Do you have evidence that Proton does not actually encrypt their emails?
>Real privacy is not the result of some product,
I do wholeheartedly agree with this, at least. Privacy is a scale and there are many, many pieces which tip the scale one way or the other.
Their encryption is based on PGP and therefore only message contents are "E2E" encrypted. Subject, From, To, etc. are not. These fields contain most of the information already. For example, Amazon puts the name of the ordered item in the subject line, so they can still see what you ordered.
And I'm putting "E2E" in quotes because if the sender does not send encrypted emails, then they can read the full content at delivery time, obviously. They immediately encrypt them with your public key and they claim that they discard the unencrypted version after that but there is no way we can verify that.
Long story short: you still have to trust your email provider after all. If I'd want to switch away from Google, I'd probably switch to some "normal" email provider (Fastmail, Apple, etc.). The benefits of "E2E" encryption for email are questionable and the drawbacks huge (for example search is very limited). But competition is good and I'm glad they are advancing.
I never claimed they were.
>These fields contain most of the information already
Except, you know, the body of the email.
>Amazon puts the name of the ordered item in the subject line, so they can still see what you ordered.
Yes, Proton is not a panacea. Again, never claimed it was. You can't just abandon all opsec because you use Proton, I agree.
>Long story short: you still have to trust your email provider after all. If I'd want to switch away from Google, I'd probably switch to some "normal" email provider (Fastmail, Apple, etc.). The benefits of "E2E" encryption for email are questionable and the drawbacks huge (for example search is very limited).
I agree with the point about trust. You have to trust your hardware wasn't backdoored on the way out of the factory, too. Security and privacy are about trade-offs and weighing risks. I've weighed my risks and made my choices.
It doesn't matter. Proton supplies the client software, so if they want (or are forced to by law enforcement), they can easily push an update that exfiltrates decrypted data back to their server.
However, lacking the other data point (e.g. knowing who has sent me an email from a service that does not encrypt their emails, and being able to access that email from that account), my emails are not readable without my secret.
I never claimed that Proton can encrypt someone else's emails.
I put "encryption" in quotes to indicate nuance in the characterization. A locksmith installs an amazing door and lock at my home, but keeps a copy of the key at the shop - I think a fitting analogy for what Protonmail is essentially doing here. This isn't a value judgement - such a setup is perfectly reasonable for most people's threat model - rather an honest apprehension of actual trust boundaries.
It's a hard problem, and a problem applicable to many domains. How do you communicate nuance that requires multiple years of education to people who don't have multiple years of education? I don't know.