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Comment by flotzam | Hacker News Reader

They claim to have exceptionally good Tor support, when in reality people have (rightly) been screaming at them for years now to fix their permabroken Tor signup flow.

1. It's impossible to create a paid account with cryptocurrency: You can only use it to pay for an existing account

2. It's impossible to anonymously create any account over Tor: You have to at least pass SMS / secondary email verification, and it better not be an easy to get address ("Email verification temporarily disabled for this email domain" etc.)

Lots of marketing and boxticking (.onion: check), but it looks curiously hostile to anonymity if you actually try to use it.

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Disclaimer: Paying Protonmail customer

Proton's first and last blog post about Tor was in 2017. [1]

The CEO today claimed to be a leader with Tor simply because they have a Tor site up.

This is 2021, not 2017. I expect better.

[1] https://protonmail.com/blog/tor-encrypted-email/

and, the onion address is for their old service. They haven't redirected it to their new updated service, or published another onion address for their new service.

Link back to thread about this in the earlier protonmail story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28429582

They are an email provider. Providing true anonymity leads to spam abuse. Spam abuse leads to blacklisting. And blacklisting leads to bankruptcy. Not sure what people expect.

Figure out how to solve it. People need to be able to create accounts through Tor.

Otherwise I'll just use Gmail it's free.

> I'll just use Gmail it's free.

So that is your alternative... Not sure what your threat model was.

My threat model is an un-educated population of people who don't value privacy or care about surveillance. I'll put up with shitty tools in the mean time but can only support those who are building a better future.

I would switch to Gmail and donate my $50/year to EFF.

How does using Gmail help to address the threat of people who don't value privacy? It seems to be joining them.

Thought I was pretty clear here. My $$ going to EFF is meant to get me more bang for my buck than using Protonmail.

Thought I was pretty clear here. My $$ going to EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is meant to get me more bang for my buck than using Protonmail.

$48/year per address is an expensive way to spam.

Yes it's time Protonmail got rid of free accounts. Or disable free accounts so they can't send more than 10 emails a day.

This isn't rocket science, Protonmail. You make it look hard. I'll take my money elsewhere (open to suggestions here).

> I'll take my money elsewhere.

Feel free to report where. Something tells me it ain't that easy to find a decent alternative.

Edited to say I'm open to suggestions here. Given that Protonmail dropped the ball for $60/year, apparently that's not enough to keep them focused. I'm prepared to pay $100/year for email now.

Any service that won't comply with local authorities risks getting shut down at any moment.

That said, I do have a country perfect for this - lax law enforcement, outside EU but bordering it, no US, Chinese or Russian affiliation, either, very reliable high speed Internet and cheap electricity.

Something tells me as soon as most people see the name, they will refuse to sign up.

Turkey?

What about what I said suggests anything about not complying with the law? All my suggestions to Protonmail were around transparency and user education. They can host it in China if that's the case for all I care. In the modern age, every state is an adversary.

> Something tells me as soon as most people see the name, they will refuse to sign up.

Wouldn't even need to see the name to refuse to sign up. Assuming it's not Switzerland, all the other options seem bad.

Go check ctemplar, it is not without faults, but it seems to be that, or set up your own lavabit/tutanota server

Appreciate the suggestion. Solutions like this also caught my interest: https://thehelm.com

(hn discussion from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28350466

from years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18238581)

> Not sure what people expect.

Transparency as the bare minimum? We are talking about a service that you expect to handle some sensitive information, you expect them to be transparent on what they do. If they block account creation over TOR because of spam issues, then that's should be said clearly on their platform.

OP is not only complaining about free account, they are also mentioning paid account, which has a 1k message per day limit. No spammer is going to pay 5 euros to send 30k message in a month, that just not worth it. So there's no reason to block paid account too.

I don't understand why spammers can't be fully stopped via built-in methods that prevent say, mass emails to more than a certain number of independent contacts upon account creation, for the first month maybe of service.

Why give up on this point? There's nothing that says true anonymity has to lead to spam. Spammers have the limit that they have to spam to , presumably make money, since they go via the 1000 tries and only needing one hit to win. They have a weakness. users and activists dont have this weakness really.

> for the first month maybe of service.

They probably have that, but spammers can wait. They have the time and money(!) to figure these limits out.

> There's nothing that says true anonymity has to lead to spam.

Lack of burdens against abuse does say that it leads to abuse.

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