this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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I actually don't know what people's hesitancy is, but I've seen numerous people say proton is not good, we'll see if anybody chimes in with a reason.
I've seen doubt of it's push to pack products into it's offering ala Google - however I don't see that as enough to call it not good.
It's also very easy (and suspicious imo) for anyone to call a service not good without any reason to back it up.
I see that as offering services that people clearly use and value, and that the bills have to be paid somehow. So as long as proton can deliver the privacy and security features it promises, I personally don’t see anything wrong with providing an alternative when the only other options are built on monetizing your data.
Edit: formatting
I often figure it's google bias and / or people trying to impose their threat models on other people.
Been using proton for quite a while with a few custom domains and am impressed with the service to price of their offerings.
We can one off use cases with any vendor, but at the end of the day, they offer a more secure out of the box experience than just about any other platform out there. If someone is doing illicit shit and gets popped, it's not on the service provider to provide air cover for them. Improve your opsec or self host.
The one and only critique I'll give to Proton is how they have it where you can have Google e-mails forwarded to you to your Proton address.
And it's like...why? The entire reason you're going to ProtonMail is to escape Google. Why the hell would you want Google to try and pry into your Proton usage when all you want is to distance yourself from them?
You set up the forwarding in google, not proton. You mark the forwarded emails in your proton mailbox. You forward the emails to your proton account until you changed all the sources that you care about from your google to your proton mailbox. Then you turn off forwarding.
Google never gets any more data from you except your protonmail address.
It's really nice for the transition period. I personally forward my email to Tuta, which lets me slowly convert my services to my new address. I have my most important ones switched over now, but I had to switch dozens over (I would do 3-5 at a time, which was a pain).
I'll probably leave my gmail forwarding to my Tuta account, just because there's no way I'm going to go though every single service I have ever used and switch it over, and inevitably some contact will continue using my old email.
As far as Google goes, all it knows is that it's getting less and less emails, and that what remains is being forwarded to @tuta.com. But that's not my main email address though, it's just the one I set the account up with. I actually use @, and I have a bunch of aliases configured for each type of account (e.g. -banking@ for my bank accounts, -bills@ for utilities and whatnot, etc). But that's still not my actual, personal email, which is @, and I only give that one to my family and friends.
So in short:
If I can convince my SO to switch, I'll give them an account at custom domain 2 and tell them to only use it for personal contacts, and to have everything else go through their old gmail or a Tuta alias. If I ever decide to switch to Proton, I'd have to transition all of those custom domain 1 emails to some proton aliases (unless I pay for the higher tier), which would be a pain, especially since the main reason I use these custom domains is to make it easier to switch services (e.g. just point my DNS records to the new host).
That's not everyone's privacy posture. Some people use Proton to hide, some people use it to secure, some for both. If your goal is to secure, google's antiprivacy isn't against that.
I'm with you, though.