Are private email providers worth it? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 week ago by notarobot@lemmy.zip to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I think I know the answer, bit maybe I'm missing something

Since proton only sends and receives encrypted emails to other proton accounts, that means that when you get or send an email to someone else, they have to send / receive unencrypted and there is no way for us to verify what they are doing. Right?

Also if most accounts are google Microsoft, they still get 90% of my emails. By switching to proton I think I've gained nothing, while losing convenience , added another trust point, and having two different companies have my data instead of just one

Proton drive, calendar and VPN I think are fine

Sorry for the poor syntax. I'm at work working on email related things, and this topic kept distracting me. I might correct it later

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[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago

You have to trust that:

 They're not logging your IP on their VPN and coorelating it with output traffic.
 They won't dox you to motion pictures houses because of your torrents on their VPN.
 They wouldn't slip you some javascript in their client at the request of a foreign government to dox you without letting you know.

Code is good, but there's a lot of operational information there that doesn't get exposed by being open.

Code in the face of no malice wouldn't be a large worry. They rolled over on a French activist and doxxed them for the French government. Those logs should not have existed in a privacy company.

Again, this is all old news now. Let's see him make hard decisions to protect the clients and turn the PR side of things from "the empire did nothing wrong" to hey, let's have an open dialog.

[-] notarobot@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago

i don't care about their VPN. the issue you describe is very real, but it's inherit to all vpn providers. what i care right now, is their email service. you can switch vpn providers in less than 15 minutes, but email takes days. so i wouldn't want to go around doing all of that every time some employee says something stupid.

and btw, if you use native installed apps, then the worry of them serving malicious javascript goes way down because any change they make on the complied package would be very likely to be very obvios to someone, because its open source ( i won't go into detail here).

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I feel you about not wanting to move your email. Email is inherently insecure. My only real problem with their email is that they give people and false sense of security that their email is secure. It's only secure as long as it's on their network and it's not like it's end-to-end. If i remember correctly, their back-end email server is one of the things that's not open.

this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025

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