ProtonMail Now Supports Bitcoin Payments | Hacker News Reader

ProtonMail Now Supports Bitcoin Payments

protonmail.com

336 pointsvabmit183 comments

I'm thinking of switching my business email to protonmail from gmail.

Any users like it ?

The whole google memo revealed google employees are not as trustworthy as I thought. All the social media talk of blacklists, and inquisition tactics from some of upper management is bad for business.

I've already gotten emails from clients asking me to change their business google services to something else (anything else in their own words).

> google memo revealed google employees are not as trustworthy

What made you feel this way, specifically, in the memo?

'ideological echo chamber'

*perfect use of the feel word.

> blacklists, and inquisition tactics from some of upper management

the memo is just a reference to an episode. i.e. "the memo ordeal"

I just set it up for my custom domain and it could not have been any simpler or easier. They have a really clean UI/status checks for setting up MX/SPF/DKIM/DMARC, I setup some custom addresses and a catch-all and it all just worked.

How is their catchall support?

Last I checked into the status, they only planned to support it for business accounts and limited sending to only a few aliases.

I went with Fastmail for catchall because since the last time I checked (about a month ago) they still didn't support it fully. I hope they do support it fully in the future as I'd seriously consider switching.

ProtonMail now supports catch-all email for ProtonMail Professional and Visionary plans. That means for each domain that has email hosted at ProtonMail, you can now designate one email address as the catch-all address by going to Settings –> Domains. For example, info@me.com could receive any email sent to the @me.com domain, even if the address did not exist. You can learn more about catch-all emails here (https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/catch-all/).

https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-v3-10-release-notes/

That's great to hear.

I'll probably have my current mail service run out and then switch to protonmail for personal mail and selfhosted mail for spamming notifications from my nextcloud instance.

Can you send email back from the addresses the email was sent to? I think when I was looking into it, ProtonMail caps how many aliases you can create; making it not that good for catchall.

What part prevents you from sending it from any email address? I assume if you smtp auth with them ok then you should be able to send from any email@authed domain you want.

Do people limit that somehow?

I've been using migadu.com for a while (nice reliable email hosting for 4$/mo). They even have a nice drawbacks page: https://www.migadu.com/en/drawbacks.html

Oh wow this is perfect, I've been wanting an email service that is priced exactly like this forever. Thank you so much for posting it!

I have a lot of email/domain combinations and most places charge per domain which makes it super expensive super quick.

I think they offer the same but cheaper: https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/e-mail

Their straightforwardness is nice, but I wonder how sustainable the business model is - every paid account has some message send/receive limits but there is no cap on storage. [1] They also say they've been profitable (on the same page), but I'm a bit wary of anything that says "unlimited". Nevertheless, thanks for pointing to this one. It looks very attractive for those who need to use multiple addresses/aliases/domains.

[1]: https://www.migadu.com/en/benefits.html#anchor_storage

Also the fact that they leaked an internal document to the world doesn't give me great confidence they won't do that again. There have already been instance of Google employees snooping in gmail:

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked-teens...

What makes you think ProtonMail employees couldn't do the same? Not a critique of PM (I'm a paying user myself), but this is not a reason to switch.

Some of their software stack is open source. You can go have a look how it works for yourself, of course you have to trust that what they opened is what they run- but the foundations seem solid at least.

https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClient

How does an open source software stack stop employees from reading content?

When they receive an email, they encrypt it with your public key. The private key is stored on their server encrypted with a passphrase only you know.

Assuming they don't backdoor their client to find out your passphrase, or log emails as they receive them, you're fairly safe from having an employee browse through your emails.

Has anyone audited that system and implementation? If not, can you really trust that there's no backdoor?

No, and no. I don't actually use them, I just looked up their implementation. It also looks like I was downvoted for clarifying how they say their system works. Obviously open source doesn't absolve you from having to trust the company running the software.

>What makes you think ProtonMail employees couldn't do the same?

ProtonMail is end-to-end encrypted. (Can't verify it myself, though.)

I like it but as noted the lack of an exit path makes it scary for a long term business contract.

I've not seen anyone else talking about mailbox.org. I've been using them for a while after moving away from Fastmail and I'm loving it. Cheap and they're recommeded by https://www.privacytools.io/.

I've been with them for over a year now as well and not a single issue. The interface is a bit cumbersome in some ways, it's a customized OpenXchange, so some mailbox.org-specific settings are done outside of the rest of the more general OpenXchange settings.

What you get with mailbox.org that you don't get with ProtonMail:

  * IMAP and SMTP
  * Support for hardware 2FA dongles like Yubikey
  * Ability to use your own GPG keys
  * Very capable mail filter config tool
  * Calendaring and contacts (with nice URLs so it's easy to use on Android via DAVdroid instead of Google's stuff)
  * File storage
  * Web-based spreadsheet, word processor and presentation tool

Their jurisdiction is Germany so you get whatever is left of EU privacy laws plus the Germany-specific ones.

I don't know much about eu laws and less of Germany. Out of curiosity if I was a Nazi could the government shot me down?

A number of European countries have laws that make denial of the holocaust (or sometimes more generally all known acts of genocide) and usage of Nazi symbols (swastika, etc.) illegal, with exceptions for things like art and research. Many also prohibit incitement to ethnic or racial hatred.

Why did you move out from fastmail? They are very clear about their privacy policy.

(Also who runs privacytools.io? Is he/she reputable?)

I don't think Fastmail is very clear on their privacy policy (see also my other answer below).

Here is an extract from Fastmail TOS:

Fastmail can disclose your info/data if it thinks it's in the interest of the company: "The Service Provider will not monitor, edit, or disclose any personal information about you [...] unless required or allowed by law, or where the Service Provider has a good faith belief that such action is necessary to: [...] (2) protect and defend the rights or property of the Service Provider; [...] (4) act to protect the interests of its members or others [...]

Why did you switch away from Fastmail? I'm there.

Possible reasons (I'm also with Fastmail and it makes me uncomfortable):

- Fastmail can immediately cancel your account for any reason: "The Service Provider may terminate your access to any part or all of the Service and any related service(s) at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately, for any reason whatsoever, with or without providing any refund of any payments."

- Fastmail can disclose your info/data if it thinks it's in the interest of the company: "The Service Provider will not monitor, edit, or disclose any personal information about you [...] unless required or allowed by law, or where the Service Provider has a good faith belief that such action is necessary to: [...] (2) protect and defend the rights or property of the Service Provider; [...] (4) act to protect the interests of its members or others [...]

By comparison, mailbox.org TOS are much better.

Also mailbox.org offers GPG encryption, which Fastmail doesn't (AFAIK).

Good reason, but i stick with fastmail for now. As the UI and user experience still good for me.

Their service may be good enough but they are hardly investing enough into their product at the moment. mailbox.org is also not a core product of theirs. Just read through the forums (mostly in German); there are basic features/aspects missing you'd expect with a paid service nowadays like automated DKIM next to bug fixes needed around the web interface, which also can't compare to Fastmail's or Google's mail UI in terms of efficiency and usefulness – it's clunky: consequences of being fully dependent on foreign upstreams, I guess. Plus there's plenty of downtime. And that's for prices similar to Fastmail and GSuite when looking at similarly featured tiers (GSuite Basic – Fastmail professional – mailbox.org Mail XXL plan).

I actually ran mailbox and fastmail side by side before settling on mailbox. I think the UI is next to flawless. AFAIK they don't work on the UI themselves, they use https://www.open-xchange.com/

Well that's fair enough, I basically never use the web interface so I probably haven't ran into those issues. For me it's about where they're located and their customer service more than their interface.

What made you switch to mailbox.org? Curious as am a fastmail user.

I am very impressed with their service, accessing it on their .onion site. I've been paying with Bitcoin, but it has been a manual process. Their support seems responsive. The UI is great.

I was going to use fastmail, but ProtonMail's inbox encryption seemed like a nice bonus. I know it is not really securing my email, but it is nice to know that if they get a subpoena or warrant they cannot just dump my inbox. At least not without compromising their product - an active step.

Setup of domains and accounts is slick. Changing payment plans all works online, pro-rating and all.

I've tried it, but their solution is (IMHO) a very poor fit for a business e-mail account, as there is (or was when I used the service) no way to manage e-mail accounts for your employees and no way to archive / extract their e-mails in case of need (I understand that it's a privacy-focused e-mail service, but as an employer you have legal requirements to keep business documents for several years, and having to rely on your employees goodwill to get the data out of the system is not an acceptable solution for this). Also, there's no calendar integration (https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-feedback/sugg...), which again makes it difficult to use this as a business e-mail account.

I've switched to Mailbox.org in 2016 and I'm very happy with their product and service: Their system is based on an open-source solution (OpenExchange) so they don't need to reinvent the wheel and can focus on prodiving good hosting and service (which they do). They also have support for 2FA (including hardware tokens like Yubikeys) and recently revamped their management portal, which allows you to easily create and manage e-mail accounts for your employees.

It looks like ProtonMail released new account management features just a few weeks ago, including the capability for "organization admins to access the emails of other organization users" while still preserving end-to-end encryption.

Source: https://protonmail.com/blog/encrypted-email-for-organization...

>while all organization accounts are end-to-end encrypted, it is still possible for organization admins to access the emails of other organization users. Thus, organizational oversight and management is still possible, even with end-to-end encryption. Furthermore, administrative read permissions are also granted or revoked automatically when admin users are created or demoted.

I wonder how can they provide this without either storing encryption keys on their servers or reencrypting (client-side!) all email during such events.

It's a key escrow system. The admins hold a copy of the user's key, and promoting a new admin involves giving access to this key.

So where is this copy stored?

Interesting! You could probably do it by using the key of an existing admin to decrypt the escrow key and then reencrypt it with the public key of the new admin, all client-side.

Very intersting, I might give the solution another go in the future. Still, at this pace it will take them a long time until they are on par with a "normal" e-mail solution (it might be worth the trouble though).

I love proton and am a paid user, but I'm not sure if it has all the features a business needs. I'm personally waiting for a calendar before dumping google altogether (except for spam / email lists). Still, it seems better than anything else out there as far as privacy, though I would never count on email privacy to begin with for obvious reasons (unless I encrypt it myself / have others send encrypted email).

I gave it a try and I really like the Webmailer and the apps, but not having IMAP/SMTP is a dealbreaker, because you can't import/backup your mails at all. As soon as they add those features, I'll sign up for a paid plan again.

Any reasons to not go with https://www.fastmail.com/ ?

You may want to give a try to Zoho.

I won't go into details, but I moved my personal and business activities (including 8 domains) away from PM after using their top tier service for a year. Let's just say that performance and usability in moderately heavy business use was not acceptable.

And keep in mind that even though your email is encrypted within PM, it is not encrypted on the mail servers of the people you have been communicating with (unless they are also PM accounts). So the primary attraction is largely moot.

I hope they catch up in the areas I think they need improvement, but providing Gmail level service is quite difficult unless you're big and well funded.

If you like Proton features and want to move away from Gmail, consider Mailpile[1]. It's almost ready, there's a release candidate and packages for Debian/Ubuntu; it offers to protect your data with a master password like Proton; it supports GPG which with all its problems is still the way to encrypt your emails; and you can run it on your own server. Best of all it's open source and written in Python. You can know exactly what it does with your messages.

Mailpile is an email client (MUA) so you will need a server (MTA). At first you can try it out with your regular ISP, even Gmail. Later you can set up your own server. Setup is a little involved but much less than people tell you and, if you choose a competently run distro, requires very little ongoing maintenance.

With your own server, you can have it working exactly as you like. Export feature? No problem, you have direct access to the maildir, mailbox or the database. Want a catch-all? One switch in the config. You will have little trouble finding a provider who accepts your preferred method of payment, too.

[1] https://www.mailpile.is/

There is also cloudron.io. It has imap/smtp/sieve/catch-all/relaying/aliases/tagging/rest api. Fairly complete. https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/

My only complaint with cloudron is that the auto-update mechanism requires a subscription. You can manually upgrade, but it's awkward and I broke it more than once while trying.

Can you use one subscription to update multiple cloudron VPS servers or would you need to have a separate for each one?

This is a little bit "late". Fastmail has supported Bitcoin payment for a very long time. In fact, I was surprised last year when I wanted to try proton mail and they didn't have Bitcoin payments.

So you couldn't just use a CC or some other form of payment? Seriously?

I expect that's not the point he was trying to make. I believe he/she was stating their surprise that bitcoin was not a payment option back then. "Seriously."

No the point is it stopped him from using/trying the service. If he really was interested he would've found an alternative payment solution

The point was he wanted to test a service which does not ask him for his billing address, CC info and other stuff, which not only completely deanonymize him, he would also have to trust them to store this information safely (which you cannot really expect any company to do).

So in a way, his test was completed (no I don’t want to use this service) before he was even able to test their product.

Just imagine you want to test the food of the newly opened restaurant downstairs. Before you actually get to test the meal, have been treated like shit. Sure, you could have stayed to try the food, but you have already decided that it is not worth it.

As amazing as it may sound to you, much of population of the world doesn't have a CC. And not everyone trusts or likes to support Paypal.

Everything they do is late, they got first to the market and stalled since then, the only improvement over the last years was that the UI transformed from being utter shit to a "passable" one.

ProtonMail has supported bitcoin for a long time too; I'm not sure why they're only announcing it now. I payed for my ProtonMail account at least 6 months ago with BTC...

But are they open source yet?

Sure, you can find the web client sources. How about the server, and the mobile apps? The website makes a big deal of them being open source after all ( https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-open-source/ ).

Mobile apps should be open source, but server doesn't really matter. It's just some boring plumbing shuffling around a bunch of encrypted blobs.

There's also no way to verify that a server is really running the same code that was open-sourced.

Bitcoin is not anonymous.

The transactions may be public, but your identity can be masked if done properly.

If you want to mask your identity wouldn't you be better off buying Visa gift cards with cash at a major store and then using them to purchase services online?

surveillance cameras at the checkout, not to mention the ridiculously high reload fee.

Stores have cameras and Visa cards have unique numbers. Not too hard to put the two together.

Bitcoin let's you transact without having to interact in physical space to acquire or spend them.

And just how are you going to do a dollar <-> bitcoin exchange without revealing any information about your identity?

Bitcoin mixers would serve you well in this instance. Just buy BTC normally and clean via a mixer.

And how do you know that that the Bitcoin mixer you decided to use is not actually operated by the FBI and that they are actually keeping a private log tying bitcoins in with bitcoins out?

Had similar questions yesterday and some hackers responded here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15016338

That doesn't seem to address hostile mixers? Running dark-net bazaars, bitcoin mixers and "hacker"(cracker) forums seems like trivial intel basics. Just like running "anonymous" [ed:remailers,[1]] and tor nodes.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixmaster_anonymous_remailer

I actually think it would suffice to payout at random times with an insanely high number of bitcoin addresses (all autogenerated via a script) for high number of users (the more the better). It would be virtually impossible to know who got how much BTC out (may be in, but not out).

As for the hostile mixers, I'm afraid I can't offer any solution other than to rely on reputation. That said, it is rather telling that bitmixer.io is closing [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14843373]. It may not be safe to run a mixer; the feds may come after you.

Monero.

This whole argument is stuck in 2012. Lean not on your own understanding and look at the technology thats out there.

You don't have to trade for dollars. You can use one or more intermediaries such as gift cards and high resale value goods, just like using proxies to distance yourself. The more hops, the harder it is to connect.

No, you would not.

Even better to have someone else buy the gift cards and then hand them off to you in a dark alley. Bonus points if you're both wearing trench coats and fedoras.

"We'll give you 20 bucks if you tell us who you bought these for"

I wonder how many people get busted through localbitcoin.com like this.

Double bonus points if your coat-clad fedora-wearers aren't in the alley at the same time and use a dead-drop.

Or using a coin designed to be anonymous and private, like.. Monero. You would still probably be on camera buying a Visa gift card in a retail store. With timestamp.

This is the correct answer.

Not really. You can unlink all of your cryptocurrency transactions with Monero. This is sufficient for fiat too.

It is harder than that though. Monero has an issue in that everyone is only doing ringsize=3 transactions, providing little anonymity. If you buy from an exchange then turn around and sell it back, even with different amounts, you will be on a shortlist of suspects.

To do Monero properly you need to wait a while (at least hours, better days) while churning to other addresses, being sure to keep your ringsize and fees looking like everyone else's. Hopefully they will raise the ringsize minimum to 10 in the upcoming hardfork - that will go some way towards fixing the problem.

For now, I bet there will be cases of people happily bouncing to Monero via Shapeshift and getting busted.

I could argue the merits of the ringsize but it would be moot because it's being bumped to 10 in September. So I will just leave this here as a note that the argument that a ringsize of 3 is not very anonymous will be moot in September for future readers.

Even with ringsize 10, it does not help if someone does BTC->XMR->BTC with the same exchange (or an exchange that shares records) without adding some XMR->XMR churn steps inbetween.

My future freedom depends on me getting this right, so I am a bit sensitive on this topic. It took me a while to cut through the fluff and figure out how to churn enough to make it safe. Fortunately I also used multiple Bitcoin mixers on both sides and didn't originally get our Bitcoin investment in a way that's directly linked to any of our identities.

It is somewhat irresponsible of Monero's marketing to make such grandiose privacy claims at the moment. I say this as someone that loves Monero and thinks their team is fantastic, and I'd bet Monero will be the privacy currency winner if it isn't already.

I'm with you on the "my future freedom depends on getting this right". Im in that same boat.

Personally I can see someone obviously paying me in BTC. But I will only send out XMR. It's a one way street with me regarding BTC.

Time is going to tell wether we retain our freedom or not by betting on XMR.

I agree, by the time Monero becomes the default part of these discussions it will be a much more hardened network

Pretty sure, it leaves a trail.

https://github.com/nopara73/ZeroLink/blob/master/README.md

It does if you've connected it to a bank account, but if you didn't do that, or you used funds that originated from a bank account to get access to a wallet which wasn't connected to you directly, you could make it a rather difficult trail to follow with certainty

It's not the opposite, either. Not all transactions are necessarily traceable to an entity or individual.

Monero support would be nice.

+1 Monero does not have the problems Bitcoin has regarding privacy and anonymity. I also would much rather see it supported than Bitcoin.

I've used shapeshift for this for years.

Every time I get a bitcoin invoice, I shapeshift some Monero

I don't get why anyone would ever want a snapshot of their finances ever.

You are never anonymous when you connect to the Internet, even over Tor, even through 7 proxies. There is always a connection right back to you.

We need to move beyond the obsession with anonymity and refocus the goal as being privacy. Then, recognize that privacy has several levels. That way, the expectation is more clear.

This is disingenuous. Bitcoin is very anti-anonymous. Tor is rather anonymous. Saying that perfect anonymity does not exist because there's always some bits leaking to an omniscient entity is not helpful.

ProtonMail should support Monero. For now, I pay using a group of Monero wallets I churn every few hours and xmr.to. I suppose Bitcoin is the least common denominator in that sense.

>Bitcoin is very anti-anonymous.

That's correct. It is very anti-anonymous by its design; its security rests everyone verifying the transactions. The distinction you make is the same one I attempt to make by arguing against anonymity as a goal. Both Bitcoin and Tor are, in the mind of the public, construed as ways to be anonymous on the Internet. That is dangerous.

>We need to move beyond the obsession with anonymity and refocus the goal as being privacy.

You mean "we" == a dozen of first world countries? There is strong demand for anonymity all over the world.

> There is strong demand for anonymity all over the world.

Is there? From whom? Facebook is still growing rapidly and now claims more than 2B users. It seems that not even privacy is in high demand, much less anonymity.

It's close to being anonymous though. If I give you a random bitcoin address, what are the odds you can identify the owner of it? It's very close to zero.

In practice? The odds are pretty likely. Most people have poor opsec, and you can uniquely identify anyone with fewer than 33 bits of data.

And yet Satoshi Nakamoto still has not been doxxed.

I said "likely", not "certainly." Satoshi Nakamoto is the exception that proves the rule; part of his infamy is precisely due to the fact that he has not yet identified, which is extraordinary.

Let's test your claim. Here's a transaction between many addresses. How many can you identify?

https://blockchain.info/tx/5e3f8e728e7a9c14231806de537ae6177...

Let's make it easier: how many of the transactions in the most recent block (as of writing) can be tied to individuals?

https://blockchain.info/block/0000000000000000005d8e91c8b1b3...

If you're very concerned, you could use a high speed/volume BitCoin Mixer[1]. For example, if it currently has sufficient volume, something on the Darknet like BitBlender[2][3]. There are a number of different mixers out there. You could also, of course, wash the BitCoins by hand yourself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_mixer

[2] https://bitblender.io/

[3] http://bitblendervrfkzr.onion/

No this is the incorrect answer. Mixers congest the network and cause many unneeded fees and they are NOT future proof and do NOT deliver suddenly-fungible bitcoins at the other end.

Use Monero, not ZCash, not DASH with a special type of transaction, use MONERO with genuine ring confidential transactions.

RingCT - https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0005.pdf

Monero vs ZCash vs Mixers - https://moneroforcash.com/monero-vs-dash-vs-zcash-vs-bitcoin...

We will hopefully support ZCash in the future. But, unfortunately, we don't right now. I am a member of the ZCash forum, though. I have been keeping a close watch on the project/coin and am very impressed with it. I don't know anything about Monero. I either hadn't heard of it before or just didn't give it any attention after seeing it because of the flood of coins lately. Thanks for the pointer and endorsement of it - I will take a look at it when I have a chance.

ZCash is not Monero, is not fungible, and does not have complete privacy. I was very clear about this distinction in the previous post because ZCash is not the right answer, and every time something is said about Monero the next comment agrees about everything that makes Monero valuable, and then goes on to talk about ZCash as if the two are interchangeable. This is a false equivalence that can confuse readers who don't care to research better.

Bitcoin is more anonymous than electronic banking.

I've been forwarding all of my email from Gmail to ProtonMail, just to see how I like the ProtonMail interface. So far I'm liking it a lot. A little weirdness on getting timely notifications on Android. But I might switch completely.

Anybody make the switch?

I prefer it by far.

I only use it for a small fraction of my business, though.

I did, and I switched back. Maybe I'll try them again if they ever release a feature that allows me to export (bulk) email. Until then, any emails you receive directly to PM are trapped there (unless you manually forward each one, by hand).

More "progress" from ProtonMail, while they still provide no way to export emails in bulk. They recommend you forward every individual email or print it.

The Export feature has been an open request since before March 2015.

Another feature which would give users a way to get their mail out of PM is the ability to check mail from a client like Outlook or Thunderbird. That has been an open feature request since before February 2015.

They, as with other companies that refuse to listen to their customers, will eventually fail. Of course failure may mean being bought by a larger competitor (and a few of the bad decision-makers cashing out)...

Try to relax a bit. It is good for your health. :) Both of those features are under development. If you would like to see them sooner rather than later, perhaps you know some great programmers that you could recommend to careers@protonmail.ch? Or, you could share ProtonMail's Careers page: https://protonmail.com/careers

ProtonMail is hiring!

Maybe they should also be hiring some sort of customer interaction expert as well.

https://protonmail.com/careers#technical-support-specialist

Looks like parent is not a ProtonMail employee. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032948)

This is a great example of how not to interact with customers.

Telling a customer who's been waiting on a feature for over a year to relax is just insulting.

I picked Fastmail due to their excellent support reputation, you all could learn from them!

Sometimes the customer is either flat wrong or at least an asshole. ProtonMail sends yearly surveys to paying customers asking for help prioritizing development efforts, so suggesting they don't listen to their customers is asinine. IMAP support is in beta as a result of customers prioritizing it in those surveys. As they are likely limited primarily by funding and developer bandwidth, I see nothing wrong with their response above and will continue paying for their service.

Fair point, but exporting email? These aren't crazy ideas from one person's wishlist. These are actual features that should be standard for any company providing an email service.

(Genuine question, haven't used it in the last few years.) Does Gmail support exporting email, other than using IMAP which I understand Proton also has in beta?

Yes, Google Takeout: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

I remember reading that they have committed to letting you download all you data from all their properties, and the list on that page is certainly long, but I can't tell if it's complete.

Exporting e-mails was one of the most requested features as far as I remember (https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/export-import-...) and I can understand people getting angry about this. I think Protonmail will have to move a bit faster on this now as holding your customer data "hostage" will no longer be an acceptable practice starting from next year (May 25) due to EU GDPR. So if they want to keep selling to EU customers they will have to implement a mechanism to allow people to get their data out of their system in an automated way.

And honestly, e-mail is not only about communication but also about archiving of data, and what good is an archive if you can't even get the data out of it when you need it? I've been a Protonmail premium subscriber and I would have loved to stay on their service, but the fact of not being able to get my e-mails out of there in case I needed them made it totally unsuitable as a business e-mail account.

We are working hard on import and export--they are top priorities, and we are fully aware that they are core features we are currently missing.

Keep in mind that pretty much everything is more complex with encrypted email, and that includes import and export. It will be done as soon as we can manage.

You could provide users the option to give up their encryption on the content they wish to export. Chances are, if someone is trying to export their entire account, they are moving away from PM. In that case, encryption is probably not their first concern.

Furthermore, even though PM keeps user emails in encrypted form, virtually all of those emails are unencrypted on one or more servers related to the recipients of those emails. So unfortunately, the encryption is less valuable than we would like.

That is exactly what we are doing, but it has to be done client-side of course, so it's not as simple as having a download link.

Looks like parent is not a ProtonMail employee. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032948)

Protonmail fan and user here. Guys, honestly there are better ways to respond to customers and potential customers, without the patronizing tone. That can't possibly help.

It actually didn't seem idiomatic... I suspect that english is not their first language and they might not have realized they were being rude.

Funny, I thought about that too right after I wrote my comment.

Looks like parent is not a ProtonMail employee. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032948)

You're charging people for a service, you're in no position to treat anybody like that.

Translation: please don't be a dumbass.

And now I'm closing my account. Not the way to respond to a valid customer concern. Good to know this is how you treat customers on a premium service. I'll share it with other customers so they know.

@vabmit means well but he is not an employee of ProtonMail.

Bet writing that made you feel a real big man.

I was a visionary paid member when that option became available, and I used the service heavily for a year (until the performance, particularly search and email-list-paging became unreasonably slow... as in multi-second delays).

While performance was going down, I noticed new features being announced. However, one key feature (exporting emails in bulk) was never done. I can assure you that is not rocket science, or rather is not a technical challenge that the brilliant minds who started PM could not overcome.

As for careers, I even made an effort to contact them. Whether I was up to par or not, I suspect my resume and two decades of experience were worthy of a reply, particularly given the quality of bug reporting I had provided during my use.

So honestly, the takeaway feeling was that the company was not well run or organized, which ultimately brings long-term reliability into question. And long-term reliability is very important to anyone doing real work and real business.

If you're a paying member just shoot them an email and they'll add you to the list for the Bridge beta. See: https://protonmail.com/bridge/

I got in after a few weeks.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/6fbzzb/dying_wi...

Fastmail's Standard plan also includes up to 600 aliases and up to 100 domains. Even if you've only got one domain you'll use, I can't understand how anyone is willing to tie their main domain to servers that will only let you receive email at 5 different addresses, seems like waste of MX records. I keep hoping for a change but feel thoroughly disappointed each time I periodically check their pricing page.

Fastmail is also terribly expensive if someone wants multiple mailboxes (with separate user credentials) rather than aliases to a single mailbox. With what would cost me several hundred dollars on Fastmail, I can have that and more on Mailbox.org and Posteo.de (the latter without custom domain support).

The disappointment you've felt here is the same I felt with Fastmail. So I decided to move to Posteo instead and save money.

These were the reasons I didn't switch to ProtonMail when I wanted to move out of Gmail and others. I didn't want to be stuck with ProtonMail and having to print or save each email one by one if I ever felt that ProtonMail wasn't good enough for me. I had also followed these requests for a little while and was frustrated that IMAP is now in some kind of beta after more than two years of requests. It's still not generally available yet! I really liked the privacy and security bits, but couldn't live with a service with these limitations.

It doesn't look like they have an option to validate account creation from a bitcoin payment instead of an SMS/email. I suspect it would be a popular feature.

>"You can now get secure email anonymously"

How exactly... by paying with Bitcoin?

And this is coming from a security-conscious company?

Unless I mined the Bitcoins myself, and never spent the remaining 12.45 BTC that I mined (after presumably spending 0.05 BTC on protonmail)... it is far from "Anonymous".

If they started accepting Zcash, however...

> Zcash

Monero would be a better option.

Care to elaborate?

I don't know a ton about Zcash or Monero, I only know that Zcash advertises and actually produces truly anonymous transactions (that the founders can unmask, or so I have read).

Is Monero anonymous as well? For every transaction? Or only specific ones (like Zcash).

Here's a really good explanation of RingCT: https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-does-moner...

I've played around with ProtonMail in the past but never made the switch. I see now that there is a one password mode that seems more convenient than my legacy 2 password mode. I already have 2FA setup. Given that, is one password mode safe enough or are you still using 2 passwords?

I want to use ProtonMail (and will pay for it), but lack of IMAP is a deal-breaker. Some of the other commenters mentioned IMAP is in beta; can I get on this too? I'm currently managing an iRedMail instance and it's not ideal.

Which will be quickly converted back to Euro or Swiss Francs for them by their payment provider. I doubt they'll keep any of that bitcoin.

You never know, Overstock.com is now keeping 50% of their crypto payments in crypto.[1]

[1]: https://www.coindesk.com/ostk-hodl-overstock-keep-50-bitcoin...

So this product is still priced in Euros, though you can pay in BTC.

Are there major products out there priced in Bitcoin yet?

No, but I can give you a subscription that charges you a random amount each month, which is pretty close.

Until bitcoin is accepted essentially everywhere, but all levels of private and business, you won't see BTC-first prices.

That's because the companies that accept bitcoin as payment have their own expenses, and it's unlikely that most of their bills can be paid by bitcoin.

It's easier to understand if you imagine your businesses in your country allowing you to buy products at a fixed price in some other country's currency.

Can I pay for ProtonVPN in coin as well?

Ya, you can signup for ProtonVPN through ProtonMail; therefore, you can pay with coin through ProtonMail for ProtonVPN.

I would use OVPN. It supports bitcoin [0].

You can check quite recent truly and honestly made (!) comparison of VPNs here: https://vpnreport.org/

Disclaimer: There are no affiliate links in this comment.

(!) not shown within first 10 google results among the usual crap for 'best xxx services'

[0] https://www.ovpn.com/en/blog/complete-guide-for-using-bitcoi...

now that we are talking about email. what is a good open source email server to use nowdays? or some free provider where i can use my own domain?

A good open source email server is https://mailinabox.email/ :)

Disappointed that there's no mention of a discount. Cryptocurrency payments will save them a lot of money. Web/email hosting is an industry with a high risk if fraud.

> Cryptocurrency payments will save them a lot of money

...until they convert it to cash?

The reason it will save them money is because there are no "chargebacks" or reverts with bitcoin.

You get $10 worth of bitcoin in your account and it's confirmed, you have $10 of bitcoin, and nobody can take it back.

That, plus the lack of a 3% fee (although there might be one for their bitcoin processor) means a good amount of savings for some.

Very good initiative. Happy to see that you're moving in the right direction. Remember, though, that Bitcoin is many things and anonymous is not one of them. It's pseudo-anonymous at best. You should consider accepting the open-source, community-driven, private criptocurrency Monero that has been around for many years now. If you have plans on adopting Monero, send me a message and I'll be glad to guide you on the right direction.

Nice, but they really should actually use Bitcoin cash.

Legacy Bitcoin fees can be higher than their actual monthly plans.

They have been accepting Bitcoin for a long time already, now its just integrated better.

The whole talk about "freedom and privacy" in relation to Bitcoin made me a bit nauseous. These are tech guys. It destroys trust for them to be blabbering nonsense about privacy like this.

If I go for the highest paid tier, it comes with Proton VPN. Ist that only ONE VPN user or do all users of that tier get to use ProtonVPN?

You get 10 VPN connections which you can distribute among your users however you see fit.

PR. Nothing else. Who wants to pay with Bitcoin when Bitcoin is skyrocketing like crazy?

everyone that pays with bitcoin now that everything is cheaper?

yeah it goes counter to all of the anti-deflationary schools of economics, but when have economists ever gotten actual human behavior right?

Nobody does. And this is the problem with having no inflation. Every economy needs a slight inflation, otherwise people stop consuming, instead save all their money and it gets worse => deflation.

Bitcoin equals gold, nobody uses Bitcoin to consume anything. I don't know which human behavior you refer to.

Your argument is: "Why would anyone spend any money if it's worth tomorrow?!" to support a pro-inflation argument

The counterargument / parallel reality in an inflationary world is: "Why would anyone accept any money if it's worth less tomorrow?!"

The only difference between the two paradigms is that in the later, the currency creators have the power and in the former, the currency owners have the power. It is no coincidence that the financial institution has chosen to be in control of inflation and extract the wealth first, via seignorage, of currency inflation.

> Why would anyone accept any money if it's worth less tomorrow

I mean they sort of don't, in the case of rapid inflation. See e.g. Brazil decades ago, with payment delays abound all over.

But that's not what we're talking about for a healthy economy, with a relatively small steady inflation rate. Very different.

Every economy needs a slight inflation, otherwise people stop consuming, instead save all their money and it gets worse => deflation.

That's the claim, where's the evidence?

Meanwhile the bitcoin transaction bandwidth is at max capacity and is frequently at max capacity as the price rises.

People are transacting, and its not all to exchanges.

That's not how this works at all.

The current price of Bitcoin is the market's best prediction of the present value of holding a bitcoin. When you spend $20 worth of bitcoin, you lose an expected $20 worth of utility from holding bitcoin (and, presumably, gain at least $20 of expected subjective utility from whatever you're buying). The past price of Bitcoin has no bearing on a rational actor's willingness to use it as a medium of exchange.

Why would you pay with dollars when you could buy Bitcoin with those dollars instead?

Two reasons:

1) Because I need to buy things with dollars to a) not starve, freeze, etc. b) not get thrown in jail for tax evasion

and

2) because I'm not comfortable with that level of investment risk, and prefer a more diversified approach of mutual funds, bonds, and real estate.

1) We're talking about paying for ProtonMail. This is implied by the context in both mine and the parent's post.

2) Exactly! And despite not being comfortable with Bitcoin as an investment, you may very well prefer it over the short term as a payment mechanism.

If the value of bitcoin goes up relative to the local currency (CHF, EUR, USD), then when you pay next month, the amount of BTC you'll need to pay will be lower.

They are going to charge you whatever amount of bitcoin gives them X CHF per month. If bitcoin doubles in value relative to CHF, then next month you'll probably be asked to pay half as much bitcoin.

This is no different than if you were buying service from a foreign company, and that company charged you in their local currency. You would have to pay the current equivalent in your local currency. Sometimes you would pay more than last month, sometimes less.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com