’s a limitation of the protocol, and it’s good that protonmail doesn’t store your emails plaintext. However, they know the encryption keys...and so will any attacker.
I went to the Office 365 email package because I get more value out of the exchange server. Any emails I want to encrypt, I will do so myself. 99.99999% of my inbox is spam and automated mailing list crap and notifications and TOS updates, with maybe one or two emails every couple of months that are actually from a human being.
"Secure messaging" is a fantasy. Nothing is 100% secure. The question then becomes, how much security is important to you? Personally I prefer a marginal level of security with encrypted email over no security at all. Your argument is the same as saying, "well they might as well store our passwords in plain text since encrypted passwords often get leaked or hacked anyway".
Fastmail doesn’t offer phone support for paid users.
I have an account with them and spent months troubleshooting a carddav sync issue with my two Mac computers before giving up and switching contacts over to iCloud.
Proton mail seems pretty hungry for business. I inquired for a paid plan and they follow up all the time with sales people who have unique email addresses.
I moved over to Fastmail from ProtonMail a few weeks ago. I think if you value the encryption and privacy and don’t mind the lack of basic stuff like threading in the mobile app or IMAP integration, ProtonMail is fully worth it. That said, for me I just want a well featured email/calendar service that can replace gmail once Gewgle fucked us over with Inbox. Fastmail does that for me and provides a lot less friction whilst doing so.
ProtonMail feels like a one-trick pony to me. They’re cruising on the allure of privacy features but they have a ways to go on other basics.
I'm not even sure it's all that great of a trick, considering that no amount of encryption and security on Proton's own servers or in their app can protect the contents of emails that are sent to (edit: or received from) someone who doesn't use Proton.
I am a current customer and think they've got a really well-done service and app, but lately I've been wondering if it's the privacy equivalent of the Maginot Line.
When I initially set out to change mail providers, I considered both Fastmail and ProtonMail.
Ultimately, my decision was based on the fact that ProtonMail is a Swiss company, a country whose privacy laws are stronger than Fastmail’s country of origin, Australia.
So far I’m really happy with ProtonMail as a replacement for Gmail, as a mobile-first user. The only issue is saying “ProtonMail” to people who have never heard of it (surprisingly prone to misspelling).
They have IMAP, you just have to install a program they call the bridge. I use the Linux version that's still in beta and have had no issues with it so far.
> This calendar key will then be symmetrically encrypted (PGP standard) using a 32-byte passphrase that is randomly generated on your device. Once it is encrypted, your calendar key will be stored on the ProtonCalendar backend server.
32-byte passphrase: might be fine, depending on what those bytes are; the interesting question is how much entropy it got generated from.
> Each member of a calendar will have a copy of the same passphrase that is encrypted and signed using their primary address key. The signature ensures that no one, not our server or any third-party adversary, changed the passphrase.
This is where it gets weird. Why do both? The obvious way to encrypt with an ECC key comes with authentication for free. Signing mostly has negative privacy implications. (I think the answer is "we incorrectly decided PGP was a good idea a long time ago and now we are stuck with its problems, which include being wrong about authenticators".)
> The invited member, if they decide to join the calendar, can decrypt the passphrase using their address key. They can also verify that the signature on the passphrase belongs to your email address key. This lets the invited member cryptographically verify that you invited them. To accept the invitation, ProtonCalendar will then pin the passphrase for the invited member by replacing your signature with one created using their own email address key. This signature will later be used by the invited member to verify the passphrase at each application start.
Again, with designs less than twenty years old you can do that without a signature.
> To accept the invitation, ProtonCalendar will then pin the passphrase for the invited member by replacing your signature with one created using their own email address key. This signature will later be used by the invited member to verify the passphrase at each application start.
what
I'm reviewing the attendee scheme next, but I need more coffee first.
This is a bad idea right? We aren't supposed to decrypt then verify usually, correct? I'm told this is standard for implementations of OpenPGP, but it just seems like a horrible design (of course OpenPGP itself is probably bad).
The iCalendar spec[1] already features "encryption by committee" by being thoroughly obfuscated through its innate unreadability and undocumented vendor extensions.
On a more serious note, a sibling comment asked if there's an API. And, really, for an API to work, we'd need to agree on some kind of data structures. Reading that spec, and having mucked with LDAP, IMAP and related specs, it really feels like we're still banging rocks together in how we define the semantics of data exchange.
The Fastmail devs have been working on getting JMAP for calendars standardised through the IETF. It’s intended as a mature, modern replacement for all the iCal / CalDAV junk. The biggest bottleneck at the moment is getting past the chicken and egg problem - we really need Apple and Google and others to adopt the new protocols for them to start to be useful. JMAP for email is currently struggling against the same adoption issue.
This is a welcome development. ProtonMail has worked well for me. Now if I could only find a way to make a Pixel phone accept that email address instead of one of my several one-off fake name gmail addresses that I use for such things.
Don't integrate privacy-focused email service (hushmail/proton etc) into a non-private phone. Access it via the webmail interface.
I've been asked several times to decrypt my phone at international boarders. If you leave things to webmail, unlocking your phone doesn't give them access to your email account, or even tell them where it is. All the TSA/Cops get is my "gmail-for-phone-2018@gmail.com" address that I haven't checked since day one with the phone. My access to my real email is covered by a web browser that doesn't keep records.
If memory serves you can create a Google account with your existing email address. They won’t create a gmail account for you, but you can still use other Google services with it. I’m guessing it’s worth trying with your Android phone?
I switched to tutanota for the price and features already provided, protonmail is really quite nice though. I'd love to better understand the legal implications of the hosting countries laws better.
Yes. I'm surprised they could develop it as quickly as a year in fact.
Calendars are difficult, there is a lot of hidden complexity in the way that users use calendars. They are iceberg products, they look simple from the outset but if you try making one you'll run into the myriad of edge cases.
Calendars are software so directly related to time, I'm not surprised. There are so many edge cases. Timezones, daylight savings time. The fact that so many regions don't use the same standards. We alter year length with leap years and doing things like adding leap seconds. Time is a nightmare to program around.
Yes I did! I thought I was alone. I love when movies do their best to have some sense on the tech side, it could have been an annoying "sending ransom note.." loader instead.
I noticed it as well and just that little touch (along with the line "What is this, CSI:KFC?!") pushed me from "I will probably stream this a few times in the background because it's funny" to "I am preordering the 4K disc as soon as it is listed."
If one doesn't care about web access to their calendar is there any recommended encrypted calendar apps to use on an android device as the default calendar app? Does setting a default calendar app to something other than the calendar on ROM actually prevent calendar data from leaking to third parties?
EteSync[1] has been around for a few years now. It's fully open source and offers secure, end-to-end encrypted, and privacy respecting sync for your contacts, calendars and tasks. Sounds like what you're looking for...
Glad to see any encrypted mail grow their services, this is a bit of a sidebar, but what are some of the updated thoughts about the return of Lavabit and the Dark Mail Alliance group?
I lost a lot of faith in Proton when I learned how much funding they took from the EU. It just runs entirely counter to evidence we’ve seen of Snowden, 5eyes/14eyes, and other programs that the EU truly wants end to end encrypted comms for people.
Am I wrong to be skeptical?
Edit: oh apparently I’m wrong to even suggest something we have other examples of
> I lost a lot of faith in Proton when I learned how much funding they took from the EU.
Unless the origins of the money are unethical (e.g. blood money), it's not where it comes from that matters, it's what's done with it. I haven't seen any misconduct from ProtonMail and the EU's motivations for giving the money seem to be economic, which makes a lot of sense. They want competitive EU tech companies.
> It just runs entirely counter to evidence we’ve seen of Snowden, 5eyes/14eyes, and other programs that the EU truly wants end to end encrypted comms for people.
The EU is not a member of the 5 eyes nor 14 eyes, some of its member states are. The EU is composed of 28 member states, so not even half are participants in those groups.
Even if the EU were a member of the 5 eyes, the EU is not a monolithic entity. The SIGINT arm of the EU (if such a thing exists) may very well oppose end to end encryption while the economic arm promotes it. The same is true in the US, where the NSA attempts to break encryption while the Department of State funds Tor development.
Possibly. There is very little to no private funding for true privacy products. I think this is one of the reasons that Proton had to initially rely on crowdfunding. Perhaps, this is because so many tech companies are stuck in the AdRev mindset where sharing customer private data is how they make their real money? If you look at the ecosystem, you see many privacy products are actually government supported either directly or indirectly. For example, the Tor Project has directly taken massive amounts of funding from the US Military and you may recall the story of how Microsoft was forced to buy Skype in order to open it up to surveillance or lose massive amounts US DoD software license contracts. Those are just two examples. But, there are really limitless cases. Trust Google? But, Google receives massive DoD/EU contracts. Apple? Same thing. Role your own? But, nearly all standard encryption and hashing algorithms were either developed by or reviewed by government funded academic researchers in the US or EU.
The way I think of the privacy ecosystem is that it makes dragnet surveillance much harder and it provides some protection if the government has specifically targeted you for data collection. So, companies/products like ProtonMail and ProtonVPN are good things. But, creating something that is 100% safe for the individual is impossible (or at best so impractical to be untenable).
They have a grand total of $4.8MM in funding, and €2MM came from an EU grant. Hardly even a modest sum considering the tech funding climate these days.
The EU is one of the most privacy-conscious government entities on Earth right now, and it needs to be noted that ProtonMail is located entirely within Switzerland, an even more privacy-conscious state that is not a member of the EU.
you could say the same thing about tor, which was originally developed by the us military. it could be a long-term honeypot with backdoors, or it could be that giving it to the general public makes it more useful for state-sponsored clandestine operations. hard to say, really.
If you want to build something which can't be compatible with popular standards, what is the better choice? Build it anyway, or let those standards stop you? It's the same reason I can't read my PGP-encrypted email on my phone.
EduardoBautista|6 years ago
If you need secure messaging, use something other than email.
mdp|6 years ago
Forget security for a second, imagining every email as public record will make you more considerate and less biased writer. And from a business perspective, email should be viewed as a public legal record, because in some cases it will be used that way.
That's not to say that there shouldn't be private messaging options, it's just that email isn't one of them and was never really built to be. PGP was always sort of a tacked on solution with a lot of faults (no forward secrecy, plenty of meta data leakage, usability issues)
All that being said, I still left Gmail for Fastmail. Just because I consider every email I write to be public doesn't mean I want Google getting a free pass to mine and sell my data.
Youden|6 years ago
It's trivial to use an email provider in a more privacy-friendly jurisdiction (e.g. Mailbox.org in Germany) and with a bit of effort you can even move to a provider the PGP-encrypts incoming email which can then be decrypted by your email client (which can connect with IMAP).
Given that the first measure is near-zero effort and saves you from silent/warrantless law enforcement requests, I think it's worth it.
Encryption is a bit more annoying but it does save you from later disclosure of your emails.
ravenstine|6 years ago
https://protonmail.com/bridge/
Or did it not work for you?
steveeq1|6 years ago
Agreed. Even if you use protonmail, google still has most of your email because they have the most of everyone else's.
dastx|6 years ago
Food for thought.
mechhacker|6 years ago
If they had a better app I'd gladly pay. I just can't stomach gmail anymore and Fastmail was next best.
ljm|6 years ago
I suppose it’s a limitation of the protocol, and it’s good that protonmail doesn’t store your emails plaintext. However, they know the encryption keys...and so will any attacker.
I went to the Office 365 email package because I get more value out of the exchange server. Any emails I want to encrypt, I will do so myself. 99.99999% of my inbox is spam and automated mailing list crap and notifications and TOS updates, with maybe one or two emails every couple of months that are actually from a human being.
StanislavPetrov|6 years ago
riddlemethat|6 years ago
I have an account with them and spent months troubleshooting a carddav sync issue with my two Mac computers before giving up and switching contacts over to iCloud.
Proton mail seems pretty hungry for business. I inquired for a paid plan and they follow up all the time with sales people who have unique email addresses.
smadurange|6 years ago
CivBase|6 years ago
Many services I need do not give me an alternative. I only continue to use email because of those services.
throwawayquick|6 years ago
jamwaffles|6 years ago
ProtonMail feels like a one-trick pony to me. They’re cruising on the allure of privacy features but they have a ways to go on other basics.
mumblemumble|6 years ago
I am a current customer and think they've got a really well-done service and app, but lately I've been wondering if it's the privacy equivalent of the Maginot Line.
mirkules|6 years ago
Ultimately, my decision was based on the fact that ProtonMail is a Swiss company, a country whose privacy laws are stronger than Fastmail’s country of origin, Australia.
So far I’m really happy with ProtonMail as a replacement for Gmail, as a mobile-first user. The only issue is saying “ProtonMail” to people who have never heard of it (surprisingly prone to misspelling).
snowron6|6 years ago
pointillistic|6 years ago
lvh|6 years ago
> This calendar key will then be symmetrically encrypted (PGP standard) using a 32-byte passphrase that is randomly generated on your device. Once it is encrypted, your calendar key will be stored on the ProtonCalendar backend server.
32-byte passphrase: might be fine, depending on what those bytes are; the interesting question is how much entropy it got generated from.
> Each member of a calendar will have a copy of the same passphrase that is encrypted and signed using their primary address key. The signature ensures that no one, not our server or any third-party adversary, changed the passphrase.
This is where it gets weird. Why do both? The obvious way to encrypt with an ECC key comes with authentication for free. Signing mostly has negative privacy implications. (I think the answer is "we incorrectly decided PGP was a good idea a long time ago and now we are stuck with its problems, which include being wrong about authenticators".)
> The invited member, if they decide to join the calendar, can decrypt the passphrase using their address key. They can also verify that the signature on the passphrase belongs to your email address key. This lets the invited member cryptographically verify that you invited them. To accept the invitation, ProtonCalendar will then pin the passphrase for the invited member by replacing your signature with one created using their own email address key. This signature will later be used by the invited member to verify the passphrase at each application start.
Again, with designs less than twenty years old you can do that without a signature.
> To accept the invitation, ProtonCalendar will then pin the passphrase for the invited member by replacing your signature with one created using their own email address key. This signature will later be used by the invited member to verify the passphrase at each application start.
what
I'm reviewing the attendee scheme next, but I need more coffee first.
anaphor|6 years ago
Specifically this part from their whitepaper https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EKpHwB-WwAE4YN0?format=png&name=...
This is a bad idea right? We aren't supposed to decrypt then verify usually, correct? I'm told this is standard for implementations of OpenPGP, but it just seems like a horrible design (of course OpenPGP itself is probably bad).
https://protonmail.com/docs/business-whitepaper.pdf
ben509|6 years ago
On a more serious note, a sibling comment asked if there's an API. And, really, for an API to work, we'd need to agree on some kind of data structures. Reading that spec, and having mucked with LDAP, IMAP and related specs, it really feels like we're still banging rocks together in how we define the semantics of data exchange.
[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545
josephg|6 years ago
https://jmap.io/spec-calendars.html
sverige|6 years ago
sandworm101|6 years ago
I've been asked several times to decrypt my phone at international boarders. If you leave things to webmail, unlocking your phone doesn't give them access to your email account, or even tell them where it is. All the TSA/Cops get is my "gmail-for-phone-2018@gmail.com" address that I haven't checked since day one with the phone. My access to my real email is covered by a web browser that doesn't keep records.
nothrabannosir|6 years ago
tjoff|6 years ago
I feel that it is better to have them compartmentalized.
bfrog|6 years ago
nennes|6 years ago
stabbles|6 years ago
7777fps|6 years ago
Yes. I'm surprised they could develop it as quickly as a year in fact.
Calendars are difficult, there is a lot of hidden complexity in the way that users use calendars. They are iceberg products, they look simple from the outset but if you try making one you'll run into the myriad of edge cases.
Topgamer7|6 years ago
samatman|6 years ago
So, yeah, calendars are hard.
tomlagier|6 years ago
Falsehoods programmers believe about time: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
Falsehoods programmers believe about time part 2 (this one contains most of the timezone related madness): https://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-pr...
C14L|6 years ago
Feels really good to be able to migrate more personal data away from G.
Guest42|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
asdf21|6 years ago
jpcapdevila|6 years ago
techsupporter|6 years ago
gruez|6 years ago
lvh|6 years ago
vabmit|6 years ago
jxramos|6 years ago
tasn|6 years ago
[1]: https://www.etesync.com/
Disclaimer: I created it.
infide1castr0|6 years ago
mmd|6 years ago
dddw|6 years ago
SlowRobotAhead|6 years ago
Am I wrong to be skeptical?
Edit: oh apparently I’m wrong to even suggest something we have other examples of
Youden|6 years ago
> I lost a lot of faith in Proton when I learned how much funding they took from the EU.
Unless the origins of the money are unethical (e.g. blood money), it's not where it comes from that matters, it's what's done with it. I haven't seen any misconduct from ProtonMail and the EU's motivations for giving the money seem to be economic, which makes a lot of sense. They want competitive EU tech companies.
> It just runs entirely counter to evidence we’ve seen of Snowden, 5eyes/14eyes, and other programs that the EU truly wants end to end encrypted comms for people.
The EU is not a member of the 5 eyes nor 14 eyes, some of its member states are. The EU is composed of 28 member states, so not even half are participants in those groups.
Even if the EU were a member of the 5 eyes, the EU is not a monolithic entity. The SIGINT arm of the EU (if such a thing exists) may very well oppose end to end encryption while the economic arm promotes it. The same is true in the US, where the NSA attempts to break encryption while the Department of State funds Tor development.
vabmit|6 years ago
The way I think of the privacy ecosystem is that it makes dragnet surveillance much harder and it provides some protection if the government has specifically targeted you for data collection. So, companies/products like ProtonMail and ProtonVPN are good things. But, creating something that is 100% safe for the individual is impossible (or at best so impractical to be untenable).
elliotec|6 years ago
The EU is one of the most privacy-conscious government entities on Earth right now, and it needs to be noted that ProtonMail is located entirely within Switzerland, an even more privacy-conscious state that is not a member of the EU.
leetcrew|6 years ago
terrycody|6 years ago
dddw|6 years ago
lwhalen|6 years ago
artursapek|6 years ago
C14L|6 years ago
For IMAP email, there is Proton Bridge, to get around the fact that all data on their servers is encrypted with a key that only you have.
otec|6 years ago
[deleted]