No need to look for a conspiracy, this sort of thing happens all the time to all sorts of companies. Maybe it’s a patent they want, maybe they want the talent, maybe they want the assets, maybe they want to remove a competitor… It’s really not that unusual.
Email is inherently insecure and not private. If you need private and secure communication use a different protocol.
If you just don’t want Google or Microsoft to read through your emails ( completely reasonable) then that’s where the “private” and “encrypted” providers come in, imo.
No matter what, your email provider can read all of your emails if they want unless you encrypt the actual content before sending. But even then the meta data is all available. So you have to trust your email provider.
But also it’s not a secure protocol. Pick something better if you need security and privacy.
An email provider can encrypt your data so they can’t read it. But they can’t prove that they did that. So just like any other online service you have to trust them or not rely on their encryption.
But what you are suggesting only works if you only communicate with people who use gpg-aware clients, right? I’ve done that for years but I was mostly only able to sign my emails because nobody cares.
But of course when using a provider like Proton you can only trust them to keep just encrypted data.
They’re all trying to reinvent email by bolting something else on top likely an in-house implementation of whatever’s hot at the moment. However, the supposed benefits are completely gone once you’re exchanging mails with any other email host.
Proton is just your PGP email client + cloud sync (kind of like a password manager).
It generates a PGP key when you create an account. Then they encrypt incoming email with that key. You can replace this key if you want.
You can add PGP keys for contacts that aren’t in the Proton ecosystem and they’ll use those keys to encrypt out going mail and provide the information to reply using your Proton PGP key.
If your contract is another proton mail user, they set all this up automatically (they can figure that out via MX records). They’ve also pushed for an open standard for doing this automatically for all PGP capable MX servers (i.e. allowing the automatic key exchange to happen when emailing someone out of their ecosystem).
So what you get with Proton is a fancy PGP web client, encryption at rest server side, some niceties with automatic key exchange, and an IMAP bridge that handles all the key management outside of your mail client (which makes sure it’s done right and everything is in sync across all your devices).
All the encryption and the initial key generation happens client side just like with Bitwarden.
Yup, I’ve always considered my private/personal domains something akin to interfaces in programming. Send messages here, and I’ll receive them. Despite changing the email providers and services several times behind-the-scenes. The people contacting me need not worry about the details, they just want to contact me with some amount of guarantee that the address is valid, and with no need for unnecessary questions as to whether or not it might have changed. It hasn’t and it won’t, worry not.
Well not everything, we’re talking about encrypted mail services. Skiff being acquired proves that there’s a market for buying and selling such a thing. And if someone’s interested then Proton should be an even more attractive target (albeit more expensive):
It’s a startup, so it will look for an exit at some point. It has built a large user base and good word of mouth. It’s currently working on locking down the ability to take your mail elsewhere.
It’s ripe for plucking and squeezing and it will happen sometime this year IMO.
It’s a startup that was financed by a Swiss startup fund. I don’t know if the founders are really that idealistic as to say no to a bunch of millions, but even if they are it may be out of their hands. If a buyer with the right price comes along I think it’s going to happen.
Proton is 10 years old, so it’s hardly a startup anymore. It was crowdfunded and is mostly led/owned by cern scientists (inventors of the www) and also financed/owned by a swiss non profit focused on helping startups, which in turn is financed by the swiss government (geneva to be exact)
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