So… this was the plan of the Standard Notes guys all along? Now it makes sense why they never made open-source and self-hosting a true priority.
Let’s see what Proton does with this, but I personally believe they’ll just integrate it in Proton and further close things even more. The current subscription-based model, docker container and whatnot might disappear as well. Proton is a greedy company that doesn’t like interoperability and likes to add features designed in a way to keep people locked their Web UI and applications.
Standard Notes for self-hosting was already mostly dead due to the obnoxious subscription price, but it is a well designed App with good cross-platform support and I just wish the Joplin guy would take a clue on how to design UIs from them instead of whatever they’re doing now that is ugly and barely usable.
Doesn’t proton open source everything they do? Iirc, proton mail, calendar, vpn, drive, and simplelogin are open source under GPL v3 on github.
There’s no vendor lock in until you realize your emails are essentially hostage of their apps and a bridge that may be shutdown at any point. If you can’t simply setup a regular email client then there’s vendor lock in, not even Microsoft does that.
Huh? This is not true. Proton have an app that exports all your emails for reimport into the platform of your choice.
They say the reason for needing their bridge is the encryption at rest, but I feel like the better way to handle wanting to push email privacy forward would be to publish (or better yet coordinate with other groups on drafting) a public standard that both clients and competing email servers could adopt for an email syncing protocol for that sort of zero-access encryption that requires users give their client a key file. A bridge would be easier to swallow as a fallback option until there’s wider client support rather than as the only way.
A similar standard for server-to-server communication, like for automatic pgp key negotiation, would be nice too.
Still, Proton has a easy to access data export that doesn’t require a bridge client or subscription or anything. I think that’s required by GDPR. It’s manual enough to not be an effective way to keep up-to-date backups in case you ever abruptly lose access but it’s good enough to handle wanting to migrate to another provider.
I agree 100% with your ideia. The best path for this would’ve been for them to actually design that system you describe and THEN implement it on Dovecot and Postfix in their own fork or a Dovecot extension / Postfix add-on so others would start using them. Eventually after some times and other providers also optionally supporting the thing an RFC could be written. This is the usual course we see with protocols/extensions and is what should’ve happened here.
I want to share another thing, before Snowden there was Lavabit, they also did “encryption at rest” and the user password involved for some parts of the information and it was proven to be effective. It wasn’t a perfect model but it was certainly better than the havoc Proton did to e-mail by opening the precedent that is okay not to run on standard protocols.
What Proton is doing to e-mail is about the same that WhatsApp, Messenger and others did to messaging - instead of just using an open protocol like XMPP they opted for their closed thing in order to lock people into their apps. People in this community seem to be okay with this just because they sell the “privacy” cool-aid.
server-to-server communication, like for automatic pgp key negotiation, would be nice too.
I’m not sure if this is required. Any decent e-mail server uses TLS to communicate these days, so everything in transit is already encrypted.
Still, Proton has a easy to access data export that doesn’t require a bridge client or subscription or anything. I think that’s required by GDPR.
Yes, they have it because GDPR does require it. It works, but it’s not a real time sync alternative to anything and it is some kind of vendor lock-in.
As I said in other comments, not using standard protocols only makes thing worse. I used iOS as an example, for Android you can get a bridge but that’s just going to be one more thing going for your battery.
Now, consider this, there’s a TON of situation where having a standard SMTP-capable provider is interesting. Maybe you’re running in iOS, maybe you want to have an ESP32 to send a few emails, or some custom software in your computer. All those use cases are impossible or require more coding and more non-standard solutions just because Proton decided to be the first provider ever not to use standard protocols.
Do you have a privacy oriented email provider alternative to proton?
I have my domain name, but I don’t want to manage an email server on my server.
What Proton is doing to e-mail is about the same that WhatsApp, Messenger and others did to messaging - instead of just using an open protocol like XMPP they opted for their closed thing in order to lock people into their apps.
PGP is not closed. What proton has done is make a really cool JS library for PGP as part of their Web UI (openpgpjs.org) which other projects, even those unrelated to Proton have used, like Mailvelope. They’re also pushing the PGP standard itself to support stuff like post-quantum encryption. So this is really odd to hear as Proton is, without a doubt, the most open and interoperable of all the properly encrypted providers.
Lavabit
With Lavabit, you were simply trusting them mostly blindly on their claims. Yeah it worked out that one time but could have gone very wrong.
Yes, they have it because GDPR does require it.
They’ve had it since far before GDPR took affect. They’ve also had bridge which has always allowed external backups and is in fact real time. They now also support forwarding mails, which should also suffice for your use case.
Open sourcing the server software is desired ofc, but would it really mean a lot for security? Not really. All the relevant bits are already open source. And none of it is really non-standard. But i do still wish for that for the sake of transparency. And yeah i wish they would move away from this almost source-available model.
Regarding SMTP, yeah i agree. But they do provide that through bridge and also for business users based on a per-request basis.
There are definitely a few artificial limitations and stuff that really pisses me off, like the limit on aliases in custom domains and SMTP for normal paid users, but a lot of the talk I’m hearing on lemmy about proton is just FUD.
PGP is not closed. What proton has done is make a really cool JS library for PGP as part of their Web UI (openpgpjs.org) which other projects, even those unrelated to Proton have used, like Mailvelope.
I never said PGP was closed, what I was saying is that their implementation of the access to their service is closed (not using standard IMAP/SMTP) and subsequently “their” PGP might be questionable / opaque.
If they actually do everything with open standards and PGP by the book as they say, why can’t they provide IMAP/SMTP access to everyone who wants it BUT add the disclaimer that you’ve to use a PGP compatible e-mail client and configure it to deal with the encryption… they could even configure their submission to refuse any email that isn’t PGP encrypted to improve things further. The fact that they don’t do this leads me to believe that they either a) aren’t actually doing everything as “by the book PGP” and there might be security issues or b) they’re “privacy” as a catch all excuse in order to push a bit of vendor lock-in.
Their market niche is privacy conscientious people and those same people tend be to computer savvy and I bet half of them would mind setting up PGP on Thunderbird and use Proton without a bridge. Everyone else could still use their apps, web or the bridge.
They can’t do traditional IMAP/SMTP simply because they always do client-side auth rather than tradition server-side auth, which inherently makes them more trustworthy than every other provider that does offer IMAP/SMTP-based provider to whom you always send your passwords in plaintext. This has the added benefit of having at least your own mailbox always be zero access encrypted.
I’m not sure if this is required. Any decent e-mail server uses TLS to communicate these days, so everything in transit is already encrypted.
In transit, yes, but not end-to-end.
One feature that Proton advertises: when you send an email from one Proton mail account to another Proton address, the message is automatically encrypted such that (assuming you trust their client-side code for webmail/bridge) Proton’s servers never have access to the message contents for even a moment. When incoming mail hits Proton’s SMTP server, Proton technically could (but claims not to) log the unencrypted message contents before encrypting it with the recipient’s public key and storing it. That undermines Proton’s promise of Proton not having access to your emails. If both parties involved in an email conversation agree to use PGP encryption then they could avoid that risk, and no mail server on either end would have access to anything more than metadata and the initial exchange of public keys, but most humans won’t bother doing that key exchange and almost no automated mailers would.
Some standard way of automatically asking a mail server “Does
user@proton.mehave a PGP public key?” would help on this front as long as the server doesn’t reject senders who ignore this feature and send SMTP/TLS as normal without PGP. This still requires trusting that the server doesn’t give an incorrect public key but any suspicious behavior on this front would be very noticeable in a way that server-side logging would not be. Users who deem that unacceptable can still use a separate set of PGP keys.Here’s what I think: if they actually do everything with open standards and PGP by the book, why can’t they provide IMAP/SMTP access to everyone who wants it BUT add the disclaimer that you’ve to use a PGP compatible e-mail client and configure it to deal with the encryption… they could even configure their submission to refuse any email that isn’t PGP encrypted to improve things further. The fact that they don’t do this leads me to believe that they either a) aren’t actually doing everything as “by the book PGP” and there might be security issues or b) they’re “privacy” as a catch all excuse in order to push a bit of vendor lock-in.
Their market niche is privacy conscientious people and those same people tend be to computer savvy and I bet half of them would mind setting up PGP on Thunderbird and use Proton without a bridge. Everyone else could still use their apps, web or the bridge.
I had assumed their reasoning for not taking that approach might be related to metadata at rest, but it seems they don’t use “zero access” encryption for metadata even at rest so I have no idea what technical justification they could have for not supporting IMAP with PGP handled by the email client. The fact that they restrict bridge access to paying subscribers only doesn’t help them avoid lock-in impressions either.
Yes the clients are open source but the server part is closed and it’s a big missing part
Now, better to be 50% oss than 0%, but it’s not a community effort. Most commits are done behind the scenes and then published when app is released. This causes most pull releases to be rejected as the problem was already fixed internally months before. It’s more like “source available”
I don’t trust Proton. Avoid it at all costs, they’re expanding and want money. Your data is at risk!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a press release announcing the move, Proton emphasized the pair’s “shared values,” including the use of E2EE; a commitment to open-source technology; and how neither has relied upon venture capital to drive growth.
This includes building on its first acquisition — email alias startup SimpleLogin, which it acquired in 2022 — as well as developing and launching fully fledged password manager app Proton Pass in June.
So the company is evidently not allergic to user acquisition and other consolidation-based growth opportunities where it sees enough philosophical overlap plus the chance to deepen its technical bank.
“The deal is a strategic decision designed to benefit users by bringing to market secure, easy to use, private products that anyone can access,” Proton wrote.
“Standard Notes and Proton engineers will begin working together immediately to ensure their combined skills and experience bear fruit for users as soon as possible.”
Asked about the sustainability of pro-privacy business models that don’t rely on exploitation of user data — when so much of mainstream tech still continues to roll in the opposite, data-mining direction — Yen emphasized the need for long-term thinking by privacy startups.
The original article contains 967 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
good for them, love to see proton continuing there growth I pay for protonmail plus and definitely am happy to do so, for actual private email
I pay for the same but may go down to their free tier. After a purge of email and emails with larger attachments I’m down to less than 500mb. The only thing I dislike on the free tier is their automated signature to advertise proton. I hardly ever send emails though so not too much of an issue.
I went with Pro for the custom domains and catch-all inbox. Now I can give out whateveriwant@mydomain.com and it will get back to me. It’s nice for easily identifying phishing, plus you can set up filters to trash emails to a particular address automatically, so if one of your addresses gets compromised you can just filter them out. Also, it’s nice to see who’s selling your info!
I do pay for SimpleLogin and will continue to do so. The only place my actual proton email address is exposed is on SimpleLogin. Every site I use on the internet has its own alias. That’s 350+ sites currently.
The only downside to a catchall, as I see it, is someone could just start creating any random email address knowing it will find your legitimate mailbox. Also sending as any of the aliases can be a pain.
Compared to simplelogin (or proton pass aliases, addy, firefox relay, etc), one other downside of a catchall is in associations across accounts. Registering with a
@passmail.netaddress implies that I use Proton; registering withrandom-string@mydomain.orgimplies I have access to that domain. If 10 data breach leaks have exactly one account matching the latter pattern then that’s a strong sign the domain isn’t shared. If one breached site has my mailing address, my real identity can be tied to all the others.
Rip. Time to delete all my standard notes.
Seriously curious: why is that?
I don’t trust Proton at all, and Obsidian is a nicer experience for this anyway. I had a ton of old notes, and now that a new owner is taking them all, it’s time for me to delete my account and move on.
Proton’s alternative to Google Docs getting closer? 👀
It will really hard or impossible to reach the level of development that ms and google have in their cloud collaborative products. They don’t have the resources like the mentioned two monsters.
A single coder made photopea which is near feature parity of photoshop. I think the Proton team can figure out a docs suite
It may require intense passion and a manic episode to do something like that with one coder or a small team, which is hard to arrange bureaucratically.
Or a burning hatred of proprietary systems
Mixed feelings on this, as a user of simplelogin, proton and standard notes as individual services for the last 4+ years I love them all, and trust proton.
However one of the key reasons for choosing those services was they were isolated, and without risk of vendor lock in or single points of failure… Depending how this goes it could be great, I just hope they don’t force/push integration with proton too much. Maybe I’m just being a FUD pusher. Certainly equally a chance this is great for both proton and StandardNotes. SN has lacked development on a fair few plugins recently so hopefully this aids that.
I was really dissatisfied that notes are always somehow weirdly shared with a propriatary backend. There is jtx Board which uses your CalDAV calendar (Nextcloud, Radicale, etc.) as a backend which is really cool. The UI is also OK, but there seems to be no (Linux) desktop app for that.
So I started https://github.com/jeena/JNotes because I was curious about developing for GNOME anyway. It’s going very slowly - because I am a stay at home dad with a one year old who demands all my attention :D - but it’s going forward, but I guess it’ll take another year before it’s usable ^^.
Actually I was hoping that there would be more notes apps using standard backends like CalDAV or IMAP, but it’s almost impossible to find something, everyone seems to want to implement their own backend and then charge for the synchronization.
None of those standards are e2e
As long as you host it yourself it doesn’t matter.
It’s not reasonable to assume that most people are going to self-host, or even how to go about doing that if they wanted to, but people still deserve a right to privacy and products that support that. I think that’s what they were trying to say
