Hacker News Reader

Comment by cowpig | Hacker News Reader

When I started my company we chose to use Protonmail. My advice to anyone who wants secure email: don't use protonmail.

The email search is completely useless. I don't understand how it can possibly be so difficult to do a substring search on a corpus and rank them in some kind of sane way. Searching for old emails based on content is an exercise in futility. After a few years of using an email service, search becomes really important.

It is exceedingly difficult to pull data out. You need dev ops skills to do it.

They charge for users that are disabled, and you can only stop paying for them if all of the associated data is deleted.

So they effectively hold your data hostage (yes, you can get it out but it time-consuming and requires technical skills).

I finally bit the bullet and paid a dev ops person (and gave him access to all my data) and switched to fastmail (at least it's not google) a few months ago. It's been an incredible relief.

View on HN

A few clarifications. There is an export tool that is available. The reason we must count disabled addresses towards your quota is because if we did not do that, we would be susceptible to an attack where a paid user could run through our address space by creating and disabling addresses continuously, so some limits are required. You can remove disabled addresses, but only by contacting support.

This is a sort of weird reply. The person you're replying to isn't saying "you need to allow an attacker to create and disable millions of addresses to DOS you". They're saying "you need to allow medium to longer term clients that de-activate very small portions of their overall number of accounts to not have to pay for those". You already have a system to measure account numbers, so what makes it impossible to also measure active account %ages

Sorry if our answer wasn't clear. You can de-activate, but it must be manually requested through support.

You’re replies are very frustrating. It’s like you’re completely missing the point of the replies and focusing on very tiny, irrelevant details. Nobody is claiming that you can’t remove deactivated accounts. Only that you charge for them until you go through the rather annoying process of contacting customer support. And then you make some bad excuse that it’s in the name of security because somebody could potentially make and deactivate millions of accounts. Obviously there could be a middle ground of allowing someone to deactivate 5 accounts per month or something.

I suggest you either stop responding, or actually respond to the issues people have, and don’t make excuses that are paper thin.

This line of discussion from Protonmail is making me greatly reconsider closing my accounts (plural) there for VPN and mail service.

This is embarrassing at minimum, and show negative interaction with customers.

Their service is so useful to me. But man, I can't deny their customer interactions can be problematic (as evidenced.)

Is it that the developers 100% defer to a marketing rep without in-depth knowledge? Something else?

Same here, with their email AND vpn. Its been flawless so far, tech wise.

But yeah, they really need to control and focus their core message to a tech board. If you whiff that (which they did), there's a good chance in running off your core users. And that is generally considered a bad idea.

Completely agree.

> Obviously there could be a middle ground of allowing someone to deactivate 5 accounts per month or something.

A improvement like this is indeed in our feature backlog, and something we hope to implement in the future.

Wow this response chain is so layed on thick with half answers and marketing speak. I guess you can now "hope" that I won't cancel my protonmail subscription.

I very much assume they wouldn’t care (or not more than you do anyway).

This seems to be assuming bad faith, you've changed a complaint of a missing feature into a different request for a new feature (because contacting support is inconvenient), which are two different things. It would be best to not confuse the issue, and to focus on doing what you can to support the feature request, if that's what you're interested in having.

If you have to contact support to stop paying for an account you're not using, that's definitely a missing feature.

That seems like a misreading, the very toplevel post says that you can stop paying by deleting all the data. Then the response says you can also do that by contacting support. Did I miss something?

The way I'm reading it, you need support's help to delete everything, but I admit I'm not sure if that's the correct reading.

I don't know how anyone could look at protonmail's responses and not assume bad faith. They're obfuscating the issue so they can make technically correct but effectively useless excuses for crappy behaviour.

I'm not sure what you mean -- it makes sense to me that if you are paying for an email service, they would continue to charge you as long as you store and access those emails in their server, and they would have to take steps to prevent abuse from people who might try to store too much data. Can you be more specific about what the behavior is? Maybe you could show a good way that another email provider has solved this, and provide a helpful guide as to how they could implement that?

Can you name another corporate email provider that doesn't free up seats when users are deactivated? To my knowledge this is how all of Proton Mail's competitors charge for seats - at least all the ones I know of.

I haven't used many "corporate email providers", whatever that means, but I've used my fair share of "classic" email providers (standard mail stack + basic webmail) and most of them charge per inbox. If an address is deactivated, but the inbox is still present, it counts towards your quota (depending on your package, this might mean you're paying for it). If you want to reclaim it, the inbox with all its contents must be deleted. Since that is a highly destructive and usually non-reversible action, a few do require you to go through their support.

I personally don't like it and surely there's better ways of doing it, but it is definitely not unheard of.

I think it is unreasonable to think that protonmail should not charge you for deactivated accounts that still have data in them. If they still have data, then you should keep paying.

It's the same evasive maneuvers that are used on Reddit.

I would kindly suggest you stop wasting your time engaging them in their corp. troll techniques.

If you have additional questions hopefully other members can answer them here.

Why would you not pay for deactivated accounts for which they’re still storing the data? I don’t think the delivery of email is what costs most money, it’s the storage of data.

Oh I forgot to mention the customer service

Note: due to the design of PM, the search is done client-side rather than server-side. It's not an excuse but at the very least, full-text search is harder.

Full-text search within the average amount of a single user's emails is trivial and fast on any modern PC. Smartphones do it for autocompletion suggestions every time you type a letter. The only thing taking longer than a few milliseconds is the initial indexing.

This sort of comment is frustrating. How many times has XYZ site had broken search? It seems to _not_ be a trivial problem still.

Gotta love all the comments here and on the Github issue who just throw out casual "This problem is trivial to solve!"'s.

> This sort of comment is frustrating. How many times has XYZ site had broken search?

I can't even think of any? But also search isn't a core feature for the vast majority of sites. Something can be easy and still break if nobody cares very much.

Edit: Actually I can think of search breaking on one site that was notoriously badly run and had 0 to 1 part-time devs. That's not a flattering comparison.

Edit 2: So could the people that disagree name some notable sites with broken search? I feel like if I don't understand what "XYZ" stands for it's probably not something I should be blamed for...

Not a website, but...Windows 10?? Highest market share OS, billions of $ worth of engineering time behind it and due to recent changes, search is pretty much a core feature of the OS. And I'm not even talking about file search here, which is indeed a hard-ish problem (although `locate ... | grep ...` seems to do well enough on Linux) - this is just a simple word search through a list of programs that's usually under 100 items long. And it's still broken most of the time.

Then there's MDN - a documentation site, whose 2nd most important function should be search. Yet, despite DuckDuckGo (a general-purpose search engine!) consistently finding the exact results I want, MDN's built-in search often misses even titles that are searched for verbatim.

If it weren't almost 2am and I weren't running almost entirely on caffeine, I'd probably be able to think of a few more.

Windows 10's broken search is on Microsoft.

When you can download a freeware tool that will find any file in the system instantly after maybe a minute of indexing you know the file search is not the problem here.

Just a month ago the only reason I could start a recently installed MS Office package on Windows 10 was its tendency to list newly installed programs first in the start menu. It did not show up anywhere else, could not be found by the search and Word could not even be set as default program for a file because the OS didn't seem to know of its existence.

Doesn't that assume you _have_ all of the emails on your device on order to search them?

I know for a fact, Gmail on my phone doesn't have the ~15 years of email in my account downloaded. I bet that would take significantly longer to download than the actual search would would take to perform.

If the things to be searched aren't already on the client, a client side search doesn't seem too useful to me, regardless of how much compute power you have.

Yeah by default Gmail on your phone only keeps like 30 days of mail iirc

They charge for users that are disabled

Took me a second to figure out that you weren't claiming accessibility was only supported at an extra cost.

I didn't get it till reading this.

I’ll second this, I love the idea of proton mail but the product isn’t anywhere close to ready for daily driving. Great for the occasional should it arise however. Encryption should be a selling point and it seems like they use it more as an excuse.

Hmm, I use it for everything, but I’m using the bridge with apple mail.app, maybe that’s a bit of the happy path for searching..

No real complaints besides the bridge sometimes pegging a cpu until I HUP it..

I also use the bridge with Thunderbird with no problems.

Was literally about to posit that as a solution.

It’s way above my pay grade but I wonder if homomorphic encryption could be leveraged at scale without compromising security.

Apple mail app searching sucks. Might just be my personal experience but I find it easier to just search for email on gmail

It's not just you. Apple mail sucks for search.

I've been using it for 2.5 years for my personal email (I don't do anything super complicated with email; mostly service notifications, the occasional correspondence with friends or recruiters or such). As far as UX, it's pretty mediocre (on both web and mobile) but it gets the job done for my purposes.

I've been using protonmail as my mail email service for probably close to 6 years. Earlier iterations of the UI were obviously basic but it's perfectly functional now and works very well and certainly not for "occasional use". The web client UI is great and has come on leaps and bounds particularly of late.

The mobile app has some way to go but more than adequate for daily use because I'm using it daily.

It used to be the case that both ProtonMail and FastMail were frequently recommended on HN. So, how is FastMail doing in comparison?

I'm not entirely happy with fastmail. Too much of legitimate mail ends up in Spam. They even put aliexpress mails to spam, that kind of domain surely must be whitelisted. I'd prefer more spam in inbox, because right now I have to check spam every the time to ensure that nothing is lost.

A bit off-topic, but I'm constantly surprised that e-mail companies are so bad at this. If I, as a user, keep corresponding with someone, what kind of brain-dead system keeps putting their mails to spam? (answer: gmail) I am communicating with them, do you really think they are spamming me? It's so frustrating. And yes, their SPF & similar headers are correct (or at least they seem to be, as G of course doesn't tell me why it went to spam). I know I can setup filters, but I thought they had that "smart" machine learning thingy? Or at least some simple "if" statements? /rant

Settings -> Filters and Rules -> Spam Protection -> Advanced settings -> Custom

Ikea mass marketing emails are ~5.5 for me, and essentially all of the “false positives” in my spambox. The real spam is all 20+.

It looks like fastmail defaults the threshold to 5. Try increasing it to slightly above the score your legitimate emails get.

To be fair, aliexpress is pretty spammy. If they use simple bayesian filter for their spam filter it's pretty understandable that aliexpress emails ended up being marked as spam.

To be fair, 70% of what I get from AliExpress is actually spam, despite having disabled all the email switches I could find. For each order, I get 3-5 near-useless emails and every visit to the site results in a week or two of "abandoned cart recovery" emails.

Check out TricepMail.com. I'm curious to see what HN thinks of it.

It looks interesting, it goes the functionality checkboxes, but given the thread here the target audience is likey interested in privacy and security. Tricepmail seems to have little to no information about security, and the privacy policy is basically GDPR compliance (specifically: we'll tell you what we collect personal info for) with the option to sell the data to third parties. Additionally, the apps appear to be in beta-stage still. They're functional, but still pretty rough in appearance. You're going to be hard pressed to convince anyone here to switch to a service that retains the right to sell your data, doesn't reveal the country of administration, and is relatively new.

Thanks for your feedback. I will touch on all your points.

TricepMail is designed specifically for privacy, and not only privacy for your data on TricepMail’s servers but for preventing others from tracking and selling your information as well. The privacy policy specifically states that there is no collection of your personal information. TricepMail is based out of Colorado, US, but considering moving to another country which might be better for privacy.

The UI is definitely very minimal, but that is on purpose by design. No need for a bunch of visual clutter when reading/sending email. Improvements can and will be made though, of course.

Are you representing tricepmail? Because it kind of sounds like you are. And if you are, it's kinda shady to not disclose that in your initial post asking what people think of it...

When Zuck says Facebook wasn't sharing our data with NSA/Prism, he has his company's and his own reputation on the line if he was lying... we don't know who you are and what this service is, so, sorry to say, but your 2nd paragraph doesn't mean much.

I could promise you I'll send you a legit authentic fancy gold Rolex worth $20,000 if you transfer me $15,000, so you can re-sell it and make $5,000 in an instant. Would you believe me?

FWIW, Zuck/Facebook and every other shady company who uses dark patterns and takes advantage of their users disgusts me. It's one of the primary reasons I started TricepMail.

Services like email don't have a high barrier to entry and most customers don't have complex technical requirements, so much of choosing a provider is based on trust and instinct - rightly or wrongly.

I remember a while ago someone promoting a new email service that "focused on privacy", etc. A few knowledgeable HN users quickly pointed out they were running Mail-in-a-Box on a single Digital Ocean droplet.

Your open source link contains nothing, your blog has no posts, your Windows app is not found in the store, your privacy policy is from a free policy generator tool, there are no reviews due to the service being new and there is no documentation for how to use custom domains, etc. You may offer an excellent service, but there's not a lot to base trust on.

It is a brand new service still in the early stages of development. Building trust will take time, especially since it's new, but I think competition in the email space is a good thing.

Thanks for your feedback!

Oh, also, the open source repos are coming soon. Only so much time in a day. :)

I've used fastmail for 20 years and Im very happy about it. Before that I used telnet to a server and running pine. While traveling in India I got fed up by the lag so I decided to try out this web-mail thing that everyone was talking about. I came across an Indian IT magazine that compared all the big players at the time, and fastmail came up on top. Easy choose, never liked big corp anyway. I've since tried out most alternatives, buy nothing could match my need as well as fastmail. Thumbs up!

I just switched back to Fastmail after a year of testing alternatives (mailbox.org, Private Email [a Namecheap company], Runbox, and Zoho Mail) and I'm quite happy with it.

Long time fastmail user and I love it. Simple and works great. Use it for business and personal now.

Really happy with fastmail. It is above anything else, very fast.

aren't all messages encrypted on the server? that would make search difficult because no server process could read them. all your emails would have to be pulled into the client for decryption first.

Not really, it depends on each service provider.

You can imagine each user as a folder in the /var/mail directory, it depends on your implementation to encrypt the folder or not. Gmail encrypts all in-transit e-mails but I cannot find a reference for encrypting on their servers

Their point is that ProtonMail specifically does encrypt emails on the server. That's their headlining feature. Only clients are supposed to be able to decrypt them.

Oh, my bad.

I thought when they were referring to the server, it was email servers in general.

> exceedingly difficult to pull data out

Their “bridge” lets you use a regular imap client, which makes it trivial.

I think the search doesn’t include the message of the email is because it’s encrypted and it would have to decrypt every single email to do it.

// Or something like that, I’m dumb for cryptography :)

My own advice re secure email is that there isn't such a beast – you just can't apply what is expected from modern secure messaging, like having no insecure fallbacks, forward secrecy, encrypted metadata, etc.

https://theconsciousresistance.com/protonmail-is-insecure/

https://privacy-watchdog.io/protonmails-creation-with-cia-ns...

https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1121.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com