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Comment by datawarrior | Hacker News Reader

I gave up on ProtonMail. The lack of a calendar means you often need to go back to using Google Calendar or Outlook.com Calendar, kind of negating the privacy benefits if you're a heavy calendar user.

Secondly, its been years and you still can't store more than a single email address for a contact. This is so incredibly ridiculous that I have an extremely hard time understanding how they get away with charging what they do.

Lastly, the mobile app drives me nuts. I just can't get used to using it. You delete a message and a notification pop down drops from the top covering the next email so that you can't select it until the pop down notification goes away. This is deal breaking for me as if I have to go through 20 emails I have to sit and wait over and over and over again for this notification to go away. Yes, a message was deleted, I'm the one that deleted it, I don't need a notification telling me I did so. Infuriating to use.

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I'm optimistic about ProtonMail in the long run, but won't use it until it gets out of my browser and onto a native app on my desktop.

If UI problems bother you, and you need a calendar, you can use mailbox.org which (1) can encrypt incoming emails w/ your GPG key, (2) offers SMTP so you can use Thunderbird, (3) comes with a calendar you can use on thunderbird/your phone via network.

They're also based in Germany, which is nice.

>"They're also based in Germany, which is nice."

They're based in Switzerland which is no longer a safe haven, although ProtonMail seems to still trade on the idea that it is.

See:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/25/switzerland-vo...

I meant mailbox.org is based in Germany :)

Ah sorry, I didn't read closely enough, mailbox.org looks good. Cheers.

Why would you expect an email provider to also provide a calendar?

There are many business, coordination, and communication tools that could be in my mail client (I do a lot of billing over email, is an email provider unusable if it doesn't integrate Quickbooks-like functionality too? What about shipping/receiving, project management, phone, SMS, mapping, etc, all things related to my use of email?), but I don't think they need to be there.

Calendar protocols are not federated like email. Choose between Exchange, Google, and iCloud. You'll have an easier time if you use the same one as most of your contacts.

Choose the best tool for the job. It's not likely that one provider will have the best tool for everything that, say, Outlook does.

>Why would you expect an email provider to also provide a calendar?

Because calendar has become a key part of a productivity suite and Email is the keystone. We use Protonmail right now to avoid Google or Fastmail or someone serving up all our emails in a warrant. We keep sensitive stuff off Protonmail of course but every bit helps LE build their case against us.

Protonmail should have calendaring, wiki, and on and on. An encrypted replacement for Exchange eventually. We disable all audiovideo hardware for core members but I can see even secure voice being useful for our contractors to use.

Why not FastMail?

Also: Posteo.de

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