[notresidenter]

(Paying customer) I wish they would focus more on their existing product(s). There's a huge synergy between Calendar and Mail, but Drive, Pass, VPN, are useless (but the VPN is well-done). There's still no Caldav support or scheduling, and a lot of things are annoying in Mail, of course some of these are hard to solve with E2E, but at this point, their E2E claim is also half-baked and mostly for marketing, why not fix all of things?

What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

[frenchman99]

I'm even more convinced that me being a Fastmail customer is a good thing. Fastmail has been rock solid for years.

Their email, calendar and contacts solutions work well with iOS and android (using the DAVx app).

WebApps work flawlessly on Firefox. They have all sorts of customisation for spam filtering, catch all email addresses, etc.

They don't do all the things (vpn, passwords, drive, what have you). But what they do, they do very well.

[fhd2]

Absolutely, very happy Fastmail customer here! My only qualm is that their apps could be better at multi account (switching is too much of a hassle), but that's the only problem I ever had, and I work around it by using different mail/calendar clients.

If you just have a single account with them though, their app is quite excellent and has everything (mail, calendar, notes), no need to get multiple apps and stuff like DAVx unless you want to.

[ndr]

I love the service but hate their android app. It fails to load any content when offline. Absolutely maddening when you need to look up anything, like gig tickets, in a low reception area.

[amelius]

How do you deal with spam in Fastmail?

I switched from GMail to Fastmail about a year ago, but ever since my Inbox is just filled with lots of spam. I tried writing email filters, and have about 50 now, but it is just not cutting it.

And also those promotional mails that I don't want to mark as "spam" but still shouldn't end up in my Inbox ... they drive me nuts.

Since I started using Fastmail, my main means of communication is shifting away from e-mail, which is sad.

[stavros]

I'll second this, I've had absolutely zero issues with Fastmail over many years. It always just works, and is super fast.

[brianmiddleton]

I agree. I also like their explanation on why they don't offer PGP.

https://www.fastmail.com/blog/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/

[omneity]

(another happy paying customer of Fastmail here)

I am pleasantly surprised that Fastmail has no AI cruft in it especially that Fastmail is founded by one of the godfathers of modern AI, Jeremy Howard.

[lloeki]

> android (using the DAVx app)

It borderlines on the insulting that Google refuses to support CardDAV and CalDAV OOTB.

[swatcoder]

As soon as somebody decides that a brand's future requires adding more top-level features rather than specializing in top-of-class delivery of core features, product design becomes an endless treadmill (death spiral?) of adding "yet another half-baked product"

That's not to say that "one thing well" products are sure to be viable, and the "bullet point maximizers" that dominate product design for the last 10-15 years may know best, but this is what it looks like once they run the show either way.

[viccis]

This happened so bad with Wyze. They had a really great little camera for a very brief time. Then I turn around and they're just a white box product reseller, with everything from vacuums to earbuds. Meanwhile, their camera service is a shadow of its former self.

[tombert]

If this is a Proton grievance panel, I really wish they'd optimize their web app, at least with Firefox. If I leave the Protonmail tab open, the amount of CPU and RAM usage for Firefox just spikes up like crazy, and it shoots back down once I close that tab.

I can get around this with the ProtonMail Bridge and using Mutt, which works fine and makes me feel cool, but the web app is considerably more convenient.

[digging]

Both their web app and their android app are extraordinarily sluggish, unfortunately. And I currently am forced to use the web app in a PWA on my phone because the Android app has a current bug where the contents of emails won't load. In other words it's 100% useless, and I uninstalled. By the PWA is agonizing to use, so I've been missing emails lately. For a service to keep getting worse over the years when I want to like it is difficult to swallow, but every day I'm a little closer to canceling my subscription.

[dinglestepup]

Hm, I have Proton Mail in a pinned tab in FF (Mac) - no issues at all. The only time I re-open it is when FF restarts after an update (~once a month).

[euroderf]

Is there some trick to get Mutt's "e" command to work ? My editor (emacs) says the message writes back to the server okay, but then my edits do not "take" on the server.

[domh]

CalDAV and CardDAV support missing is the only reason I still have a google account. I understand it's "tough" with e2ee but adding support to the bridge would be perfectly sufficient, then at least I could use local Calendar/Contact apps.

[InsideOutSanta]

It's pretty easy to self-host CalDAV and CardDAV. I went with Baïkal, it took me maybe 15 minutes to install on a server, it's supported by all of the calendar tools I use, and it's worked perfectly fine for a few months now. So now I'm completely free of Google.

Maybe not for everyone, but a way more feasible option than most people seem to realize.

[aarmenaa]

I've been considering switching from Fastmail to Proton for Mail/Calendar/Contacts, but I didn't realize their bridge didn't do CalDAV or CardDAV. Also, apparently the bridge is desktop-only -- no mobile? That's kind of a deal breaker.

[attendant3446]

What about mobile devices? There is no bridge and you have to rely on official apps, which is the biggest drawback for me.

[tailspin2019]

Also a paying customer. I completely agree. They keep doing this, widening their scope constantly while every new product launched seems to get less ongoing attention than the last one.

[jamil7]

Probably gunning for enterprise contracts in which they need an answer to every service and product.

[rapnie]

This. Also a paying customer. My Android mail app is definitely not fully baked. At times it drains my battery trying unsuccessfully to fetch notifications. Other times it fetches a ton of notifications I had already seen.

Proton is on a good path in many ways, but these rapid launches of new apps will kill the company if they don't do it well.

[vishnugupta]

> What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

New product often means new segment of customers they can go after. Whereas refining existing ones will help reduce the churn.

Their sales/marketing pitch gets that much better.

[juandemarco]

Missing Caldav support is really painful. I've had to spin up my own Caldav container (Radicale) and leave Proton Calendar behind, but I'm still unable to send calendar event notifications from any calendar app on mobile, only from thunderbird.

[logicprog]

Well I'm also a paying customer and I'm really glad they're doing this — this way I don't have to awkwardly piece together a VPN, a password manager, a mail client, a notes app, and a Google Docs alternative all from different places, probably paying separate subscriptions to each since I wouldn't trust free services. Instead I get a reasonably good suite of apps for everything privacy-related I need, all for $10/mo. The more they add, the more that money feels worth it and the more affirmed in my choice to pay it I feel.

[jacooper]

I agree, everytime I think of migrating away from Proton, there's nothing that can replace the stack for the same price. Maik + aliases alone are 6.5$, that's without including cloud storage or a vpn, you just can't beat it at that price.

[paledot]

I didn't feel comfortable with Google controlling my entire digital life, should I feel comfortable with migrating it wholesale to Proton?

[webkike]

The connection is encryption, and having all of these services paid for and therefore have better support. I really like protonpass so I was happy to see that I already pay for it

[efitz]

Paying customer for many years.

I like Proton Pass and switched to it about a month ago from 1Password. It's not quite there yet; I'm thinking of switching back. There are still some sharp edges like lack of support for credit cards, addresses, etc.

[triceratops]

The VPN is "well-done" but "useless"?

[ffsm8]

VPN are pointless for the vast majority of people.

You're essentially just shifting the person you're trusting from your ISP to proton.

Downloading copyrighted media is pretty much the only usecase I can think of for such a service, and most people don't do that.

The only other usecase would be to conceal your traffic on a public wifi, but you'd be better served just going through your home connection at that point. Pretty much all decent routers provide you with dyndns+VPN services builtin

[notresidenter]

It's a great product, but I don't need it from them. I bought a protonmail subscription, not a Proton subscription.

[attendant3446]

I actually think it's their best (in-house) product (and SimpleLogin from the acquired products).

[jacooper]

They can't add direct caldav support because it's e2ee, they should add a caldav bridge to their mail bridge, they also should work on contact sync.

I agree that drive is underpowered, they still don't have a syncing client on Linux, and their android/iOS client is quite limited and the photo integration is really half baked. However Pass is really great, it has better UI/UX compared to Bitwarden.

[CivBase]

> What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

I suspect they're attempting to build up an attractive package for business customers, competing with the likes of O365 and G-Suite. There's probably a lot more money in that than in personal email hosting.

[maximinus_thrax]

> What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

Growth. I'm also a (happy) customer, I've been using their products for years and my personal impression is that they're trying to catch up and build a full productivity suite as fast as possible.

[KeyBoardG]

It is interesting to watch them try to grow so quickly. At some point they'll need to turn more profit to hold all this scale up. We'll see if they can stick to the privacy claims or start to sell out.

[InsideOutSanta]

They just switched to a non-profit system of governance.

[jacooper]

They are already profitable without any VC investments.

[mrmetanoia]

Agreed, happy paying customer but would rather see them investing in improving Drive. Seems like they're trying to get more enterprise-y which sucks.

[0x1ch]

I can't even search on the mobile app for android... I could about two years ago until they decided to push out half baked rewrites or something.

[mzajc]

Edit: they have since added support for this, my bad --- I am still bummed that ProtonMail doesn't support automatic forwarding. Their rationale is that E2EE makes this impossible, but most of my incoming mail is unencrypted anyway, and I could decrypt the rest myself with Thunderbird and GPG. Lack of automatic forwarding support makes it harder to switch mail providers, on the other hand.

[cedws]

It’s misleading marketing. They sell their email service as “E2EE”, even though the majority of emails flowing through their system are in fact NOT end to end encrypted, they’re visible to Proton in plaintext upon receipt. This is a fundamental limitation of email protocols. You only get E2EE by using PGP at both ends.

[bartbutler]

We do support automatic forwarding, have since last fall.

[McDyver]

Talking of half-baked, one thing I find really frustrating is that on the mobile app you can't even see the mail headers of a message. Absurd

[kertoip_1]

They are probably targeting to provide services for companies. It's hard to convince someone to pay for mail if your competition (like Google Suite or Ms365) offers mail AND a bunch of additional stuff. They also just want to tie customers to they services as much as possible to prevent them leaving

[treprinum]

What irritates me is that their ProtonMail iOS client always sends a notification when I log into ProtonMail from my laptop and I can't turn that notification off without turning off all notifications. I don't want to be spammed by yet another useless security-freak notification.

[philwelch]

On the one hand I can agree with this—I would love them to focus on refining the current suite of Proton apps.

On the other hand, Google’s ability to monitor the contents of Google Docs and engage in censorship is extremely concerning and Proton seems well-placed to provide an alternative.

[icar]

It's not going to be as half baked as other products they've released in the past that were made from scratch because this is basically Standard Notes that they bought directly integrated in Drive.

[jamil7]

Also a paying customer, I'd like it if they would email an invoice every month instead of me needing to go login to the web UI and dig for it when I do my monthly tax reporting.

[KingOfCoders]

If this is invoice griefing group, please

   1. Everyone make invoices PDF
   2. Send them out every month
   3. If I need to log in, make them easy to find on the first page
   4. Name them <company>-<invoice>-<date>-<number>-<amount>.pdf

Thanks!

[stockhorn]

(Paying customer) Yes! I cant believe I still cant share a folder with another account on proton drive (apart from read-only sharing via link), but now instead they add .....

[protonmail]

You can now, with this recently introduced feature: https://proton.me/blog/enhanced-sharing-drive

[westpfelia]

I can see it as trying to compete with say a google in all competencies.

So hopefully once they have tool parity with Gsuite they would buckle down and work on features of each application?

[al_borland]

They need to keep in mind that Google spend decades getting to where they are with the current toolset. Proton shouldn't be expected to replicate it in a couple years.

I'm sure people are asking for this stuff, but I hope it is sustainable. I'm a paying customer and only use the email today. With the pace of these releases, I'm not comfortable investing in these new tools, because I'm not sure how long they'll be around. I'm starting to question the email choice, since I'm worried they are spreading themselves too thin. I'm not sure what their financial situation is like, but I hope this isn't all from a bunch of funding or debt they will need to answer for at some point.

[red-iron-pine]

certainly not in all competencies, but there is definintely a demand for O365 or GSuite that's not going to actively datamine the hell out of you.

This isn't even a "im a paranoid l33t hacker", just that I don't want someone capturing 100% of every document and communication in my business.

like holy shit, we're gonna let MS hookup their AI to monitor everything all the time? cuz that's what my org is doing with Copilot...

[drpossum]

I use pass for all my TOTP and keep my passwords separate with KeepassXC. It works really well.

I agree and wish for Calendar to use much better integration

[ilrwbwrkhv]

PMs get promoted when doing the shiny new thing instead of improving the dull old thing.

[lagniappe]

What a world we live in when even the agencies have to deal with PMs

[tossandthrow]

Yep.

In the end I switched away from proton due to their negligence on this core product suite.

[denysvitali]

I love Proton Mail, but their mailbox search on Android is just awful.