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Comment by mzajc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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