More people are searching for an inbox that protects their privacy

> Who is right? Is there a consensus in the security community?

There might not be one best answer. There have been many other stories on HN of people loosing access to their Gmail accounts, and having no recourse with Google to regain access.

My gut feel is the best any of us can do is to set up our digital lives so that our accounts are "misaligned" to make it more difficult to use social engineering to pivot between them. For instance, in the story you linked, they key to an actual attack was a shared credit card number between Paypal and Godaddy that was used for verification. Ignoring the fact of how stupid it is to use just 4 digits for such a task, it would have made that path more difficult for the attacker if he'd used a dedicated card for Godaddy (given his domains were valuable enough to him that they could be used to extort a $50k twitter handle from him). Having different, secret, email addresses/domains attached to important accounts could also provide a stumbling block.

But it's also worth noting that much of the attacker's planned attack failed, and he only succeeded in the end through extortion.

E-mail in 2020 is not secure against a motivated attacker. It doesn't matter how secure and woke your provider is, when:

1. Everyone you talk on an e-mail thread gets a copy of the entire e-mail thread, to do whatever they want with.

2. You can't control the present and future security of other people's providers, or the present and future security of the computing devices they use to read the e-mail you send them.

Now, if you want to LARP, you can try setting up a mailing list for your friends who only use secure providers (For whatever definition of secure you want to use), and only limit your use of a single e-mail address to that mailing list. Great. Go for it. Write a blog post about it, even. But that's not going to solve the fundamental problems of #1 and #2 for the rest of the world.

Now, if you actually want security (as opposed to 'I want to LARP at security'), take a page from conspiracies in the financial sector, and don't use e-mail for any conversations that you'd like to remain secure.

Securing e-mail is a waste of time. It can't be secured, because of 50 years of social expectations about how e-mail should behave. (Other people retain copies of your e-mails, and other people can choose which provider services their address.) You can spend that effort on trying to secure a different communication protocol, which does not have those 50 years of social expectations, and that will probably lose to e-mail (Because those two security holes provide users with value, and when it comes to value versus security, security will lose every time.)

My company name was too long, so we registered a domain for our email that was just our initials and it was nicer to type, and really easy to set up.

For CalDAV, many people use the Fastmail web interface with other calendars by syncing them (https://www.fastmail.com/help/calendar/sync.html?).

Everyone has this. It's called IMAP.

As for the gmail web client, various services are providing similar interfaces on their email service.

(A great thing about HN is that you don't need to have an account in order to read articles. So I can bookmark it on my phone without worry.)

But that's false. They're encrypted with TLS. It's just not end to end encrypted.

There is clearly some merit to Proton Mail's privacy claims. Even Google goes out of their way to try to scrape data from ProtonMail: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/9yl94k/never_co...

ProtonMail has been dragging their feet for so long in the interoperability department, it almost feels like they're aiming for vendor lock-in. If they truly were serious about interoperability, they've had plenty of time to create an open standard around their protocol (like FastMail and post-2017 Lavabit has done), or release patches to make their protocol available in widely used open-source email clients like Thunderbird. Instead they've got that mediocre IMAP bridge you mentioned. No thanks. When I choose an email service I want to retain the ability to export all my data and leave on short notice, without having to depend on non-standard tools.

There are no such guarantees. Social pressure on their brand did not stop Enron or Madoff from committing fraud. Nor did it stop millions of others from committing various crimes, atrocities, and other unethical acts throughout history.

In the realm of email providers, the case of Hushmail[1] serves as an instructive example.

Hushmail is an email provider that provides a service similar to ProtonMail, but:

"Developments in November 2007 led to doubts, amongst security-conscious users, about Hushmail's security, specifically, concern over a backdoor. The issue originated with the non-Java version of the Hush system. It performed the encrypt/decrypt steps on Hush's servers, and then used SSL to transmit the data to the user. The data is available as cleartext during this small window of time; the passphrase can be captured at this point, facilitating the decryption of all stored messages and future messages using this passphrase. Hushmail stated that the Java version is also vulnerable, in that they may be compelled to deliver a compromised java applet to a user."

and

"Hushmail supplied cleartext copies of private email messages associated with several addresses at the request of law enforcement agencies under a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the United States.; e.g. in the case of United States v. Stumbo. In addition, the contents of emails between Hushmail addresses were analyzed, and 12 CDs were supplied to U.S. authorities."

Incidentally, despite all this, and what you'd expect to be "damage to their brand", Hushmail is still around, and I'd expect many of their users have never even heard of any of this.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_...

For someone from Belarus and opposing Lukashenko, ProtonMail is fairly secure service. For Edward Snowden, probably less so.

Forward secrecy only works up to the point your end point gets compromised and only for messages you have not kept. So for the vast majority of people it provides very little value.

It provides no protection against someone who breaks your encryption and something like the Signal Protocol's much greater complexity provides more opportunities to do that.

It’s good to use your own domain, it’s good to use a non ad-driven business model like fastmail (though even this is mostly for the user experience and not security)

Beyond that “secure” email when you’re largely communicating with other @gmail users, isn’t a thing.

Google has some of the best security researchers in the world, I’d trust their employees to do a better job than proton at securing the service itself.

Email should be treated as largely public (for personal use) and not used for sensitive communication. It’s a little different in a corporate setting, but then you’re not using proton mail anyway.

It's right there in the link you're replying to.

and yes, Yandex has an API for everything. You don't need language bindings as long as your language speaks HTTPS.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland