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by Shacklz 772 days ago
There are some serious anti-proton-vibes in this thread, so just my 2 cents as a paying customer: I'm rather happy with their service. I pay them money, they make sure that Joe in Marketing won't be able to harvest data from my emails. I'm also fairly optimistic that they take security serious enough that the blast radius of some dataleak is hopefully very limited.

I have zero delusions however that they can protect me from state agents, let alone state agents with malicious intent. And I don't think it's realistic to expect that for the amount of money they cost. But that's fine with me - it's Joe from Marketing I'm scared about, and so far they seem to do a good job keeping Joe at bay :)

2 comments

Seconded, happy Proton customer for years since de-Googling my life.

Par for the course at HN to have a "vaguely dislike-ish" relationship with Protonmail. Fastmail is the poster child of HN on the other hand.

I would guess the gist of it is that if you promise _any_ amount of security (or whatever feature), HN will nitpick you to death on not going 100% (despite the general improvement to your security). If you don't promise security at all, it doesn't matter that you're less secure than Proton. Something like that.

It's normal. Dropbox was derided on HN because it wasn't much more than a glorified FTP.
I've just been poking around at the Dropbox APIs recently when I got so frustrated by the fact that the Fastmail "attach from Dropbox" feature has been loading directly into my personal files space rather than showing the shared team folders since we switched over to using those last year - and I now have to download and re-upload files from those folders.

It's more than a glorified FTP. FTP does some heinous things with a separate control channel and stuff (let me tell you about adding encryption support to the Perl FTP server some other day), but this is next level!

https://developers.dropbox.com/dbx-team-files-guide

It's not even as simple as just sending a fixed string in the "Dropbox-API-Path-Root" header for every API request (and they're all path based, so you have to make sure you always send that header or the paths won't parse right) - you have to get an ID for the real root, with a separate request, with a scope that we weren't requesting on refresh tokens.

So I hacked together something that worked on my testbed on the train ride home, but making it good is going to include adding a caching layer to the token refresh code, and suddenly it's not just a casual project. I'm still going to do it though, because dammit I have a file to attach to an email on Friday and I'm happy to spend hours on this to save myself 30 seconds.

I'm a free customer and I am always annoyed by ads in my inbox about other services provided by Proton. I signed up for an email box, I don't care about Proton Drive nor ProtonVPN. I chose Proton specifically because it supposedly had less or no ads at all, but it seems like Gmail continues to be the better choice.
Maybe this is disabled for free customers but at least for me there are settings to enable/disables what I kind of informations I'd like to receive from them.

Gmail in that regard I've always perceived as worse - every few months or so they update their policy, linking to some gargantuan document that I can't be bothered to read, each time wondering how much of my soul I've sold this time around...