Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by alansmitheebk 3264 days ago
I use protonmail (protonmail.com). It's encrypted email developed by the scientists at CERN. The data is hosted in Switzerland and therefore subject to Swiss privacy laws. There are app for iPhone and Android. They just came out with a VPN product, too.
6 comments

That means subject to Swiss surveillance laws as well. Not worse than other western countries but Switzerland isn't a safe haven for privacy.

"All Internet service providers must retain the following data for six months:

type of the connections [...] and if known login data, address information of the origin (MAC-address, telephone number), name, address and occupation of the user and duration of the connection from beginning to end

time of the transmission or reception of an email, header information according to the SMTP-protocol and the IP adresses of the sending and receiving email application"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retent...

These laws don't apply to Protonmail: https://protonmail.com/blog/swiss-surveillance-law/

> As a participant in these discussions, we can confirm unequivocally that upon implementation, the provisions regarding data retention introduced by the BÜPF will exempt companies like ProtonMail and ProtonVPN which are not major telecommunications operators.

Note that ProtonMail paid $6000 ransom to hackers: https://arstechnica.com/security/2015/11/crypto-e-mail-servi...

I applaud their privacy stance, but paying ranson money to hackers is a deal-breaker for me.

They were hit by a DDoS that was so big it's suspected to be a nation state. Under those circumstances, their ISP and hosting provider didn't really give then a choice and basically forced them to pay the ransom, which you can read about here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/11/05/proto...

The magnitude of the attack would have killed most services, but ProtonMail managed to mitigate the attack and went as far as becoming their own ISP to prevent getting in this situation in the future.

My two cents on this making them a pretty rare company.

That's an interesting take, but why would a nation state settle for $6k?
I've been testing ProtonMail for a couple months now in search of a Gmail alternative. What's keeping me from fully switching is support for contacts and calendar syncing as well...

That's where I started looking at FastMail.

The protonmail encryption is useless, since it's done in the browser. Don't use it (or any email service) for sensitive data.
The free plan is only limited to 500 Mb though.
Pay for your email or you are the product.
Email is the most important thing you have online, why wouldn't you pay for it?
ahappy protonmail user here, too
Do they support inline images in Email now? Last time I was using it(long ago), neither the web UI, nor the email apps supported drag & drop of images into the compose window..
unfortunately, they don't. their UI/UX is rather basic