Comment by throw089672 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw089672 | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently a paying Proton customer. I'm dreaming of the day when I can cancel my subscription, to be honest.

I've been a customer for a few years now. Long enough to watch the company steadily scope creep in ways I don't agree with. I wasn't 100% against the VPN idea. But then came Drive. And calendar. And ...

Thing is, their core Mail product kinda sucks. End to end encryption is great, but have you ever actually tried to search for emails in Proton Mail? It's embarrassingly bad. I've lost count of the number of times I know exactly what I'm looking for in my mail archives, but no matter what search incantations I try, I can't find it.

Their bridge clients are stupid. The way threaded replies are handled are stupid. Their web UI is frustratingly laggy in Firefox. I didn't particularly like their iOS app, and now that I'm on Android, I don't particularly like their Android app, either.

For me, the next step is to self host my email. Yes yes, I know: "but self hosting your email is notoriously hard and bla bla bla!". Yes, no doubt. But email is important, and I've been burned by GMail, appalled by Fastmail spying for the Aussie govt (god, what a shitshow that was/is), and suffered constant disappointment as a Proton customer. Self hosting feels like the only option left.

Self hosting by itself is easy. The hard part is not getting all your sent emails marked as spam. It's not really a technical problem.

I won't self-host, but even hosted mail can easily be spam-canned.

I have found success, using SPF and DKIM signing. I had to do that, to get emails from my current app, through Apple's anonymizer.

The thing I often see forgotten is ensuring your reverse DNS is set right.

It’s not a particularly hard problem, since it can be solved by using a smarthost.

can you get the email search solved easily than having it on protonmail?

> End to end encryption is great, but have you ever actually tried to search

I've implemented a few e2ee apps, both for myself and clients, and every single time this comes up, along with other business metrics / queries.

If the encryption model ensures the server cannot process the data in any way, it means everything has to be done locally by clients, and only on their own data.

Also, bye bye BI.

Tried to register some months ago and they blocked me, support was giving a cold "we cannot tell why we are blocking you". It turns out their system gives a high score to self hosted email, since everything works if you use something like gmail.

This doesn't sound right. Our anti-abuse systems don't discriminate against self-hosted email by default. You can find the possible reasons for account suspension here: https://proton.me/legal/terms. You're also welcome to share your support ticket number with us here so we can track it internally.

I tried ProtonMail for a few months and gave up. It was indeed too slow for my usage.

Meanwhile everybody you exchange e-mails with doesn't care about any of this and unless using E2EE all your email contents will be known by their e-mail providers anyway.

> I'm dreaming of the day when I can cancel my subscription

Are they holding you hostage? Is there a contractual obligation preventing you from cancelling? Why can’t you just cancel it if it sucks?

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