For some reason I have it in the back of my mind that they were at one point accused of being a honeypot for US intelligence because of their association with MIT. Probably complete BS, but maybe not. Are they as open source as they claim to be? Looks like they’re on github. F-Droid seems to think they have some Google libraries or whatever that they use.
ProtonMail users, how do you like/dislike it?
From a security stand-point: Yes. From a privacy standpoint: Absolutely not.
Both privacy and security are the same in either case:
The moment you go off-VPN, or use a webapp, security goes out the window.
Privacy, as in social network/contacts, goes out the window the moment you use a fixed email address; more so if it’s associated to your IRL identity.
There’s a large difference between surrendering massive amounts of highly critical metadata aswell as some data* to a known abuser vs. an entity that prides itself in not abusing your data and which even takes specific technological measures to make it as hard for them as possible (zero access encryption at rest, automatic key discovery).
(* Partial social graph, interaction timestamps, political interests, health, hobby interests and much of that usually even in plain text data form when receiving email; stored in in plain text forever.)
Right, “don’t be evil” 🙄. Corporations are corporations.
Also called “encryption”. Just so we’re on the same page:
Enigmail for Thunderbird supports both since 2018. The mail service, be it ProtonMail, GMail, Outlook, etc., is irrelevant regarding security or privacy.
FYI Thunderbird now natively supports PGP (and possibly WKD?) without the need for Enigmail.
Since 2020, with some caveats:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-howto-and-faq#w_how-do-i-get-the-public-keys-of-my-correspondents