It also looks like one of the writers filed an appeal with Proton and Proton denied the appeal, so they manually investigated the incident and refused to reinstate the account and then only did after this got attention on X/Twitter.
So make no mistake about it: Proton didn't just disable the accounts after whatever CERT complained, which would have been bad enough - they also didn't do anything about it until this started getting lots of eyes on social media.
1. According to the now-deleted Reddit comment from the official Proton account glazing Republicans, so I assume they were speaking on behalf of all of Proton. https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru.... I have zero evidence except for the CEOs questionable public statements, but I wouldn't be surprised if Proton turned out to be the 21st century Crypto AG.
What about those of us nobodies with no influence?
Maybe a tool with DRM embedded would be an appropriate analogy?
With good cause, in this case, but the crowds wielding pitchforks don’t much care either way.
According to Proton's response in the linked reddit post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45227356
They say: "Regarding Phrack’s claim on contacting our legal team 8 times: this is not true. We have only received two emails to our legal team inbox, last one on Sep 6 with a 48-hour deadline. This is unrealistic for a company the size of Proton, especially since the message was sent to our legal team inbox on a Saturday, rather than through the proper customer support channels."
Proton doesn't mention that the first email from Phrack which Proton ignored was weeks prior to that, which is what led to the second email in the first place.
You'll also note that Proton doesn't mention that their Abuse Team refused to re-anable the account after the article author did the appeals process, as per Phrack's timeline at the top of their article.
I had previously liked Proton. I started seeing bits and pieces of info about their security being lackluster over the past year or so, causing doubt about their credibility. I'm definitely done with them after this.
and yet suspending the account...
The whole "we have only received two emails" is a classic move of every company caught with their pants down. Considering Proton's history, they don't get the benefit of the doubt on this one.
As for the "company size excuse" sorry but considering the business you claim to be in (the private and secure email), having an on-call skeleton crew legal team available over the weekend for urgent requests is a bare minimum (and I'm pretty sure they have people available to hand over everything the cops request if "the proper process is followed").
Remember that they have turned over information in less than 24 hours before (for what they call an extreme case of course). So the "size" excuse doesn't hold. Doesn't matter how urgent it is, if they are the small bean they claim they are, there is no chance they can have a turnaround of less than 24 hours.
Again, it's not what they did that's the biggest issue, it's the coverup. Just like last time they got in hot water. Because the coverup raises a lot more questions.
Here's a genuine question: is Proton Mail the least shitty of companies that provide email services?
I self-host email and will continue until I die. But for others who need a company to do this for them, is Proton Mail the least shitty of options? Does this change the evaluation? I'm genuinely curious about the opinion of others here.
There are better or less shitty companies like Fastmail, Runbox (tried them), even Purelymail (but 1 or 2 people setup), Mailbox (shitty support, solid setup; I am a customer), Migadu (good name, I have never used them), there's Tuta (but somehow they seem off to me; like Proton they also do not allow IMAP/POP - Proton allows with some circus), MXRoute has good name at places like LET forum. There's even Zoho if you just a mail service (but then if you use Zoho then only reason to not use Google or MSFT will be cost or just the middle finger :D) … and many more.
So there are options.
PS. as per self hosting email - I can't self host my seedbox properly on a VPS, I don't think I should even try email :)
[0]: https://mailu.io/
For my parents, I registered a domain on OVH and they use the free email accounts they come with. So that's an independent, ready to migrate, email account for about 8 euros per year.
Proton had a great thing going where their VPN service and business service funded the cost of maintaining free accounts. The fact that they chose to destroy years of trust by announcing a deletion policy, indicated to me that they no longer care about their users more than they care about running a business.
I’m not even asking for something unreasonable. It’d be one thing if they didn’t want to maintain free accounts with no activity but hundreds of gigabytes of storage. But they haven’t stratified the limit by storage usage. If you’ve got a free account consuming a few megabytes of storage, maybe an email you setup for the government service you interact with every few years… well you better make sure you remember to do the arbitrary chore of logging into that account every year, or Proton will just delete it, no questions asked.
Maybe they’ll send you some reminders if you gave them a “recovery” email, but that defeats the point of signing up to a privacy-preserving email service and calls into question the premise that they even are one.
(In related news, I need to text myself on Google Voice every few months or they’re gonna delete the number I use for 2FA on critical services… and this is an account that has $4 of credit loaded into it from ten years ago…)
One year, to be exact: https://proton.me/support/inactive-accounts
Any suggestions for mail hosting and VPN? I hear good things about Fastmail and mailbox.org (I see they very recently rebranded to just mailbox and revamped their offering).
Also, I've been a heavy user of the SimpleLogin alias service. Any suggestions for easily porting all those accounts to a new provider? Manually changing each and every account to a new email seems painful.
For a VPN, what do you need it to do? For tinfoil hat privacy stuff, get a VPS in Estonia or something. If you just want a secure tunnel while working remote, get a WiFi access point with Wireguard and Dynamic DNS at your home (it's free plus you probably have more bandwidth).
That would at least move your needle around a lot, even if it isn't bringing along the haystack of all the other VPN customers sharing their endpoint IP addresses. You couldn't consider this sufficient protection against TLAs or Mossad. Or disgruntled Magic The Gathering players burnt by MtGox...
The rebranding and "revamp" is limited to the logo and colour changes :D everything under the hood is still the same good old OX inferiority. Hell, you may never want to use their webmail either (my 99.9999% mail usage is via IMAP clients). They are fine other than that.
Fastmail is pretty good if their price and offerings are not an overkill for you. You should check Runbox as well - really good.
Simple Login alt: addy.io? Fastmail and Mailbox (auto-deletes in 30 days unless you "touch" it :D) also have disposable email as part of email offerings. Don't know about Runbox.
I like fastmail they seem to have a move slow and don't break things mentality that I like from my email.
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...
The configurability is extensive in both web app and ios email app. Service has been fast and stable. They rarely change anything in the UI (no random tinkering is what I mean) so it is predictable and easy to use.
That said, because I’ve not experienced any failure, I’ve not experienced how well Fastmail handles failure, which is the real measure of a company.
This is something I had not heard (also have been a paying user for a very long time).
I've never encountered a bug, to my knowledge. I did dislike that when they released photo storage they didn't have a proper search feature.
I'm glad it works for you, but their offering is frequently buggy and broken for me.
So I responded in kind, because I've definitely seen company cheerleaders, and I'll have no part of it. I'm glad you all are happy with Proton. I'm not telling you to leave.
And if you really want to see complaints, you don't have to look far. Read the other comments on this thread. I don't have to spell everything out for you.
People that feel very satisfied or dissatisfied with something are most likely to comment. I've just been very satisfied.
I heard using your own domains solves the migration issue but that makes your email pretty identifiable just by looking at your domain.
I wonder whats a suitable replacement candidate after Mozmail and Simple Login? One of the reasons I migrated away from Mozmail to Simple Login was that you can't initiate a email sending, which made it difficult to contact support if needed. Plus Mozmail are on Amazon SES.
Like, the calendar on mobile doesnt even have a search function. What if I want to know when an event is happening? I just have to scroll and scroll until I find it? Come on now. Also no storage backup in proton drive??? What??? That's, like, 90% of the purpose of proton drive!
I was a a founding paying member of Proton Mail. I loved them and evangelised them for years. But after a decade, the quality of the offering, especially the mail and calendar, is almost a joke, and the company seems very distracted chasing the next big thing (the half baked password manager being one).
Comparing Fastmail’s UI and feature set with Proton, you quickly realise they are leagues apart.
And no Fastmail doesn’t provide e2e encryption. For that I use Signal, and for the few occasions where I need e2e encryption in email, I use PGP.
My only wish is that there was more client support for JMAP protocol. Even thunderbird doesn’t support it, and I can’t go back to IMAP because I like labels. Thankfully Fastmail’s own web interface is so good it is not a big issue.
Or a very bizarre LLM offering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44657556
Fastmails interface is very plain, and it works very fast and works well.
They support a plethora of ways to do mail and have many advanced users so their mail support is very good, maybe close to running your own mail server without having to deal with rbls and getting spamlisted
I think it'd be crazy to make a service worse because of worry over potential hit pieces that might whine about a perfectly reasonable policy. It isn't as if Proton Mail hasn't been accused of those things before anyway (along with accusations of being a honeypot and not private enough).
It's better to have integrity and fight for your users than to cave just to avoid click bait articles by people with irrational views.
They currently do cooperate and they go get the odd bad press about this.
So doing what they actually claim to do would change nothing. Their current stance is just a cop out.
Most CERT requests are valid and good and should be obliged.. but there should be a manual check involved.
Especially when an appeal is filed. Especially when the content is obviously security reporting.
Both extremes are wrong - don't ignore CERTs and don't mindlessly oblige them. Find one of the many reasonable middlegrounds.
I suspect there's a few email providers where the marketing and reputation management teams are hurriedly adding "check the user and the user's affiliated social media reach before suspending this account, and before responding to any support requests from the user."
My new elevator pitch: We proactively research all of our customer's users and new signups to assign them a social media reach score. We then automate escalating external account action requests or user support calls for highly ranked users to senior staff and providing details and evidence of their social reach and industry affiliations. While we generate revenue from these customers, our primary revenue stream is the aggregated data we acquire while doing this, and selling access to that data to law enforcement, the insurance industry, and Nation State intelligence organisations across the globe.
While I like the idea of a safe and uncompromising service, proton seems less so now.
Sadly https://lavabit.com/ currently just says "We are not accepting new users at this time. Mail services remain online, while we work on improving our website code. "
"You are considered active if you log in and use our services once a year. Simply logging in to any Proton service on our web, desktop, or mobile apps at least once a year is enough."
If this would be the case they would not be approved by any payment providers at all.
On top of that, add the possibility that hosting companies and upstream network peers would shut them down.
You do know what law required Proton to act as it did at each step in the story, right? You wouldn't just come up with random non-sequiturs, right?
I’d like more details about the initial CERT contact if anyone knows anything
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 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.
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.
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".
I would expect their own apps to be open source, are they not?
If you, or someone else, like please audit the repos. Could be cool to see trusted forks of some of the clients.
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.)
>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 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"
"Big Tech CEOs are tripping over themselves to kiss the ring precisely because Trump represents an unprecedented challenge to their monopolistic dominance.”
They don't know how this is going, from what I see Trump threatens something not to change something, but to get something. If there is any anti-trust drive it's there to shake the tree, not to break up big tech. Trump loves big US corporations, like those in the 50s and 60s, those pre-Bell-breakup.
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.