This is the first significant downtime we have had in several years, and while we will strive to do better, the incident this morning is something way out of ordinary for Proton.
Regarding development speed, we are working on increasing our development velocity, but due to our security/privacy first approach, we can't cut any corners. You might remember that Gmail was in beta for 5 years before full release. Calendar has been in beta for around a year, and certainly won't take us 5 years.
While I do look forward to their calendar solution, it's by no means a deal breaker. I've seen too many products driven into the sand by feature bloat. I use PM for email, that's all it needs to do, and it does that very well IMO.
Last year I was a paying customer for ProtonMail, FastMail, and Google Suite - all at the same time. I have now canceled all paid services except for ProtonMail.
Good thing I only used my PM email to test things out, paid for an upgrade because I liked their public image, only to come back a year later and have no access to anything unless I pay up.
Absolutely not acceptable. There are other, more gentle ways to convince your customers to stay.
Recent examples:
-Switzerland wants to make a Free Trade Contract whith Indonesia, now Swissmem makes some Advertisement on YT with the starting sentence "Indonesia is not just Bali and Palmoil..." First that's kind of ignorant as if Switzerland is just Chocolate and Matterhorn. Second..PALMOIL..that's not something to brag about.
-We had a initiative, which in theory came thru, but was stopped (different theme). It was about Corporate responsibility (Swiss Corps are not allowed to break Swiss Laws even when they are not operating in Switzerland), and now imagine who made that Advertisement on YT against that initiative? F*cking NESTLE!!!
It's like: Hy i'm your dear friend Assad and i am against regulations concerning ABC-Weapons.
BTW: Hey Nestle and Swissmem, if you need someone who filters your BS for the modern age before it goes online, write me an Email (it's my username at protonmail...no pun intended)
And while a proton calendar would maybe be useful, I personally don't need them nor want them to become a one stop shop for all things.
That being said, I don't understand why companies don't have test systems for validation of updade and maintenance procedures.
My systems actually always had two test systems. One which was identical with Prod, and another one where test-users could test new features coming out of development system(s).
And doing such thinks without downtime can be hard, especially if you did some design mistake at the beginning which wasn't obvious and didn't cause problems until they scaled to a much larger customer base and/or provided additional services (storage, calendar) which originally whern't planed/considered when creating the mail service.
> reliability of their services in recent months has
Didn't affect me at all, sure they seem to currently slowly do some major infrastructure changes and there seem to have been service interruptions, but again mail is an asynchronous "slow" communication protocol so this didn't really affect me at all and besides today I didn't even notice it.
> ridiculously slow rollout of new products
Do you buy into services because of not yet rolled out products? I at least don't and I prefer them to have a slow rollout leading to a stable product once released then a rushed rollout.
> but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN
I agree that their price for people with many custom domains is high, but then lets be honest most people (I know, in my experience) have sometimes a custom domain very rarely two and hardly ever more. So my guess is for most users it's reasonable priced.
Elaborate...
https://www.cyberscoop.com/germany-court-ruling-tutanota-ema...
> Tutanota said it plans to appeal the November ruling from a regional court in Cologne, arguing that it contradicts an earlier decision from another German court.
> “This decision shows again why end-to-end encryption is so important,” Pfau said via email. “According to the ruling of the Cologne Regional Court, we were obliged to release unencrypted incoming and outgoing emails from one mailbox. Emails that are encrypted end-to-end in Tutanota cannot be decrypted by us.”
It seems like this openness of the CEO about the warrant and their actions taken indicate that they are trying to do everything they can without brazenly breaking local laws where they operate. "Unfortunately," if you use an email provider based in a country with a system of judicial proceedings and warrants this will always be a concern, and if you use one in a country without these things you instead lose any semblance of checks on these powers. They offer end-to-end encrypted emails that cannot be decrypted, and their clients have long been open-source to verify this unlike ProtonMail.
https://protonmail.com/blog/joint-statement-eu-encryption/
And
>>Does this resolution affect Proton? This resolution is non-binding. On its own, it does not change the current EU framework but rather points the direction the EU may take in the future. ProtonMail is also protected by Swiss jurisdiction (Switzerland is not a member of the EU). Any request for us to develop a backdoor to ProtonMail under this hypothetical anti-encryption law would need to pass the scrutiny of Switzerland’s strict criminal procedure and data protection laws.
https://protonmail.com/blog/eu-attack-on-encryption/
>It seems like this openness of the CEO
Yes, tutanota seems to be a really nice place to work for.
My guess is they needed some major infrastructure changes which where at fault, maybe related to them providing additional services.
Or at least so I hope, as this would mean thinks get back to being nearly always reliable soonish.
Would be nice to hear about it from them, but then if my guess(hope) is right we probably only hear about it after it's fully done (at least that is what I would do).