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Comment by Saris | Hacker News Reader

What made you pick proton over something like mailbox.org? You'd get calendar and contacts sync, IMAP and POP access, custom domains, really nice webmail, and so on..

Proton seems really limited for what you get, and the webmail is absolutely abysmal in performance and design.

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Mailbox.org is based in Germany, which is why you generally cannot trust its feature that automatically encrypts all incoming emails. Other german mail providers, such as Tuta, have already been forced at the direction of government authorities to store every incoming email from certain accounts separately in unencrypted form. Even though Proton also cooperates with authorities, Swiss data protection laws are significantly stricter in this regard. So far, there is no regulation there that requires them to implement a backdoor. They only disclose metadata, the IP address, and the backup email address. Whereas Mailbox would have to forward the entire emails to the authorities.

I see, I don't use email for anything private because even if my mail server stores it encrypted, it passes through potentially multiple other servers on the way which have unknown privacy.

It's just for notifications and newsletters mostly.

Doesn’t your bank require an email address? What about your job/employer? Never bought insurance online?

I hate to use emails for private matters too, but can’t avoid it unfortunately

My bank will send nothing other than notifications to check their secure message server to my email.

I was not aware of the incident with Tuta, thanks for mentioning.

https://hackread.com/encrypted-email-provider-tutanota-backd...

However, Proton is leaving Switzerland, because of changing legislation, to Germany.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329654

I wasn't looking for a complete email client at the time, and I just needed a secure and stable address as my contact email for my domain registrar. I had to move my registrar contacts from an old gmail account.

I bought the yearly paid plan because they won't close it for inactivity. I'll look into mailbox.org or another solution, maybe even self-host if I need to migrate my work email!

I used to be a mailbox.org customer. I find the proton webmail much much better usability wise.

I imagine part of the performance issue is their encryption flow? Their search is sub par even with the on-device search enabled, but besides that i’ve been a happy customer for a few years now. Catch all domain, multiple domains, their cli lets you download all messages and I setup a RAG flow to better search.

Regarding outages, this is the first one I’ve actually noticed and affected me. Obviously not great, but maybe I’ve been deluded in seeing GitHub‘s fiasco of what acceptable means.

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