[aarondong]

literally signed up for proton mail, their yearly paid plan, around half an hour ago.

I assumed an email service was supposed to be stable first, given how important it is. I was going to use proton mail as my contact email with my domain registrar.

This outage may change my mind.

REFUND?

[InsideOutSanta]

All services have outages. The difference is that when Outlook goes out (https://uptime.qodex.ai/outlook/incidents), it's a happy occasion because nobody can work and we all take an hour off, but when something like Proton goes offline, we're the only ones who can't access our important stuff.

Anyway, point is, Proton is generally very reliable, but shit happens.

[aarondong]

Yeah, just the timing couldn't feel worse in my case. Right after doing some security shuffling and signing up. recency bias

[embedding-shape]

> All services have outages.

I've found this to be true too, that's why I've moved most of my personal email to my own email servers, so at least I can decide when those outages happen, as they tend to mostly happen when you do some changes, not just randomly by themselves. At once you've setup monitoring and recovery for the usual suspects (disks, network, etc).

[aarondong]

That's great. Relying on a third party as your means of authentication and communication with the world always has inherent risk.

[imzadi]

I've had proton for years and have no complaints. I can only think of one or two other outages in that time. Most services do have outages from time to time. tbf, I don't seem to be having any issues with proton today, so far.

[aarondong]

Ok good to know it isn't a complete auth outage. I might keep proton, not sure about other options.

[robertlagrant]

I've used Proton for a couple of years and have never had problems before today, so I think their engineering is of a high standard.

In fact, I applied for an Engineering Director role there not too long ago and they rejected me, so they must have extremely high standards!

[aarondong]

I would assume that their engineering is of the highest standard, given the category of products they provide. And their marketing and general privacy posturing and guarantees.

My comment wasn't supposed to be a jab at Proton. No service can have 100% uptime.

But I signed up for Proton and paid them just for a secure and stable contact email for my domain registrar. And when I couldn't log in for 15 minutes, with opaque errors and requests just being timed out, it was definitely a surprise.

I'll keep using their service. The refund remark was probably a bit polemic.

[bushwart]

I've been a Proton customer since before they started issuing proton.me email addresses. Never had any problems, including today. Right now I can check my email just fine.

[heyheyhouhou]

I've been using Proton for few years already and I did not have a single issue

[Saris]

What made you pick proton over something like mailbox.org? You'd get calendar and contacts sync, IMAP and POP access, custom domains, really nice webmail, and so on..

Proton seems really limited for what you get, and the webmail is absolutely abysmal in performance and design.

[RandomGerm4n]

Mailbox.org is based in Germany, which is why you generally cannot trust its feature that automatically encrypts all incoming emails. Other german mail providers, such as Tuta, have already been forced at the direction of government authorities to store every incoming email from certain accounts separately in unencrypted form. Even though Proton also cooperates with authorities, Swiss data protection laws are significantly stricter in this regard. So far, there is no regulation there that requires them to implement a backdoor. They only disclose metadata, the IP address, and the backup email address. Whereas Mailbox would have to forward the entire emails to the authorities.

[Saris]

I see, I don't use email for anything private because even if my mail server stores it encrypted, it passes through potentially multiple other servers on the way which have unknown privacy.

It's just for notifications and newsletters mostly.

[danshipt]

Doesn’t your bank require an email address? What about your job/employer? Never bought insurance online?

I hate to use emails for private matters too, but can’t avoid it unfortunately

[msh]

My bank will send nothing other than notifications to check their secure message server to my email.

[constantius]

I was not aware of the incident with Tuta, thanks for mentioning.

https://hackread.com/encrypted-email-provider-tutanota-backd...

However, Proton is leaving Switzerland, because of changing legislation, to Germany.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329654

[aarondong]

I wasn't looking for a complete email client at the time, and I just needed a secure and stable address as my contact email for my domain registrar. I had to move my registrar contacts from an old gmail account.

I bought the yearly paid plan because they won't close it for inactivity. I'll look into mailbox.org or another solution, maybe even self-host if I need to migrate my work email!

[msh]

I used to be a mailbox.org customer. I find the proton webmail much much better usability wise.

[spacephysics]

I imagine part of the performance issue is their encryption flow? Their search is sub par even with the on-device search enabled, but besides that i’ve been a happy customer for a few years now. Catch all domain, multiple domains, their cli lets you download all messages and I setup a RAG flow to better search.

Regarding outages, this is the first one I’ve actually noticed and affected me. Obviously not great, but maybe I’ve been deluded in seeing GitHub‘s fiasco of what acceptable means.

[exploraz]

(relevant context in another submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48859976)

[esseph]

Been a customer for years (6ish) and this is the only outage I can remember. Others may have happened but they weren't significant enough me to notice

[SapporoChris]

I recommend reading documentation on refunds before signing up for service. It's much much more effective than relying on a message board.

[Insanity]

I've been a paying customer for many years and can't recall the last time this happened apart from now. It's honestly been a pretty stable service and rarely encountered any issues with it.

[surgical_fire]

I have been a Proton user for the past 4 years.

No complaints so far.

[tossandthrow]

Proton is horrible. Notoriously bad email service.

I ended it after they only sent half my email to my accountant because they would apparently send the server saved draft version, which was not made current when I clicked send.