For some reason I have it in the back of my mind that they were at one point accused of being a honeypot for US intelligence because of their association with MIT. Probably complete BS, but maybe not. Are they as open source as they claim to be? Looks like they’re on github. F-Droid seems to think they have some Google libraries or whatever that they use.
ProtonMail users, how do you like/dislike it?
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On the open/closed source issue: how do they stack up against things like Tuta and Signal? The latter I heard was not actually completely open source.
AFAIK Signal are pretty much FLOSS, they’re just keeping their cards extremely close, to the point of turning into a data silo.
- Moxie Marlinspike famously nixed the LibreSignal app and demanded they stop using Signal servers.
- And last I heard Signal can but refuses to federate with other servers, so their available server code might as well be closed source. That is, you can setup your own Signal server but you can’t connect to the network that others use…
Federation no longer works, no. They did have it at first but Moxie hated it because it was harder to push new features.
But you can use other clients. It’s not expressly allowed and LibreSignal stopped their development, but they’ve never actually banned anyone for doing it. I use the Matrix bridge to Signal and I’ve never seen issues with it.
Also, Moxie doesn’t work there anymore so their attitude might be changing. I hope so, as having an official option to use third-party clients and bots (for the latter see Telegram where they add a LOT of value to group chats like live transcription or translation) would really make the platform a lot more viable for me. As it is now I hardly use it and I never recommend it because I don’t see the point of replacing one walled garden with a slightly nicer looking one that is still nonetheless a walled garden.
I realy like Matrix but normies tend not to grok it because they need a username and password. Weird, because Discord and other services do too and they manage to use them fine. But whatever. I’ll just bridge all their shit.
It’s been a while since I looked at Signal but I was aware that Marlinspike stepped down. that can only be an improvement after he effectively shut down LibreSignal. I guess projects like the Matrix bridge have somehow been more acceptable?
If you want open source encrypted messaging, try delta chat. It’s an email client that’s styled like a messaging app, and it works with most email providers.
Edit: a word
They are alright. They are no honeypot. You should bring proof if you spread such words.
They publish now and then the source code to their apps and services. They don’t develop publicly.
I don’t have any proof, just a dim almost certainly wrong recollection in my aging brain.
I’m on the edge of quitting protonmail. The issues:
- #CAPTCHA hell. At least for Tor users.
- no app in f-droid
- API shenanigans and/or CAPTCHA breaks hydroxide (the foss bridge)
- protonvpn: you can no longer fetch all the configs in one download. You have to click “download” >120 times now to get all the configs
- account locks if you do not login frequently enough (i think every 6 months)
- if you supply your login creds but get a CAPTCHA and say fuck this, and walk, it does not count as a full login needed to reset the expiration clock
- the CAPTCHAs are graphical which forces you to enable images in your browser; but when you do that you get images that junk up your screen and waste bandwidth
- no public keyring. Hushmail was better in this regard. An advanced user could upload their PGP public key to Hushtools and then encryption just worked for hushmail users contacting that person. After Hushmail started charging, I would tell the normies who need comms w/me to get a gratis Protonmail account. But then I have to send them my public key and they have to figure out how to attach it to my profile in their phonebook. It’s a show-stopper in many situations.
For what it’s worth, I think if you add the izzysoft repo to F-Droid (https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/repo) then you’ll get the ProtonMail App; I think regular F-Droid has only the VPN.
Protonmail failed to satisfy F-Droid’s inclusion criteria because it requires gms (playstore framework) and because it uses Firebase messaging.
Since I’ve disabled gms in my device I’m not sure how Protonmail would work for me. Someone tells me I might simply lose push notifications capability. But I am confused because Snikket pushes notifications just fine on my device.
My only major complaint is their free-tier is a bit lacking compared to what Skiff had (or I guess has, but not for much longer.) I think their platform is great, and definitely worth paying for, but given I’m a broke college student that’s not much of an option. Also their support for third party clients (or lack thereof) isn’t great, though I don’t use those as much. Otherwise I like it quite a bit!
Only thing would be the closed source server and no third party apps. They do have an API, but I haven’t found anything written on top of that.
I’m not entirely sure why expected a user-owned private key 🤔 How do they ensure zero knowledge if you send them the username and password?
They do have an API, but I haven’t found anything written on top of that.
Not 3rd party of course but most of their official clients are FOSS.
How do they ensure zero knowledge if you send them the username and password?
Because you don’t. I haven’t looked into how it works exactly but all your browsers sends is your username and a proof of you having access to the password
General rule of thumb:
- Web: can change at any moment, can serve a highly secure mail web app… except to those it might decide to target, giving them zero notice, leaving close to zero trace.
- Electron based “app”: if it can run random JS from the web, see first point.
- Compiled app: to change its way of working, the user needs to update/download a different version. An explicit user action is required, people can notice malicious changes and warn others about them.
- Compiled open source app: same as a compiled app, except people can also notice malicious changes before running the code, fork it to remove them, compile it themselves, and warn others.
ProtoMail, touts itself as a “secure web app”, which is a contradiction.
If you use an open source app to access ProtonMail’s service, the security lies in whatever app you use. At that point, might as well send E2E encrypted mail via GMail.
TL;DR: the way most people use it, is just security theatre.
At that point, might as well send E2E encrypted mail via GMail.
From a security stand-point: Yes. From a privacy standpoint: Absolutely not.
Both privacy and security are the same in either case:
- Both servers know who’s connecting
- Both servers see the connecting IP
- Both servers know the source and target mail addresses
- Neither server knows the message’s content
- Neither server controls the client’s app
The moment you go off-VPN, or use a webapp, security goes out the window.
Privacy, as in social network/contacts, goes out the window the moment you use a fixed email address; more so if it’s associated to your IRL identity.
There’s a large difference between surrendering massive amounts of highly critical metadata aswell as some data* to a known abuser vs. an entity that prides itself in not abusing your data and which even takes specific technological measures to make it as hard for them as possible (zero access encryption at rest, automatic key discovery).
(* Partial social graph, interaction timestamps, political interests, health, hobby interests and much of that usually even in plain text data form when receiving email; stored in in plain text forever.)
known abuser vs. an entity that prides itself in not abusing your data
Right, “don’t be evil” 🙄. Corporations are corporations.
zero access encryption at rest, automatic key discovery
Also called “encryption”. Just so we’re on the same page:
Enigmail for Thunderbird supports both since 2018. The mail service, be it ProtonMail, GMail, Outlook, etc., is irrelevant regarding security or privacy.
FYI Thunderbird now natively supports PGP (and possibly WKD?) without the need for Enigmail.
Proton fell into the black hole when they pitched to replace Gmail on Huawei phones. Being eager to do business with the CCP was a dealbreaker.
That said, I have a Tuta account. I don’t use it for everything, but I have no complaints.
Proton AG lost me as a customer the minute they backdoored a binding arbitration clause into their TOS last year.
The difficulty of proving damages in breach of privacy cases combined with generally weak privacy legislation globally means the threat of a class action often serves as one of the only practical deterrents to abuses of power by corporations controlling sensitive personal information. By changing its terms of service, Proton essentially immunized itself from suffering any significant penalty in the event its negligence leads to a mass breach of privacy of its users.
Tactics like the use of binding arbitration clauses are hallmarks of inherently untrustworthy corporations.
I’ve had good luck. Reliable and fast as any other service.
I’m a 3rd year subscriber of the Unlimited plan, $158 for 2 years at a time. I utilize the drive, aliases, mail and VPN.
No real complaints. I still use Google calendar because it integrated more with Android phone. I still consider going back to Gmail occasionally for simplicity. I really hate Gmail though but email is garbage. Does it really matter?
I basically priced out good vpn’s, and the two year price of proton was pretty similar to most other quality VPN plans. So why not stick with it and get the rest of the ecosystem too.
I don’t think about it too much, it’s email and it works.
I do not care about secure email because I don’t communicate with anyone else using it, but I do like how it automatically blocks trackers and cleans email links for me.
My experience has been fine. If you go into Proton Mail with the understanding that you’re doing it to stop Google from data mining your email, and not for the sake of truly private/anonymous email, you’ll have a good time. The aliasing feature is super nice as well.
What qualifies as being truly private/anonymous email in your book? Or does such a thing even exist?
Based on the reading I’ve done, it doesn’t really seem like one exists - it’s just not what email was designed to do. I’m not an infosec professional, but that’s the impression I’ve been given by others in the field.
it’s just not what email was designed to do.
Email was designed decades ago, before the concept of data-mining even existed. It probably didn’t occur to the creators how universally accepted it would be. Much less rampant.
That being said, its’ privacy is entirely dependent on who stores your data and whether they give a shit.
I can’t get contact photos to display on PM. Tuta doesn’t have this feature at all, but the fact that PM appears to, but doesn’t work; well, it shouldn’t, but little things like that drive me crazy.
Funnily enough, I don’t know that I’ve ever even paid attention to contact photos (not that 99% of the people I email have would have them anyways.)
If you go into Proton Mail with the understanding that you’re doing it to stop Google from data mining your email
You’re not really stopping anything if most of the people you’re emailing are still using Google or Microsoft :) Because they’ll get a copy of your email then anyway. This is really the problem with email IMO. Well, one of the problems, a lack of sender authentication is another one.
I’m mostly just protecting the mountain of old stuff in my archives that I’m too much of a digital hoarder to delete. ;D
a lack of sender authentication is another one
This one is a nightmare. We spend bucketloads on DMARC shit in our department, only to still have loads of issues with email spoofing.
Protonmail is fine, I doubt they are a honeypot but they do have to comply with Swiss court orders which some people give them undeserved hate for, they logged the IP of an activist after an order by Swiss authorities1, however this could happen regardless of where they’re based, no one can ignore a court order. Swiss privacy laws are less protected for communication providers than they are for VPNs, which causes people to mistakenly assume the email providers there are just as private.
IMO they are decent, I only use them as a mirror for my primary email address in case something happens to it, but it’s never failed me in that yet.
As for the open source side of it, the Google libraries they use are the services to allow notifications through Google’s push notification service on Android, and Firebase telemetry. The rest of the app is open source aside from having those included. They don’t offer a version of their app without those yet sadly.
1French authorities initially requested the information, however Proton didn’t respond until it went through a Swiss court___
Doesn’t Proton specifically provide instructions for how to use proton mail via proton vpn (and/or tor, discussed in the article) to provide extra privacy against IP-demanding court orders?
Doesn’t Proton specifically provide instructions for how to use proton mail via proton vpn (and/or tor, discussed in the article) to provide extra privacy against IP-demanding court orders?
That would be rather short-sighted or disingenuous as they would then simply be forced to log their proxy too.
Not according to the article at the top of this thread:
Proton does also offer a VPN service of its own — and Yen has claimed that Swiss law does not allow it to log its VPN users’ IP addresses. So it’s interesting to speculate whether the activists might have been able to evade the IP logging if they had been using both Proton’s end-to-end encrypted email and its VPN service.
“If they were using Tor or ProtonVPN, we would have been able to provide an IP, but it would be the IP of the VPN server, or the IP of the Tor exit node,” Yen told TechCrunch when we asked about this.
and Firebase telemetry.
According to Exodus, version 3.0.17 only had Sentry crash-reporting.
Did they add in Firebase in later versions?
Hmm, the repo I was looking at must’ve just been poorly worded then, I was looking at this one. It said it only used sentry but the warning label said that it also had Firebase, maybe they had it in old versions but got rid of it later but the repo didn’t bother to remove the label possibly, I’ll edit that part
no one can ignore a court order.
They don’t have to ignore it, just go to court to fight it. Apple has done this. To be clear I have no idea if they did or did not do that or what their chances of winning would be.
I don’t think they contested it for this case, we do get numbers on how many they contest yearly though https://proton.me/legal/transparency
Interesting how much the legal orders jumped after 2018/2020
Well I’m glad to see they contest at least some of them. That must cost them a fortune in legal fees to protest 7k orders/year.
They only logged the IP. That’s metadata. IIRC Apple refused backdooring its phone encryption. That’s a lot more invasive.
Also: if the activist had used ProtonVPN he would’ve been completely fine, as (iirc) swiss courts cannot order you to disclose information about your VPN-Users
They didn’t just log the IP, they provided it to French authorities.
like… yeah, no shit
@Nia_The_Cat@beehaw.org, thanks for your detailed reply! 🙂👍
Yeah I remember that conspiracy theory. Iirc, the claim was basically that any company which had any relationship with any US institution must be a honeypot. It was pretty out there, and as far as I’m aware it was very much debunked.
I’m pretty sure that the Google libraries F-droid are things like the push notification service, which afaik almost anything with notifications uses, even signal.
I’ve never actually compiled from source, but AFAIK they are open source. Its been convenient to use for me, just make very sure you don’t lose your password!
Ok, so I’m not completely senile yet; awesome! Oh, and thanks too 🙂
Been using them for 2 years now, I’ve got nothing negative to say. Really happy with their service
Been using them for a while before switching to their paid version. Of course they are closed source and a business, so any hype and over the top praise is misplaced. That said they are indeed one of max a handful companies that never did anything to make me feel that my trust is misplaced. Their service is great, the products are well polished and reliable. Development is slow and they aren’t cheap. Their target audience is very security and privacy aware so any betrayal of trust would be punished incredibly hard. In that light, their own self interest should be a good insurance, should you be uncertain.
Wait, they are or aren’t closed source?
Some of the tech they developed and use is open source. But the core tech is closed. For me, that’s good enough as long as they keep up acting with integrity they do.
They’re open source now
They have open sourced their client software and libraries, but the core of what they provide is closed source software that runs on their servers.
Where can I read more about this? Big fan of proton but don’t want to communicate their status incorrectly either.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210710030151/https://twitter.com/ProtonMail/status/1309380464118030342
and
Have a look at their Wikipedia article as well:
“The source code for the back-end remains closed source.[26][27] However, Proton Mail released the source code for the web interface under an open-source license.[28] Proton Mail also open sourced their mobile clients for iOS and Android,[29][30] as well the Proton Mail Bridge app.[31]”
Thanks!
If you’re looking exclusively for reasons not to use them:
- They advertise to pro users
- They complied with a Swiss warrant to give the IP of a climate activist (but probably anyone would)
- Their customer service is atrocious but so is everyone else’s
- They don’t pay attention to their own service for feature requests
- Lots of fragmentation of features on different platforms
- Linux is a bit of a second class citizen
But overall they’re pretty great.
@helenslunch@feddit.nl, sounds like you’re a Linux user; does any paid version of the desktop client have dark mode . . . ?
Everything has dark mode
As far as I can tell, the Linux desktop client doesn’t have it yet, but has been promised.
I use it every day and I can tell you with great certainty that it does
Could you tell me where the setting is? I haven’t been able to find it.
It seems to be missing from the official app. But I believe it is an account-wide setting. So log into your web interface and change it from there and it should reflect on the app.
- the “ads” aren’t shoved up your ass. It’s not bad.
- their customer service helped me a couple of times. (And a couple of times they didn’t)
- they have a dedicated site for feature requests. Yet, they still choose what they implement and don’t comunicate it perfectly. They’re still a company. They do it better thab most others.
- they don’t artificially limit the features on ine os, because it’s not yet implemented on all. That’s actually a good thing, not a bad one.
- on linux it’s incredibly easy to add a vpn. No idea why we scream for an app.
No idea why we scream for an app.
Simple: an app can’t change at the flick of a button on the web’s end. Trusting a web app, is foolish.
the “ads” aren’t shoved up your ass. It’s not bad.
There shouldn’t be any ads when you’re already an “unlimited” subscriber. None.
their customer service helped me a couple of times.
Cool?
they have a dedicated site for feature requests.
That, as I said, is largely ignored by the company.
they don’t artificially limit the features on ine os
Didn’t say they did.
on linux it’s incredibly easy to add a vpn. No idea why we scream for an app.
Because you want to access the features that Proton offers? Not to mention the other products.
