Trusting Proton Mail

I have never been a fan of Proton Mail. To me, it’s just another email service provider. It looks fancy the last years, since they made this redesign, but I don’t care, I use email with OS native clients, usually Thunderbird.

It’s made by Swiss folks. Or, it’s clamed to be made by Swiss folks. I didn’t check that.

Switzerland have a great reputation among some folks indeed, but I don’t share this illusion. They did their banks by mostly following whitewashing schemes, siding with Nazis, and neo-nazis (Russians) too, God knows what else. To me, they’re just a place where money is laundered and became beautiful and clean. Isn’t it?

Even if it’s not, and I’m just plain wrong, it does not make them some super private territory by definition. Maybe, they respect some privacy more. Does not ring a bell with me.

As for the current situation — Proton Mail says it’s “politically neutral” while praising Republican party — I agree with this commenter.

Oh FFS.

They should probably engage a pr crisis response team, but it doesn’t help that their CEO is referring to Democrats as Dems and Republicans as Republicans, it’s clear he has bias. It also doesn’t help that he’s keen to shout out his support for Trump. And it also doesn’t help that he seems entirely ignorant as to Trump’s record and support for Big Tech.

But, mainly, there is now an official politically charged statement by Proton, and with the CEOs continued political points being made showing a clear bias for an authoritarian regime, regardless of company structure, I’ve done a full 180 on trusting them with my privacy. They’ve not really retracted/corrected their official statement other than deleting it, and the CEO hasn’t acknowledged the real privacy concerns people have with Trump and his nominations. I’m also going to have to cancel.

I won’t cancel, because I have never been a paying customer. But I certainly would, if I was. It’s just another example of ‘you can trust us’ hush-hush wink-wink policy. Really, why should I trust you in the first place? Because you use Switzerland as your cover? I can register my company there too, it won’t change anything in how it operates or who I am.

Why would people trust them in the first place? Because they’re not … who? Not Google?

If Google is an absolute evil is here, being not them does not make that other party not evil.

And email is such a great example here, actually!

The humanity has a decentralised rock-solid protocol — open protocol — for communication. It’s widely used. For decades.

Then there is a player who made decent web client (GMail), in the epoch when web just barely started, so they had almost no competitors, obviously. Since they were a web company, at first, it allowed them — technically just one employee, which is wild — it allowed Google to be number one with their email solution. Since the nature of web, which uses email address as some kind of web identity, people are in the system already. It’s not very easy to jump off your email address.

And it’s not easy to migrate your email address, if you do not control the domain.

Which is a separate huge topic, since you pay the ransom for some companies that sell you DNS fucking record, basically they make money out of a thin air. Most non-tech people don’t pay ransom to have a domain name, they don’t understand why would they need one. I’m a tech person, yet being over 20 years with this tech world, I don’t understand why we pay ransom for that, for a domain name.

Can I became a domain name registrar, just because I want? No? Oh, so sad, I’d love to see millions of free money for a DNS-fucking-server.

So, back to Gmail. It offered a whopping free 5 GB plan. Which makes their proposition even better to a general population.

Gmail’s author — Paul Buchheit — left Google at some point, yet the company continued using the service as a way to attract their customers. Did they actually did anything with Gmail over all this years? Apart from the redesign. I don’t see anything, except with this pathetic attemps of Google at inventing some messenger already.

Google Chat, Meetups, Hangups, Hook— ah, fuck it, it’s not worth even rememebering, nobody uses these messengers anyway.

At this point — 2025 — Gmail does not look like a killer email solution, yet there are not too many companies that offer free quality email, because Google basically killed the competition there. Proton is among the companies that do offer, because they found how to advertise themselves, and appeal to the folks who think Gmail isn’t for them. But for whatever reason, these dorks started praising it as a secure email. Why?

And is it?

What is a secure email? An encrypted email you send from your open source self-hosted server. To another open source self-hosted server. If you’re owning and controlling the entrire everything on your side of the communication and the other party is openly indifferent to all that— well, everything you say to that party is a public domain by default. That’s how you should treat this.

So, to me that’s pretty simple.