[b1476]

As a paying user I feel that the reliability of their services in recent months has been completely unacceptable for me. That combined with the ridiculously slow rollout of new products (will calendar ever be fully released?) has now made me look at alternatives. I love the product itself and the idea behind it, but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN service is pretty absurd in itself and now I have to put up with these reliability issues too?

[protonmail]

We apologize for the unexpected incident this morning that resulted in an hour of downtime. We take this incident very seriously and will be conducting a full investigation and making changes to ensure that it does not reoccur.

This is the first significant downtime we have had in several years, and while we will strive to do better, the incident this morning is something way out of ordinary for Proton.

Regarding development speed, we are working on increasing our development velocity, but due to our security/privacy first approach, we can't cut any corners. You might remember that Gmail was in beta for 5 years before full release. Calendar has been in beta for around a year, and certainly won't take us 5 years.

[killtimeatwork]

Apart from general unavailability, I've had, since yesterday evening, intermittent failures while sending email over Protonmail bridge. Maybe they're over now though, as I've sent an email an hour ago without problems.

[gilrain]

You realize that Gmail's prolonged "beta" was a common punchline to jokes while it lasted, right? Might be best not to compare yourself to that, even favorably.

[eska]

Agree. It's generally a bad idea to point at others in an apology, anyway.. Always turns it into a non-apology.

[sandgiant]

ProtonMail has been rock solid for me for several years now. I might have just gotten "lucky", but Gmail has been down more often for me than PM.

While I do look forward to their calendar solution, it's by no means a deal breaker. I've seen too many products driven into the sand by feature bloat. I use PM for email, that's all it needs to do, and it does that very well IMO.

[mark_l_watson]

Same for me. ProtonMail has been very reliable. We all have a “I want this now feature.” For me, that feature is automatic detection of events in email, with a simple prompt “add to calendar?” implemented.

Last year I was a paying customer for ProtonMail, FastMail, and Google Suite - all at the same time. I have now canceled all paid services except for ProtonMail.

[mhitza]

It's also the only provider that I know of that keeps your emails as ransom if you don't continue payment once you're on an upgraded account, instead of downgrading it for you at the billing cycle.

Good thing I only used my PM email to test things out, paid for an upgrade because I liked their public image, only to come back a year later and have no access to anything unless I pay up.

[submeta]

> keeps your emails as ransom if you don't continue payment once you're on an upgraded account

Absolutely not acceptable. There are other, more gentle ways to convince your customers to stay.

[nix23]

It's typically swiss (i'm swiss) it is not even meant evil but out of sheer ignorance and stupidity we make decisions like that.

Recent examples:

-Switzerland wants to make a Free Trade Contract whith Indonesia, now Swissmem makes some Advertisement on YT with the starting sentence "Indonesia is not just Bali and Palmoil..." First that's kind of ignorant as if Switzerland is just Chocolate and Matterhorn. Second..PALMOIL..that's not something to brag about.

-We had a initiative, which in theory came thru, but was stopped (different theme). It was about Corporate responsibility (Swiss Corps are not allowed to break Swiss Laws even when they are not operating in Switzerland), and now imagine who made that Advertisement on YT against that initiative? F*cking NESTLE!!!

It's like: Hy i'm your dear friend Assad and i am against regulations concerning ABC-Weapons.

BTW: Hey Nestle and Swissmem, if you need someone who filters your BS for the modern age before it goes online, write me an Email (it's my username at protonmail...no pun intended)

[MrDresden]

Just to counter; I've been using their VPN and email for a while and haven't had a single problem.

And while a proton calendar would maybe be useful, I personally don't need them nor want them to become a one stop shop for all things.

[okprod]

I had tried to move over from Google for email and calendar, but Protonmail's calendar isn't ready yet for my needs. Full-time job, startup, volunteer and personal commitments -- I haven't found a calendar app that can manage all this with customizable app and email alerts, search functionality, and daily email digest.

[b1476]

That's exactly what they're becoming though?

[nix23]

Well i think Email Calendar and Contacts have to be one product, otherwise Outlook will be always on the winner side, but VPN...well it brings probably more money in than the other Products combined, my biggest critique is the storagespace (hey Protonmail, storage should be non of your concerns, it got really cheap in the last 10 years)..and the prices are a bit high.

[de6u99er]

Your comment could explain why they need to have downtime for maintaining something. Maybe even a pressing security fix, that breaks things.

That being said, I don't understand why companies don't have test systems for validation of updade and maintenance procedures.

My systems actually always had two test systems. One which was identical with Prod, and another one where test-users could test new features coming out of development system(s).

[dathinab]

Just a guess, but I think they are currently in the process of slowly doing some major infrastructure migrations.

And doing such thinks without downtime can be hard, especially if you did some design mistake at the beginning which wasn't obvious and didn't cause problems until they scaled to a much larger customer base and/or provided additional services (storage, calendar) which originally whern't planed/considered when creating the mail service.

[dathinab]

idk

> reliability of their services in recent months has

Didn't affect me at all, sure they seem to currently slowly do some major infrastructure changes and there seem to have been service interruptions, but again mail is an asynchronous "slow" communication protocol so this didn't really affect me at all and besides today I didn't even notice it.

> ridiculously slow rollout of new products

Do you buy into services because of not yet rolled out products? I at least don't and I prefer them to have a slow rollout leading to a stable product once released then a rushed rollout.

> but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN

I agree that their price for people with many custom domains is high, but then lets be honest most people (I know, in my experience) have sometimes a custom domain very rarely two and hardly ever more. So my guess is for most users it's reasonable priced.

[stilisstuk]

I never understood why people love proton so much. I pay less for more features (e.g. catch all and calendar) with mailfence. And mailfence just seams more honest and less theater like (no cryptocurrency, no vpn, no 1000 meters if granite. Just pgp and metadata removal.)

[pndy]

I didn't had any problems with ProtonMail last year; tutanota on the other hand had this issue in early December where my ISP was locked out from accessing login page for few days - it wasn't a single case since I saw other people with Orange services facing same problem.

[DavideNL]

> I feel that the reliability of their services in recent months has been completely unacceptable

Elaborate...

[wp381640]

I use pm on personal emails where I need privacy. For work emails that I assume everyone can read and that needs availability I use Fastmail and G Suite

[bobsmooth]

Consider the unique services offered by Proton, are they available elsewhere at a similar price? They are not Google.

[b1476]

Not exactly. But, for me at least, reliability of my mail provider is just as important as them respecting my privacy. There are alternatives that I trust just as much as ProtonMail. For what it’s worth I’ve been a loyal customer since the beginning and have been more than supportive of them (I even own Proton merch..), but from a users perspective all I’ve seen recently is them pumping attention into new product releases as opposed to finishing currently half baked products or making their systems more resilient to downtime (which I’ve noticed a lot more of in the last 6 months than since the very beginning). It’s hard to turn a blind eye and continue supporting them.

[dathinab]

Looking at the protostatus history they indeed seem to have an unusual amount of (not too long, but noticable) outages (which I personally didn't notice as I read mails only 1-2 times a day).

My guess is they needed some major infrastructure changes which where at fault, maybe related to them providing additional services.

Or at least so I hope, as this would mean thinks get back to being nearly always reliable soonish.

Would be nice to hear about it from them, but then if my guess(hope) is right we probably only hear about it after it's fully done (at least that is what I would do).

[nix23]

Yes Tutanota...BUT:

https://www.cyberscoop.com/germany-court-ruling-tutanota-ema...

[vinay427]

I think the actual "problem" that this article brings up is German law, and ProtonMail in Switzerland would be no better from what I can tell (and I live here). From the article:

> Tutanota said it plans to appeal the November ruling from a regional court in Cologne, arguing that it contradicts an earlier decision from another German court.

> “This decision shows again why end-to-end encryption is so important,” Pfau said via email. “According to the ruling of the Cologne Regional Court, we were obliged to release unencrypted incoming and outgoing emails from one mailbox. Emails that are encrypted end-to-end in Tutanota cannot be decrypted by us.”

It seems like this openness of the CEO about the warrant and their actions taken indicate that they are trying to do everything they can without brazenly breaking local laws where they operate. "Unfortunately," if you use an email provider based in a country with a system of judicial proceedings and warrants this will always be a concern, and if you use one in a country without these things you instead lose any semblance of checks on these powers. They offer end-to-end encrypted emails that cannot be decrypted, and their clients have long been open-source to verify this unlike ProtonMail.

[nix23]

True here the statements of ProtonMail, Threema, Tresorit and Tutanota:

https://protonmail.com/blog/joint-statement-eu-encryption/

And

>>Does this resolution affect Proton? This resolution is non-binding. On its own, it does not change the current EU framework but rather points the direction the EU may take in the future. ProtonMail is also protected by Swiss jurisdiction (Switzerland is not a member of the EU). Any request for us to develop a backdoor to ProtonMail under this hypothetical anti-encryption law would need to pass the scrutiny of Switzerland’s strict criminal procedure and data protection laws.

https://protonmail.com/blog/eu-attack-on-encryption/

>It seems like this openness of the CEO

Yes, tutanota seems to be a really nice place to work for.