I’ve been a paid Proton Unlimited customer for several years now and aside from a few small complaints, I’m generally very happy with the services I’m paying for. I agree that there is too much focus on “sidequests” like Wallet and Meet before core products are fully rebuilt and meeting expectations. I agree that Linux versions and some feature implementations are taking a long time. However, I have a fully functioning suite of Mail, Drive, VPN, Calendar and more that meet 95% of my needs. To be fair, I’m sure the zero-access/zero-knowledge encryption aspect makes development much more difficult.
If you’re worried about political affiliations/interests, I’ll give you that Andy Yen has made a few worrisome comments. I’m not sure what to do there. Assuming there aren’t repeat occurrences, I’m satisfied with their statement about the French political figure sponsorship.
If it’s the FBI cases and subpoenas, it comes down to understanding the difference between privacy and anonymity, and knowing what strategy is required to achieve actual anonymity.
So why (especially on Lemmy) is there so much Proton hate/relunctancy? Eager to hear some non-biased, fact-driven thoughts here!
I’ve recently needed a “shared” new account and I’ve tried Proton. I regret it.
On the plus side, they have at least not requested my phone number upon registration. That was the only plus for me.
In total, if you want true ownership, open technologies, distributed technologies where the power and infrastructure is split across great many parties, then you should be against Proton. I personally chose disroot for now.
There are still situations where Proton makes more sense to recommend, such as to a political activist. I believe this group is niche though, as 99% of people really want ownership, freedom to share and less money to pay I think. It’s not a business need, it’s a human thing.
I use Proton with Thunderbird as my mail client and it works fine. For years now. That was a basic requirement for me to sign up for any mail service inc Proton. If it won’t work with a local mail client, I won’t use it.
I couldn’t get K9mail to work with proton. Do you run that “bridge” server to have it work on the computer?
Yeah. They have to have something like that, to support E2EE. They can’t depend just on HTTPS for that, b/c their server would have to see the unencrypted contents to send it over HTTPS. I believe the bridge is open sourced, but that’s just from memory. I’d hve to go search to be certain.
Also if I remember (Ha! Don’t take my word for this! My memory is shit!) they support E2EE with other mail services that use PGP to encrypt on the backend. Ofc, if you send to gmail or something then google sees everything. So this helps, but onyl under the right conditions.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but, regarding the first point, in what way are the calendar clients proprietary? Unless I am missing something, the clients for iOS and Android are open source and licensed under GPLv3 while the desktop client (part of the mail app) appears to be licensed under AGPL v3.
The email system not working with Thunderbird etc. out-of-the-box is true but that is kind of understandable, considering that the emails are only stored and transmitted to the first-party clients in an encrypted form that other clients couldn’t work with? And you could use the mail bridge (which is also open source, if I am not mistaken) to expose them as a local server to be used by Thunderbird etc., right? Maybe not ideal but I’d agrue it’s “fine”.
I do agree that there are things to dislike about Proton but those two don’t seem like problems in my opinion…
When I say that “their calendar will NOT work with open technologies from F-Droid and such”, I mean that their calendar system does not support webdav or similar sync-ing technologies. Actually no single app from F-Droid is compatible with their unpaid service, and their own app is not on F-Droid either. If you pay, it all of a sudden becomes possible, but… see the points above.
Same thing if I want to integrate a calendar from Proton into any other calendar or set of calendars by the way. Which is my use case. In the end, I open some calendars natively in my system, and just that one Proton calendar in a browser - separately, detached from the rest of the world.
I see your point. Though I could imagine at least some form of IMAP access working. For example, there’s an *already-existing* technology to automatically encrypt incoming emails with a person’s provided public key. This is compatible with the standard IMAP protocol - just encrypt it server-side upon receiving the email.
Correct. I do that, to use Thunderbird as my mail app with Proton.
The inability to add the account to a standard email client is why I stopped using them. Electron Mail exists now, which is an improvement, but I still have to download each email and import them into my client.
They’re using full end to end encryption for most things. There are no open email or calendar standards that handle encryption. So interoperability limitations are a natural consequence.
I’ll take private over open every time.
That would be a nice sounding argument, but actually, if you pay them, then all of a sudden calendar exporting becomes possible:
“Share calendar
Upgrade to a Mail paid plan to share your calendar.”
To confirm, click https://calendar.proton.me/u/0/ then click on the cog near your calendar on the right -> Click again the cog Settings button on the right for your calendar -> Share calendar
Shareing a calander is very different. That’s simple.
I thought you wanted to use an open source calander app.
If that’s all you need, then you only have to pay for the service, it’ll work fine.
I ideally want full sync of course. “Well at least they have an export function” I thought, and found out it’s paid.
Anyway, I think we understand each other - just re-wording the information differently. Proton’s offering in that regard is clear.