Hacker News Reader

Comment by notresidenter | Hacker News Reader

(Paying customer) I wish they would focus more on their existing product(s). There's a huge synergy between Calendar and Mail, but Drive, Pass, VPN, are useless (but the VPN is well-done). There's still no Caldav support or scheduling, and a lot of things are annoying in Mail, of course some of these are hard to solve with E2E, but at this point, their E2E claim is also half-baked and mostly for marketing, why not fix all of things?

What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

View on HN

I'm even more convinced that me being a Fastmail customer is a good thing. Fastmail has been rock solid for years.

Their email, calendar and contacts solutions work well with iOS and android (using the DAVx app).

WebApps work flawlessly on Firefox. They have all sorts of customisation for spam filtering, catch all email addresses, etc.

They don't do all the things (vpn, passwords, drive, what have you). But what they do, they do very well.

> android (using the DAVx app)

It borderlines on the insulting that Google refuses to support CardDAV and CalDAV OOTB.

I'll second this, I've had absolutely zero issues with Fastmail over many years. It always just works, and is super fast.

Absolutely, very happy Fastmail customer here! My only qualm is that their apps could be better at multi account (switching is too much of a hassle), but that's the only problem I ever had, and I work around it by using different mail/calendar clients.

If you just have a single account with them though, their app is quite excellent and has everything (mail, calendar, notes), no need to get multiple apps and stuff like DAVx unless you want to.

Fastmail Employees Form a Union (6 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38656727

Fastmail lays off 60% of union bargaining committee in surprise restructure (9 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40778214

It's a good product, no longer so sure about the company.

Uh, that doesn't look nice, gonna keep an eye on that. This kind of stuff is usually a warning sign for approaching enshittification.

Luckily I have a few alternatives in mind (like mailbox.org), albeit without neat apps.

Ugh...what? That's bad.

This reddit comment makes me thinks it reasonable. Who knows what's true though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fastmail/comments/1do3ede/comment/l...

How do you deal with spam in Fastmail?

I switched from GMail to Fastmail about a year ago, but ever since my Inbox is just filled with lots of spam. I tried writing email filters, and have about 50 now, but it is just not cutting it.

And also those promotional mails that I don't want to mark as "spam" but still shouldn't end up in my Inbox ... they drive me nuts.

Since I started using Fastmail, my main means of communication is shifting away from e-mail, which is sad.

Why dont you use their masked/alternate addresses. That was one of the primary selling points for me. Any questionable site/service gets its own address and is easily removed or filtered if spam starts showing up.

That only works with something you actually signed up for. When your email gets leaked in a database and sold a thousand times you just start getting spam for all types of things.

My solution was to start over with a new "root" email address and then keep it private. Having unique email addresses for each service (which then forwards to the "root" email address) is a bit of a pain but it does work for spam and, depending on what else you share with the service, privacy as well.

For better or worse if you want to reliably control who you receive email from you need to control who knows your email addresses and have the ability to disable/filter them.

the same is true for SMS/call spam - my phone number is a single digit off from my wife's, she gets 6-10 total spam messages and calls a day, i get one a year. It's because she uses her cellphone number to sign up for fuel rewards and stuff, and they immediately sell it. I use my voip number to sign up for anything, and i have notifications shut off for SMS - and a phone tree for calls. Spam calls never get through a phone tree/IVR.

I have those too. But the problem is I migrated away from GMail, where everything worked even with 1 email address, so now I'm stuck with that email address being used by all the people and companies that want to send me email.

(By the way, in GMail you can move emails to "promotional" and "social" folders, and then GMail automatically does that for you for future emails; this is quite handy, but after migrating to Fastmail this is leaving me with quite a mess in my Inbox, since Fastmail doesn't have this option).

You're not stuck; slowly change addresses with the different companies, people, etc. I did it over the course of a few years without hassle. If you spend $10/year for your own domain, then you can use a catchall, and if you ever decide to leave Fast ail for another provider, you don't have to change all the addreses again.

The fact that it requires slowly changing over years is a sign of getting stuck no? We can theoretically slowly migrate anything. But when effort > X, we consider it being stuck.

>in GMail you can move emails to "promotional" and "social" folders, and then GMail automatically does that for you for future emails

It's not quite as elegant, but you can create a rule from an existing email in the mail options. It will try to guess at the best set of filters to match that type of email (and obviously you can refine that manually if needed), so you can send those types of mails to a Marketing folder.

My experience on fastmail doesn't align with yours. While spam has slightly increased over the years, I attribute that to just using my email more often. It's very rare that I get spam in my actual inbox. In fact, my experience is that the spam filter is a bit too strong and I actually have to check the spam folder now and then.

For the promotional emails, there are some general rules you can set up to catch a lot of it, such as https://pietrorea.com/2021/10/22/filter-emails-by-the-list-u.... However, the best way to manage them is to actually just unsubscribe to them as you receive them. If unsubscribe is ignored, then blacklist the sender.

For general spam, there's a setting under "privacy and security" to make the filtering more or less aggressive. My setting is on "standard" and I haven't had any problems, but you could try adjusting that.

OK, I will try that.

But I still think migrating away from GMail should be less painful.

I'm using the Hey approach in Fastmail, so my main folders are Inbox and Screener, with a filter like this:

Matches NOT fromin:contacts -> Move to Screener

I'll check the Screener less frequently, and whenever I feel like it I'll take a message from it and use Actions -> Add rule from message.. and send messages from that sender to a Newsletter folder.

I still get lots of crap in the Screener, but then again I don't really use e-mail to communicate with humans, so in a sense all e-mail is automated nonsense from systems where I have some kind of user account.

Here's one little-known tip I learned from Fastmail support some time ago: it's only possible to train the spam filter using their Web UI. If you're using a 3rd-party client, simply moving messages to your spam folder will have no effect on your filter quality. So to truly flag a message as spam, you must switch to your browser, login to FM, and handle it from there.

But I don't want to mark everything that should not grab my immediate attention as spam.

Some stuff like promotions or social messages deserve their own folder. Google did this right.

Google does it right because they don't respect your privacy.

They have millions of users and they use aggregated data from all of them to manage the automatic categories.

spam as in unsolicited? I get 0 in any of my inboxes. I get lots of stuff i don't care about from spammy businesses (E Y E GL A S S // S A L E 80% O FF) that i've used before. But there's a way around that as well, it's more expensive. Buy a domain name. Set up DNS. Let fastmail host the actual mail service. Set up a catchall account *@domain.tld. Give per-site/whatever emails whenever you give an email.

If the email gets sold, just tell the fastmail UI that everything sent to that address is spam. It hasn't failed yet, and i've been using fastmail since it was $5/year. It's $15/yr now and they recently doubled my storage from 500mb to 1000mb!

Promotional mails you've subscribed to aren't spam, just add a rule and label them "Ads" and click the "Archive (skip inbox)"

That's what I've been doing and my inbox is pretty much empty from useless stuff.

In the spam protection settings, you can choose a protection level of off, standard, aggressive or custom. I choose custom.

Then, I send everything with a score of 5 or more to spam.

I don't delete any spam.

And I mark it all as read.

That cuts down on spam drastically in my inbox while still retaining it all in the spam folder should any legit email end up there.

I agree. I also like their explanation on why they don't offer PGP.

https://www.fastmail.com/blog/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/

I love the service but hate their android app. It fails to load any content when offline. Absolutely maddening when you need to look up anything, like gig tickets, in a low reception area.

this, I like Fastmail, but their app being online-only is a shame

(another happy paying customer of Fastmail here)

I am pleasantly surprised that Fastmail has no AI cruft in it especially that Fastmail is founded by one of the godfathers of modern AI, Jeremy Howard.

As soon as somebody decides that a brand's future requires adding more top-level features rather than specializing in top-of-class delivery of core features, product design becomes an endless treadmill (death spiral?) of adding "yet another half-baked product"

That's not to say that "one thing well" products are sure to be viable, and the "bullet point maximizers" that dominate product design for the last 10-15 years may know best, but this is what it looks like once they run the show either way.

This happened so bad with Wyze. They had a really great little camera for a very brief time. Then I turn around and they're just a white box product reseller, with everything from vacuums to earbuds. Meanwhile, their camera service is a shadow of its former self.

If this is a Proton grievance panel, I really wish they'd optimize their web app, at least with Firefox. If I leave the Protonmail tab open, the amount of CPU and RAM usage for Firefox just spikes up like crazy, and it shoots back down once I close that tab.

I can get around this with the ProtonMail Bridge and using Mutt, which works fine and makes me feel cool, but the web app is considerably more convenient.

Both their web app and their android app are extraordinarily sluggish, unfortunately. And I currently am forced to use the web app in a PWA on my phone because the Android app has a current bug where the contents of emails won't load. In other words it's 100% useless, and I uninstalled. By the PWA is agonizing to use, so I've been missing emails lately. For a service to keep getting worse over the years when I want to like it is difficult to swallow, but every day I'm a little closer to canceling my subscription.

Don't get me started on the fucking Android app.

When I would type and send an email too fast, it would only send the first half or so. I would have to type out the email, wait about 30 seconds, then send it. Presumably it had to fully save some draft before sending it, but it came off as extremely amateurish. Not to mention that it just utterly killed my battery life.

The iOS app is fine, and since I'm on iPhone again I'm still on Proton, but I haven't completely lost the bitter taste in my mouth over the Android version.

They replaced the android app recently. I haven't experienced this bug with the new one.

I cannot imagine that it could get much worse.

I don't have an Android phone anymore, and to be potentially fair to Proton, my last Android phone was an utter piece of shit (Pixel 7 Pro). I know people who had the Pixel 7 Pro and they didn't seem to hate it, so it's possible that it had some hardware issues, but it certainly didn't seem like hardware issues. I hated that thing so much that it completely turned me off of Android for the foreseeable future, since this was not a cheap phone, and it was Google's flagship phone: if they couldn't get a good experience on the flagship product, I didn't see why the experience would be much better on anything else.

Anyway, it's possible that the Proton app didn't suck as generally on Android as it did for me, it could have been the phone's fault, but it did leave a very bad taste in my mouth. As stated, the iOS version of the Proton app is totally fine, I haven't had any issues with it other than I don't really like the theme, but that's hardly worth complaining about.

With the previous android app, not the one they just launched last month, i had a similar issue (it would take ages to load an email), clearing the cache in the settings had solved it though.

Unfortunately this is an issue with the new one. It doesn't just take a long time, it never loads, and can't be fixed with a cache clear or reinstall.

Hm, I have Proton Mail in a pinned tab in FF (Mac) - no issues at all. The only time I re-open it is when FF restarts after an update (~once a month).

I feel like this is a somewhat recent change, so I don't know what happened on my computer or within Protonmail; I have an Intel Macbook Pro, and it really seems to slow everything down. Maybe I screwed up a setting but as I said everything else seems to work fine and when I use the Protonmail Bridge it works fine.

Yes, could potentially be related to a different CPU architecture, but could also be something else eg RAM capacity (I have 64GB) or Proton Mail settings (do you have offline enabled? I don't).

I have 64gb of RAM as well. I don't think I have offline enabled. My CPU is an i9.

I'm happy enough with my Mutt solution, and the iOS app is generally ok, and I do like the service overall, so while I complain it's not out of hatred. I just want the service to get better.

Is there some trick to get Mutt's "e" command to work ? My editor (emacs) says the message writes back to the server okay, but then my edits do not "take" on the server.

CalDAV and CardDAV support missing is the only reason I still have a google account. I understand it's "tough" with e2ee but adding support to the bridge would be perfectly sufficient, then at least I could use local Calendar/Contact apps.

I've been considering switching from Fastmail to Proton for Mail/Calendar/Contacts, but I didn't realize their bridge didn't do CalDAV or CardDAV. Also, apparently the bridge is desktop-only -- no mobile? That's kind of a deal breaker.

Fastmail has mail/calendar/contacts with caldav and carddav support.

It's pretty easy to self-host CalDAV and CardDAV. I went with Baïkal, it took me maybe 15 minutes to install on a server, it's supported by all of the calendar tools I use, and it's worked perfectly fine for a few months now. So now I'm completely free of Google.

Maybe not for everyone, but a way more feasible option than most people seem to realize.

Agreed! I used radicale for the same purpose. Very easy installation given I already had a VPS.

https://radicale.org

Yeah I've investigated it a couple of times but never pulled the trigger with self-hosting. Could run it on my rpi and access via Tailscale, but seems like something that should be provided by the email provider that I pay money for. They also do have Contacts and Calendar products, but they're completely self-contained and apparently can only be used by protonmail which is mostly pointless.

What about mobile devices? There is no bridge and you have to rely on official apps, which is the biggest drawback for me.

Also a paying customer. I completely agree. They keep doing this, widening their scope constantly while every new product launched seems to get less ongoing attention than the last one.

Probably gunning for enterprise contracts in which they need an answer to every service and product.

This. Also a paying customer. My Android mail app is definitely not fully baked. At times it drains my battery trying unsuccessfully to fetch notifications. Other times it fetches a ton of notifications I had already seen.

Proton is on a good path in many ways, but these rapid launches of new apps will kill the company if they don't do it well.

> What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

New product often means new segment of customers they can go after. Whereas refining existing ones will help reduce the churn.

Their sales/marketing pitch gets that much better.

Missing Caldav support is really painful. I've had to spin up my own Caldav container (Radicale) and leave Proton Calendar behind, but I'm still unable to send calendar event notifications from any calendar app on mobile, only from thunderbird.

Well I'm also a paying customer and I'm really glad they're doing this — this way I don't have to awkwardly piece together a VPN, a password manager, a mail client, a notes app, and a Google Docs alternative all from different places, probably paying separate subscriptions to each since I wouldn't trust free services. Instead I get a reasonably good suite of apps for everything privacy-related I need, all for $10/mo. The more they add, the more that money feels worth it and the more affirmed in my choice to pay it I feel.

I didn't feel comfortable with Google controlling my entire digital life, should I feel comfortable with migrating it wholesale to Proton?

I agree, everytime I think of migrating away from Proton, there's nothing that can replace the stack for the same price. Maik + aliases alone are 6.5$, that's without including cloud storage or a vpn, you just can't beat it at that price.

The connection is encryption, and having all of these services paid for and therefore have better support. I really like protonpass so I was happy to see that I already pay for it

Paying customer for many years.

I like Proton Pass and switched to it about a month ago from 1Password. It's not quite there yet; I'm thinking of switching back. There are still some sharp edges like lack of support for credit cards, addresses, etc.

Proton Pass supports Credit Cards as a paid feature!

I'm curious why it's important? Do you pass on card details manually that often?

Autofilling when buying online, having the details handy/ready to be copied if autofill is not an option, keeping track of them in a single place while being encrypted together with other personal info... To me the benefits are many!

(Disclaimer: Work in Proton Pass)

Thats cool but also so unusual for me. You just don't add card details at all here, and if you do, you just trust that service and save it permanently. If someone is actual heavy card user, he will have temporary/shortlived cards anyway.

Bitwarden is pretty great.

Keepassxc, or bitwarden, you can run your own instance too.

I've found Proton Pass to struggle with autofill in some situations where BitWarden doesn't, and their create alias+create new login for alias flow has failed me sometimes, which is awkward, to say the least.

The VPN is "well-done" but "useless"?

VPN are pointless for the vast majority of people.

You're essentially just shifting the person you're trusting from your ISP to proton.

Downloading copyrighted media is pretty much the only usecase I can think of for such a service, and most people don't do that.

The only other usecase would be to conceal your traffic on a public wifi, but you'd be better served just going through your home connection at that point. Pretty much all decent routers provide you with dyndns+VPN services builtin

Avoid region restrictions are the biggest usecase. A number of my friends use VPNs exclusively for this purpose, geberally because they are big sports fans.

That is like your opinion, man.

VPNs are critical for getting around shenanigans when working out in the world. Especially from sketchy last miles.

You're right, I forgot geo blocking entirely as all services I've used it on added mitigations over the years.

The last time I've successfully used a VPN for that was around 2015, but there might be services around (which I just dont use) that can still be unlocked by changing the IP, so that'd be a valid usecase for a few people

> Pretty much all decent routers provide you with dyndns+VPN services builtin

Most people don't know how to use that or that it even exists. Hell, I didn't know it existed until right now and I'm decently tech savvy.

> You're essentially just shifting the person you're trusting from your ISP to proton.

Yes absolutely, this is the reason I use a VPN. I have negative trust of every ISP in the USA. They will harvest and sell your browsing history to anyone who will buy it. I have no doubt about that. Some VPN providers probably won't.

In the UK your ISP is obligated to log all your DNS queries and make it accessible to a large number of government agencies without a warrant. Your VPN provider makes money from not being able to provide that data, many times proven in court. They are not at all comparable.

Apparently you have never tried to access an "adult service" from Louisiana. :)

ProtonVPN is faster than my home (usually) and is very easy to teach my wife how to use. And usually faster than those VPN-server-on-router protocols.

I actually think it's their best (in-house) product (and SimpleLogin from the acquired products).

It's a great product, but I don't need it from them. I bought a protonmail subscription, not a Proton subscription.

They can't add direct caldav support because it's e2ee, they should add a caldav bridge to their mail bridge, they also should work on contact sync.

I agree that drive is underpowered, they still don't have a syncing client on Linux, and their android/iOS client is quite limited and the photo integration is really half baked. However Pass is really great, it has better UI/UX compared to Bitwarden.

> What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

I suspect they're attempting to build up an attractive package for business customers, competing with the likes of O365 and G-Suite. There's probably a lot more money in that than in personal email hosting.

> What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

Growth. I'm also a (happy) customer, I've been using their products for years and my personal impression is that they're trying to catch up and build a full productivity suite as fast as possible.

It is interesting to watch them try to grow so quickly. At some point they'll need to turn more profit to hold all this scale up. We'll see if they can stick to the privacy claims or start to sell out.

They are already profitable without any VC investments.

They just switched to a non-profit system of governance.

Agreed, happy paying customer but would rather see them investing in improving Drive. Seems like they're trying to get more enterprise-y which sucks.

I can't even search on the mobile app for android... I could about two years ago until they decided to push out half baked rewrites or something.

Edit: they have since added support for this, my bad --- I am still bummed that ProtonMail doesn't support automatic forwarding. Their rationale is that E2EE makes this impossible, but most of my incoming mail is unencrypted anyway, and I could decrypt the rest myself with Thunderbird and GPG. Lack of automatic forwarding support makes it harder to switch mail providers, on the other hand.

It’s misleading marketing. They sell their email service as “E2EE”, even though the majority of emails flowing through their system are in fact NOT end to end encrypted, they’re visible to Proton in plaintext upon receipt. This is a fundamental limitation of email protocols. You only get E2EE by using PGP at both ends.

Indeed, and as far as I understand, even PGP-encrypted mail can be automatically forwarded and viewed easily, provided I have the correct PGP key installed in my client.

This is a matter of semantics... anyone who actually cares about E2EE probably understands the nature of email being cleartext over the wire and that Proton can't control what is outside of their control. Maybe inaccurate but I doubt they are misleading (in the sense that they are hoping to fool people into thinking their email is encrypted over the wire).

Marketing copy would not likely care to include "E2EE" .... "at the point that Protonmail recieves your message" on their frontpage.

Further, this is explain quite clearly on their FAQ: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained

</pearlclutching>

I’m gonna start selling sugar-free soda and when people point out that there is sugar in the soda I’ll explain to them that the sugar was added to the mixture by a different supplier before the mixture arrived at my factory.

My factory does not add any sugar to the soda. Therefore it’s clearly fair to market it as sugar-free!

"...No sugars added!"

> You only get E2EE by using PGP at both ends.

That's true for all email though, right? What is Protons value add?

We do support automatic forwarding, have since last fall.

Thanks for letting me know. Seems like it's a paid feature, however, and I'd rather not pay a monthly subscription for a service I no longer want to use - that was the primary reason I needed automatic forwarding anyway.

But I do distinctly recall that Proton has said the feature isn't possible to implement due to E2EE when this question was brought up. What has changed?

We made it possible, you can learn more here: https://proton.me/blog/email-forwarding

Talking of half-baked, one thing I find really frustrating is that on the mobile app you can't even see the mail headers of a message. Absurd

They are probably targeting to provide services for companies. It's hard to convince someone to pay for mail if your competition (like Google Suite or Ms365) offers mail AND a bunch of additional stuff. They also just want to tie customers to they services as much as possible to prevent them leaving

What irritates me is that their ProtonMail iOS client always sends a notification when I log into ProtonMail from my laptop and I can't turn that notification off without turning off all notifications. I don't want to be spammed by yet another useless security-freak notification.

On the one hand I can agree with this—I would love them to focus on refining the current suite of Proton apps.

On the other hand, Google’s ability to monitor the contents of Google Docs and engage in censorship is extremely concerning and Proton seems well-placed to provide an alternative.

It's not going to be as half baked as other products they've released in the past that were made from scratch because this is basically Standard Notes that they bought directly integrated in Drive.

Also a paying customer, I'd like it if they would email an invoice every month instead of me needing to go login to the web UI and dig for it when I do my monthly tax reporting.

If this is invoice griefing group, please

   1. Everyone make invoices PDF
   2. Send them out every month
   3. If I need to log in, make them easy to find on the first page
   4. Name them <company>-<invoice>-<date>-<number>-<amount>.pdf

Thanks!

I know right, especially number 4, more often than not I get emailed basically <UUID>.pdf.

a new document has arrived to your document portal.

This is a startup I wanted to found 10 years ago when writing an inhouse invoice PDF (+ thumbnails etc.) plattform

My biggest issue with Backblaze B2. It’s so much effort to get my invoice each month. I don’t get why companies send out billing emails but don’t just attach the invoice or insert a link directly to the invoice.

Same, also Backblaze customer :-)

(Paying customer) Yes! I cant believe I still cant share a folder with another account on proton drive (apart from read-only sharing via link), but now instead they add .....

You can now, with this recently introduced feature: https://proton.me/blog/enhanced-sharing-drive

I can see it as trying to compete with say a google in all competencies.

So hopefully once they have tool parity with Gsuite they would buckle down and work on features of each application?

They need to keep in mind that Google spend decades getting to where they are with the current toolset. Proton shouldn't be expected to replicate it in a couple years.

I'm sure people are asking for this stuff, but I hope it is sustainable. I'm a paying customer and only use the email today. With the pace of these releases, I'm not comfortable investing in these new tools, because I'm not sure how long they'll be around. I'm starting to question the email choice, since I'm worried they are spreading themselves too thin. I'm not sure what their financial situation is like, but I hope this isn't all from a bunch of funding or debt they will need to answer for at some point.

>> Google spend decades getting to where they are with the current toolset. Proton shouldn't be expected to replicate it in a couple years.

Well, with AI that's probably possible now.

certainly not in all competencies, but there is definintely a demand for O365 or GSuite that's not going to actively datamine the hell out of you.

This isn't even a "im a paranoid l33t hacker", just that I don't want someone capturing 100% of every document and communication in my business.

like holy shit, we're gonna let MS hookup their AI to monitor everything all the time? cuz that's what my org is doing with Copilot...

I use pass for all my TOTP and keep my passwords separate with KeepassXC. It works really well.

I agree and wish for Calendar to use much better integration

PMs get promoted when doing the shiny new thing instead of improving the dull old thing.

What a world we live in when even the agencies have to deal with PMs

Yep.

In the end I switched away from proton due to their negligence on this core product suite.

I love Proton Mail, but their mailbox search on Android is just awful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com