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Comment by defanor | Hacker News Reader

I find ProtonMail odd too, especially in context of better decentralization, for them (AFAIK) not supporting regular client-to-server protocols (without the bridge software) and doing that reinvented encryption which only works between its clients, but as for account cancellation, it does seem to happen with others too: there are regularly appearing stories about Gmail/Google accounts being blocked with no way to contact the support, occasional services (like Opera mail) just shutting down, some seem to take your mailbox hostage demanding more of PI.

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Isn't the purpose of the bridge to avoid storing unencrypted emails on Protonmail's servers?

AIUI it is, but that's achievable with generic setups (using OpenPGP for encryption, often GnuPG) and between any mail servers as well, in a standardized way. I think the ProtonMail's argument is that they make it the default for communication between their clients, while OpenPGP is not used commonly. But to benefit from that, all the involved users should use ProtonMail, which is contrary to decentralization.

It solves the problem of protonmail having to turn over emails to various authorities. This isn't solved with gpg as most people you would be sending to don't use it.

I don't think it's meant to solve e2e encryption.

But most of the email recipients (and senders too) don't use ProtonMail either, so those won't be encrypted, and then ProtonMail can still turn over the messages. The ideal situation with this approach is that everyone uses ProtonMail (no decentralization at all), to have everything encrypted. While the ideal situation with OpenPGP is that everyone uses that, which allows for multiple independent mail servers.

Edit: or do they perhaps not store sent messages (that is, they have to queue them, and attempt resending on failure, but beyond that), and/or encrypt incoming ones with the user's public key upon arrival?

Edit 2: apparently the stored messages are indeed additionally encrypted by ProtonMail [1]. That looks useful.

Edit 3: now I wonder why not to do that with OpenPGP too.

Edit 4: looked around, apparently some do that. [2]

[1] https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained

[2] https://jnphilipp.org/posts/auto-encrypt-all-incoming-email-...

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