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Comment by IAmGraydon | Hacker News Reader

Try to register a new Protonmail email address normally and you can do so without supplying too much information. Try to do so through Tor, and you will not be able to proceed without “verifying” the account with a phone number. This pattern (they want either your IP or a phone number) tells me they’re likely interested in tying accounts to real identities and shouldn’t be trusted with anything private. I would even go so far as to suspect Protonmail of being a honeypot. Oh…I’ll just leave this here:

https://privacy-watchdog.io/truth-about-protonmail/

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> they’re likely interested in tying accounts to real identities

I don't think it means they're interested in tying accounts to a specific identity, just an identity, to prevent bots or bad actors from signing up for thousands of accounts. This is a necessary reality of being an email provider. If you do not police your outbound mail then other mail servers will block or auto-junk your users' messages.

There is no way to preserve privacy while also not becoming a festering ground for Viagra spam mail.

Perhaps a way to solve it would be to accept a nominal fee of cryptocurrency. Even a one-time fee of e.g. $5 would probably put a damper in someone trying to sign up for thousands of accounts while preserving privacy for real users.

Alas this is a business-ending barrier. Despite its popularity, in the grand scheme of things, not many people have a crypto account. It's also only semi-anonymous, depending on how you fund it. It'd be nice if more businesses accepted crypto, but it isn't viable as a requirement or primary payment mechanism.

I think it would be useful enough in the context of anti-spam while preserving anonymity, not necessarily as a source of generating revenue. There are cryptocurrencies that preserve anonymity as well.

No mannerheim is correct , you are saying yeah but some people can't.. but his solution solve the issue , if you want to register under tor over anonymous and secure mail system having 5$ Monero is the easiest thing to procure.. there are communities that trade for cash or you can even mine anonymous there may be other alternatives.. but one solution to avoid bots doesn't exclude others you as subscriber should be able to choose the one that fits to you so saying some may find it difficult doesn't say that this solution is invalid . Just that maybe must not be the only option available

I'm not saying it's hard, I'm saying your potential customer base would shrink to an unsustainably-low level if you required it.

Sorry I was updating my answer while you replied ,i think I've replied in my previous message to this, what i mean is ip or phone or 5$ monero or .. google captcha or ...something else ... You choose then you have different privacy level and they keep service bot free. Entry barrier is not increased because you are free too chose what you want..maybe they can even say monero mining in your browser for 3 hours.. it's a quite reasonable request imo .. and should help vs bots.. yeah in reality it.s increased only if you compare to no bot filter..

The suggestion is to require either a phone number or a cryptocurrency fee, at the user's discretion.

Interestingly, Hashcash was a Proof of Work system that was designed to stop email spam, and was a precursor that Bitcoin was based on.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but that particular source is well known for making big claims with insufficient evidence, and it reads like it was written by a conspiracy theorist. Many of the author's claims have already been (imo, pretty solidly) refuted by Proton.

Disclaimer: using protonmail until my current subscription runs out, then selfhosting

Doesn’t self-hosting also have privacy downsides, being that all the hardware is tied to you? I’d imagine whatever minor resistance to wiretapping a multiuser site gave regarding privacy of non-investigated individuals would disappear.

It depends on your threat model. If you’re worried about big companies like Google harvesting your data, self-hosting is a great solution because you remove them from the equation entirely. On the other hand, if you’re worried about three-letter government agencies, you need to go through much more extreme measures. Most people aren’t as concerned with the latter, though.

This is why I self-host. I'm not trying to hide from the government, as I know they don't care about me. Sure, in principle I don't want them snooping me, but it's not a concern. I self-host because I don't want companies snooping all my data.

The 1986 electronic privacy act consider emails older than 180 days old to be “abandoned” and do not require a warrant to access.

Self-hosting at least means that this should not apply, I think.

From what I can see there was a House resolution passed in 2017 which protects email. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/05/email-privacy-act-come...

It never passed the Senate.[1]

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

> Doesn’t self-hosting also have privacy downsides, being that all the hardware is tied to you?

Sure. But I'm not worried about someone who has an actual warrant for ME getting at stuff.

What I want to stop is some random law enforcement idiot from Dipshitsville, Texas, from sending an electronic request to Google for "every email with the word "abortion" and "protest" in it" who promptly turns over all my email.

If you want my email, you're gonna have to get up off your chair, file a warrant with somebody's name on it in front of a judge, crossfile in some different legal jurisdictions, and have someone come seize my machines.

That will stop most everybody short of NSA.

If your threat is the NSA, you're screwed anyway. If they can't get at your email legitimately, they'll just fabricate the evidence they need against you.

> If your threat is the NSA, you’re screwed anyway. If they can’t get at your email legitimately, they’ll just fabricate the evidence they need against you.

The NSA doesn’t need evidence; you must have them confused with the FBI.

Self hosting these days is almost impossible because most email providers like gmail and yahoo mail will automatically move your emails to spam. It’s all based on IP address and how reliable that IP address is. Self hosting guarantees that all your sent email will end up in spam folders.

Not necessarily. Had been self hosting for decades and I move the server every two years to a new IP mostly because of server/os refresh.

Right now only hotmail bounces mail. Am using DO/Singapore. Other centers fare better.

Same here, been hosting for over a decade now. You do need to be on top of all the latest technologies, and still some problems will arise once in a while. But all in all, it's a pretty smooth operation.

Same here. I setup a new email server last month and most every big email service made it pretty easy to get whitelisted, but not Microsoft. They're a total pita to deal with. Google made it very easy.

My server is a "Mail-in-a-Box" running on a DigitalOcean VPS.

This isn't true at all. I self-host email, with full SPF/DKIM/dmarc, ESMTP, and my email isn't rejected anywhere. I'm sending and receiving via a Digital Ocean VPS. I've had the same IP for six years, and never had a problem.

Why not receive all mail on your server and send your mail through your isp.

That way no one reads the emails sent to you and the ones that you send get through (and outbound privacy is not expected if you are sending to gmail or another provider anyhow).

That also makes it harder to track conversations and would take manual work to recreate the conversation threads.

If you use SPF/DKIM/DMARC you can still self host.

> Self hosting these days is almost impossible because most email providers like gmail and yahoo mail will automatically move your emails to spam.

This is completely not true. Comes up every time there is a thread related to email. Every time many of us who host our own email servers will explain how it is not true. You can absolutely self-host your email server for your domains, configure it correctly and it will work fine.

gmail has a huge false positive spam identification problem, but it applies to all emails, even those from gmail to gmail.

It's not trivial, but it's doable.

Excision Mail which runs on OpenBSD hits the majority of what you need technically. https://github.com/Excision-Mail/Excision-Mail

The bigger problem is finding a hosting provider that hasn't had their entire space blacklisted.

For that, you're likely going to have to pick a "responsible" provider, have a couple of rounds of back and forth with them to prove you're neither an idiot nor a spammer, and ask them to manually open the port for you. And they're going to demand something that will tie to identity.

That's what I used to think, but it does indeed seem to be possible to build a reputation over time. I've been running my own email server for something like 4 years now and emails seem to get through to gmail and outlook accounts almost always at this point.

From talking to other people who tried the same, my theory is that the main reasons for my success were having everything configured well from the very beginning, running on a single static IP for multiple years, hosted at reputable mid-range server provider (not the cheapest, not the most popular) and not sending any "broadcast" email whatsoever for a very long time.

We don't like the term, but that link is actually fake news, and has been refuted before, for example here: https://serpentsec.1337.cx/i-was-asked-to-review-an-article-...

Yep noticed this a long time ago and am very suspicious

A visitor from TOR is extraordinarily more likely to be abusive. It makes total sense to put up extra barriers, which is still short of blocking TOR users altogether, which is also fair for webmasters who don't want to deal with it.

I’ve always found it weird how people jump hoops to be apologists for Protonmail

Does anybody else find that weird?

“I completely misunderstood Swiss privacy laws and fell for a sales pitch from an email and VPN company that goes out of its way to track every user no matter how they sign up! Its to avoid email abuse, exclusively!”

I've never even heard of Protonmail. I just think it's silly to fault anyone for blocking/limiting TOR connections.

> A visitor from TOR is extraordinarily more likely to be abusive. It makes total sense to put up extra barriers, which is still short of blocking TOR users altogether, which is also fair for webmasters who don't want to deal with it.

And why is that again? I want to understand that argument.

In case of DDoS scenario: Well, too late, traffic already served and server already done the workload.

In case of password brute forcing: Well, then implement a latency, or cryptographical challenge to delay it more efficiently.

In case of "evil" human: Well, if a human can get past your security so easily, then your approach to security through obfuscation might be wrong.

So, again, what is the scenario where a captcha helps you to avoid being "attacked" by malicious actors?

The mindset is basically: Programming is hard so we're going to block as many non-paying customers as possible to limit the blast radius when we inevitably fuck up. And inconvenience those paying users too, because we can't figure out how to mitigate DoS attacks at the edge. And then we'll give a talk at a Next.js conference or something.

What about the case of someone signing up for thousands of accounts?

> What about the case of someone signing up for thousands of accounts?

My question is related to the specific /login page, not the registration page.

I understand the benefit for blocking spammer signups, but not for the current case of the login page where users have an account already, were verified that the account/password was correct (captcha appears in second step), and then have to enter a second decryption password manually.

In that scenario there's no argument on the "WHY" a captcha helps. It simply doesn't.

It increases the cost of credential stuffing attack, which is very common nowadays.

Why would that be a problem on surface? You have thousands of users, why do they need to be unique identities?

The only reason I can think of is because they want more unique identities. More unique people means a greater chance for a purchase. More mail accounts just cost more.

The entire business model of free accounts requires someone paying for something extra. By unique identifying people they can limit new accounts and increase their chances of an upsale.

What if they changed how they operated. Instead of looking for more unique identities why not accept multiple addresses and include an ad at the end of every free email letting the receiver know this came from protonmail. That would give a benefit for each email sent and provide more advertising and give users a reason to upsell?

My guess is having that ad after every mail would bother you (the customer) more than having your identity uncovered.

I don't think they have a problem with a user creating two or three accounts. It's a problem if someone creates thousands of email accounts to send spam with.

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