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Not sure this would be a solution. In this case it seems like Protonmail wasn't logging IP but then was compelled to by law. So my assumption here is even if they stripped IPs, law enforcement could compel them to unstrip them going forward for an account. And that's what happened in this case.

That said, if there was a third entity that removed IPs for Protonmail, maybe that could get away with it. Kind of like how Tor is functioning.

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> law enforcement could compel them to unstrip

We don't know what jurisdiction this happened in - Belarus, Switzerland, or the USA. I doubt that Switzerland or the USA empower the police to force a private company to put up a bogus service on the internet - especially on behalf of China.

We also don't know whether the activist was taking advantage of Protonmail-to-Protonmail security, or whether one end of the connection was non-Protonmail.

My guess: they were logging IP addresses, at least for SMTP, and the activist was using SMTP.

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