Big recommend for ProtonMail for anyone looking where to migrate to
Until Proton gets acquired too.
Hopefully doesn’t happen but we’ll see!
It’s a startup that was financed by a Swiss startup fund. I don’t know if the founders are really that idealistic as to say no to a bunch of millions, but even if they are it may be out of their hands. If a buyer with the right price comes along I think it’s going to happen.
Proton is 10 years old, so it’s hardly a startup anymore. It was crowdfunded and is mostly led/owned by cern scientists (inventors of the www) and also financed/owned by a swiss non profit focused on helping startups, which in turn is financed by the swiss government (geneva to be exact)
Skiff was founded in the US by americans.
Do you see the difference?
You can say that about literally anything.
Well not everything, we’re talking about encrypted mail services. Skiff being acquired proves that there’s a market for buying and selling such a thing. And if someone’s interested then Proton should be an even more attractive target (albeit more expensive):
It’s a startup, so it will look for an exit at some point. It has built a large user base and good word of mouth. It’s currently working on locking down the ability to take your mail elsewhere.
It’s ripe for plucking and squeezing and it will happen sometime this year IMO.
So what is the point of acquiring them if they just dismantle the company? Seems stupid unless it’s funded by the CIA or something.
No need to look for a conspiracy, this sort of thing happens all the time to all sorts of companies. Maybe it’s a patent they want, maybe they want the talent, maybe they want the assets, maybe they want to remove a competitor… It’s really not that unusual.
You’re right, if it was an intelligence service they’d want the service to continue while they have a backdoor.
Switched to Proton last week. Currently paying for Mail Plus. Happy so far. I do wish they make the mail app icon MY3 compatible.
I dont get any of those “encrypted mail” services.
You need an app with good PGP support.
- generation / import when logging in
- share with every message
- autoimport sent keys
- encrypt messages if you have a key
- sign every message
- display a checkmark if message is signed
I have no idea what an “encrypted mail” provider is supposed to do differently. Either you use E2EE or you have to trust some random people.
Proton is just your PGP email client + cloud sync (kind of like a password manager).
It generates a PGP key when you create an account. Then they encrypt incoming email with that key. You can replace this key if you want.
You can add PGP keys for contacts that aren’t in the Proton ecosystem and they’ll use those keys to encrypt out going mail and provide the information to reply using your Proton PGP key.
If your contract is another proton mail user, they set all this up automatically (they can figure that out via MX records). They’ve also pushed for an open standard for doing this automatically for all PGP capable MX servers (i.e. allowing the automatic key exchange to happen when emailing someone out of their ecosystem).
So what you get with Proton is a fancy PGP web client, encryption at rest server side, some niceties with automatic key exchange, and an IMAP bridge that handles all the key management outside of your mail client (which makes sure it’s done right and everything is in sync across all your devices).
All the encryption and the initial key generation happens client side just like with Bitwarden.
They’re all trying to reinvent email by bolting something else on top likely an in-house implementation of whatever’s hot at the moment. However, the supposed benefits are completely gone once you’re exchanging mails with any other email host.
Vendor lockin basically. Protonmail is doing something really bad in my eyes, in that they force you to use their app. That bridge works too, okay
