Posted by lehi 9/12/2025
Even if you can't send email at all (unlikely if you use an outbound relay), there are very significant privacy benefits to having your own server. I send very few emails relative to the number I receive. You couldn't pay me enough to go back to one of big commercial providers.
Feels like that's carrying a lot of load there?
Where do you get those? I doubt any inexpensive VPS provider has any clean IP addresses? AWS charge you $5/month for an elastic IP address, and I bet you'd need to cycle through their pool of those looking for one that hasn't been blacklisted recently?
There's another thing to consider here too. I was selfhosting my own mail, but back in 2013/14 I investigated all my mail, and even though I'd avoided Google/Microsoft,Yahoo et al. - over 80% of my personal email was on their servers because that's where my correspondents were. I pretty much gave up maintaining my own (slightly over complicated) stuff and gave in and chose to accept the "Do no evil" company at face value. 4 or 5 years later that company no longer existed, even though they continue with the same name today.
But it'd be nice to be able to expect your email provider to not cave in to a request from some other counties CERT organisation without pushing back for evidence and some sort of proper judicial authority behind the request.
That's not what Phrak says here: https://phrack.org/issues/72/7_md
Where they say "Proton was used only for email and only to communicate with South Korea"
That said, if your inbox is encrypted, protonmail does so on the client side with a second password. They can maybe delete the account, but proton mail doesn't know what the encrypted data is. What happens to new emails sent to a disabled address is anyone's guess though. Honestly I think they're doing the best they can given the circumstances
source? Their compare plans page specifically lists "End-to-end encryption" as a feature for their free plan.
This is the weakness of cloud services.
You are the bosses at Protonmail, do you want police at 6 am shaking your kids, seize all your devices, loose all agreements with PayPal and Visa/MasterCard, because you want to protect a guy who distributes child pornography or plans a terrorist attack ?
No way, so you tap on the shoulder of the CTO and ask him to push a temporary update or turn on a feature flags, in order to collect the missing information.
This is true for all companies who control the client.
t was - without anyone admitting to it - probably KrCERT who requested the account suspension. KrCERT don't seem to have any legal jurisdiction in Switzerland.
"KrCERT/CC, which is an internal division of KISA, is a CSIRT with national responsibility and a focal point of contact for Korea on international cybersecurity incident handling." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_Internet_%26_Security_Ag...
I'd like to think if they 'tapped on the shoulder of the CTO ' of a company headquartered in Switzerland, he'd say "maybe, come back with an order from a relevant court or security agency in Switzerland and I'll get my team right on that".
Full disclosure, I use Proton and overall trust them so unless I see strong evidence of abuse or lies on their part I'm inclined to post contextualizing comments on stuff like this, b/c well I don't wanna host my own mail server, at least not in prod.
I would expect their own apps to be open source, are they not?
As if disabling the issue tracker and stonewalling pull requests wasn't bad enough, seeing how it is built out of multiple layers that communicate via gRPC was what made me instantly lose all trust in Proton. I don't know who's been doing their hiring but just from one look at that kludge it's evident they've lost the plot altogether.
(There's a third-party alternative called Hydroxide, but it's experimental. Haven't been able to send emails through it from Thunderbird yet, though I've only looked into this for a few hours recently.)
If you, or someone else, like please audit the repos. Could be cool to see trusted forks of some of the clients.
>But last month, Proton disabled email accounts belonging to journalists reporting on security breaches of various South Korean government computer systems following a complaint by an unspecified cybersecurity agency
Soon or later we will default to analog means. It’s not looking good.
That's not to say I feel any sympathy to the target - who by all counts has done a fair bit of damage. But this sort of hacktivism / vigilantism simply isn't helpful. There's a high likelihood that one or more nation states / law enforcement agencies may have had active operations directed against this threat actor derailed by such activity.
tl;dr - If you're going to conduct such activities, practice proper OPSEC. And don't let your desire for attention / recognition take priority over staying on the right side of the law.
This looks like brigading to me. Which is the only way for govs to fight against protonmail: spreading doubt.
Hence I am reinforced to continue being a strong supporter of Proton.