ProtonMail now offers entire message content search | Hacker News Reader

ProtonMail now offers entire message content search

protonmail.com

31 pointsvinceroni18 comments

This is great news, as mail without search is a hugely crippling situation.

Note that the feature is for premium (paid) users only.

There's no mention of whether or not this will also be available in iOS or Android apps as well. Information on this would be appreciated.

The announcement is specific to " ProtonMail web app".

Also: Available to everyone with a Plus, Professional, or Visionary plan

Right, I saw that.

as much as i dig protonmail, the rate at which they bring features from web -> mobile is staggeringly slow. it’s a bit frustrating, honestly

Their mobile apps haven’t received any serious update for years, it’s frustrating indeed and there is no excuse. I plan to cancel my subscription next month and try something else. Privacy is good, but not by crippling productivity.

My guess is that when they decided to rewrite the web front-end in React, they also put off any major mobile updates until they could port the mobile apps to React too.

Hopefully there is a big mobile update coming soon now that ProtonMail 4.0 is out of beta.

Since this relies on a local index, does that not mean that it needs to download all your email to be able to search it? And if I want to search on a new device it needs to download all my emails for me to search?

From what I gather from the article, yes: the index is stored on your browser. From the post:

This means that when you have search message content enabled, but your web browser is closed, an attacker with physical access to your device cannot read the contents of the index file. If you are logged in with your ProtonMail tab open, a decrypted version is stored in memory, but at this point, they would have direct access to your emails, anyway.

I'm curious about this myself.

I activated the feature today, and my Indexed DB for mail.protonmail.com now has a table "messages", and each message has an ID, a time, and an "aesGcmCiphertext" object with 2 child objects of keys "iv" and "ciphertext". The "iv" object has 12 integer keys from 0-11, with integer values between 0-255. I don't see any data in the "ciphertext" object at all.

I am not well versed in indexeddb so can't shed more light.

Could you run this to check how much space it is using? `navigator.storage.estimate().then(estimate => console.log('Usage (MB): ', Math.round(estimate.usage / (1024 * 1024))))`

That script returns 53MB for me, while the Protonmail GUI says my inbox uses 418MB.

I do not know how much of my inbox is attachments and embedded images though.

I despise the fact that they keep people from migrating away. They're not giving any option of forwarding the emails for free, which means you can't make a smooth transition out.

Your belief that email forwarding ought to be free, on a platform that does not sell user data, seems unrealistic to me.

Protonmail doesn’t stop you from migrating, they’re stopping you from *indefinitely using their domain and servers, for free*. GMail has an incentive-they’ll scan your emails for information about you and use it to target you on their other platforms. Proton has no such incentive, and no obligation as far as I can see.

If you use a custom domain name it’s not really an issue

They also make it really hard to sell a house, when you sell and move to a new house they dont let you continue to live in the old one for a few months to make the transition smoother.

You have time between the offer acceptance and the closing to move out. You usually can buy a new house on the contingency that your current house will be sold. And you can of course get your mail forwarded for quite a while by the postal service with a simple form.

Nahh I still want to be able to live there, I particularly liked the upstairs toilet, its where I did my best work.

It should be no problems for the new owners to let me in and use it whenever I want. I know I dont own it anymore, but really it would just be unreasonable to not let me use it.

I did move to Fastmail, had enough of Protonmail. UI is bad, important and useful functionality is missing and their release cycle is appallingly slow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com