[joedissmeyer]

Serious question for HN:

What are the opinions on moving a personal family domain on the GSuite Legacy free over to Proton?

It seems like the cost is reasonable, 9.99€/month for 15 email addresses and 3 custom domains. I have just one domain and 5 email addresses for my family so I don't need much. Curious to what everyone thinks about Proton or if there might be a better alternative. Side note: I know Proton is based in Switzerland but my family and I are based in the US. Not sure if that is something which would be a problem.

[jacooper]

Hmm, I don't think that pricing is right, first you would need a business account so every use can have their independent login.

The cheapest option is 7$ per user, which is a big jumb from free.

https://proton.me/business/plans

Otherwise, I think they are really the best private email company.

And now with this change, they are the only privacy ecosystem out there, unless you count nextcloud which a different thing and isn't as heavily encrypted as proton.

Be aware that proton doesn't offer standard SMTP connections, you need a bridge which is only available on desktop. The same thing is true with the calendar/contacts there is no cardav/caldav sync.

I hope they are working on integrating a Dav bridge on desktop and syncing from mobile apps.

[selykg]

>The same thing is true with the calendar/contacts there is no cardav/caldav sync.

The lack of CardDav and CalDav are absolute deal breakers for me. If I can't get my contacts and calendars into my preferred apps on my phone there's just no way they'll get adoption from me. I stick with Fastmail because it just works for mail, calendars and contacts across all of my devices and apps.

[jacooper]

However I would remind you that since Fastmail is based in Australia, its privacy is pretty limited.

> The new law also allows officials to approach specific individuals—such as key employees within a company—with these demands, rather than the institution itself. In practice, they can force the engineer or IT administrator in charge of vetting and pushing out a product's updates to undermine its security. In some situations, the government could even compel the individual or a small group of people to carry this out in secret. Under the Australian law, companies that fail or refuse to comply with these orders will face fines up to about $7.3 million. Individuals who resist could face prison time.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-security-data/a...

[selykg]

Email isn't really secure or private anyway. And Proton's email is only making email between Proton accounts private, so unless a large number of my email recipients are also on Proton it's a moot point.

I don't get the draw of Proton. If I send email to someone else outside of Proton I should assume that email is now in an insecure state.

Fastmail may not advertise privacy, but honestly, I don't think much email in general should ever be considered private, including much of what is sent from Proton.

[cge]

Proton's major draw, in my view, is the storage being encrypted and not accessible unencrypted to the server, not the transmission and emails to others. While it does do relatively convenient PGP encryption to other ProtonMail users (and annoyingly inconvenient PGP encryption to others, when I've tried), these are rather limited in scope, because of the limitations on recipients.

If your concern is a major state-level actor, able to spy on every recipient/sender you're communicating with and generally tap emails being transmitted, yes, Proton offers little protection, and email is insecure. If you're worried about a data breach or targeted attack compromising your stored email in its entirety, however, it does. These are more feasible for smaller-scale attackers, and in getting an entire, potentially complete history of your emails, potentially offer something more than just spying on one email.

I'd speculate that targeted attacks are more often client-side, usually trying to steal credentials from the user, but at least the user can be careful about these. Having all your correspondence stored and readable on a server that isn't under your control means you have to trust the security of the server much more than you would with this type of encryption.

[Reitet00]

> annoyingly inconvenient PGP encryption to others, when I've tried

If the recipient has set up Web Key Directory for their key the encryption looks just like for a Proton recipient (transparent key fetch in the background). And WKD is quite common and easy to setup (eg all major Linux distros have it).

[jacooper]

Proton's feature is its privacy adovacay and now its ecosystem.

Its a compelete ecosystem designed with privacy in mind, and encrypting emails is not the only benefit, another ProtonMail benefit is that no one can read the stored emails, only you can do that.

[selykg]

Maybe so, but if the recipient of the email, or sender of the email is not using an email service that provides the same then those emails should not be considered private. They might not be accessible on my email service, but they are on someone else's.

[stjohnswarts]

Yeah, anything in the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the UK should be considered accessible by the government and shared between the 5 upon request.

[grammers]

It would work if you are all fine with using the same login.

If you want separate logins, take a look at Tutanota, it's 1€/month and you can add each family member as a full user.

As to the location, there is no issue, Tutanota is based in Germany, but both options (Switzerland or Germany) are fine for usage from the US. At least I've never heard about anyone complaining.

[carimura]

Our family did the same thing... gmail is pretty superior in most aspects, but so is their ability to search your deepest darkest secrets. a tradeoff we were fine making. that said in the year we've been using it their overall "arc of change" has been positive and this latest refresh looks to follow that trend. FWIW I use the iphone beta app through trustpilot and it's a lot better but this refresh looks like they're moving towards GA'ing that version soon.

[CobaltFire]

I have Visionary, which allows for five logins if I recall right. It also has a drive replacement, and something like 12 VPN assignments. I run a few domains through it without issue.

Edit: Looks like they aren’t allowing anyone new to sign up for Visionary. That’s recent as I was seeing signups available as of a week or two ago if I recall right.

[ivan_gammel]

I use Visionary subscription for that, so far the only downside was lack of mailing lists - I really want some emails to be received both by me and my wife.

[CobaltFire]

See here for todays sunset if that plans availability:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31505489