"Anyone can download the app, but free users will be given a 14-day trial to test drive it.’
So it’s only for premium users ?
Yup
Hey it takes effort to make a WebView for mail.proton.com
They need to see how to package the dedicated browser for all the different distros and operating systems, make a nice icon and so ok. It takes hours
They should sell this masterpiece for much more
Baby steps that take Proton from a great service to a toy for the masses in the effort to increase revenue. AI features are next
Sooo… What exactly changed about the service?
Idk, got thunderbird set up and feeling pretty happy with it.
The proton desktop app was pretty slow when i checked it. I might give thunderbird a go.
“Finally” really is the key word, waiting for Proton to add features or apps is painful at times.
Glad they’ve finally made progress with this.
Waiting for Proton to acknowledge and fix critical bugs that can cause data loss was way more painful… took them years with the solution being “just wait for the bridge rewrite it will be (most likely) fixed there”.
Proton Drive though 😭. The Windows app is so nice, wish we could get that for Linux.
I’ve set up an Rclone for the time being, not great but it works well enough for basic bisynchronisation.
Celeste works fine on Linux, or you can use rclone directly.
Ugh, they took too darn long. I’m probably going to switch to Nextcloud.
I would too, but after like a week I get bored of maintaining it myself when all the expenses summed together aren’t much cheaper than Proton or likewise. This is what I was doing before submitting my independence to Proton.
Furthermore Nextcloud is just too damn sluggish. The web interface makes it seem like my server’s idea of a CPU is a kid with a calculator and WebDAV isn’t designed for cloud storage. I’ll take new features being slow over my whole experience being even slower any day of the week.
You should do it. Easy to setup using either their official AIO image or the community-driven micro service one. I am using the latter and it’s been amazing. It’s completely replaced Google Drive, Calendar, and Contacts for me and with the DAVx5 Android App it feels like a drop-in replacement. I am also using the auto upload feature to back up my photos to it.
Working on that right now. Wish me luck. :)
Oh… I thought they meant Drive is finally out. That sucks. :(
Is this where the source code is supposed to be ? https://github.com/ProtonMail/inbox-desktop
Looks like it, it’s available as a zip in the releases along with the compiled app, but isn’t yet uploaded fully on GitHub.
What are people’s thoughts on https://forwardemail.net/en/blog/docs/best-quantum-safe-encrypted-email-service
Protonmail still does not have an official app in F-Droid. Just because of this reason I ended my paid subscription and moved to Tutanota.
Tutanota doesn’t have a good way to export emails in bulk. Their feature set is getting richer, but once invested, the exit cost is quite high, speaking from experience.
Not going away from Proton myself, but yes this is damned infuriating. Although I’d deal with a reliable Android app. The Beta Android looks good, but why Proton has struggled so much with Android is beyond my current digging.
Speaking of mail apps, has anyone used Thunderbird recently? I had used it for a year or two up until . . . a year or two ago (probably two or three, actually) and then switched to kmail to satisfy my masochism. Thunderbird just hadn’t been doing it for me with meh functionality and slightly more meh looks.
Fast forward to yesterday when I’m updating my steamdeck desktop to use nix stuff instead of rwfus+pacman and I couldn’t get kmail from nix to behave right so I thought I’d give thunderbird another look. I’m several hours into tinkering with it and holy hell has it changed pretty much completely from a few years ago. Looks fantastic and works pretty much exactly how I want/expect it to. Good job mozilla!
Yes Thunderbird is getting really nice nowadays.
Just started using Thunderbird again a couple of months ago. Like it! I never really stopped liking it, just stopped using it because all the webmail interfaces and “appification”.
Was just trying to get K-9 Mail working on my phone again (after years of using umpteen different apps) and it’s not as smooth as I remember.
I think they’re talking Kmail from the KDE app suite. I thought they meant K-9 mail.
Btw If I remember correctly K-9 mail is or is becoming Thunderbird.It’s taking them quite a while, but that usually means that the end result will be worth it.
It’s not developed by mozilla anymore. they stopped updating it a couple years ago.
That’s not true, the latest release was two weeks ago.
Not from mozilla, they spun it off a couple years ago
“Thunderbird is completely independent of the Mozilla Corporation, the makers of Firefox.”
Edit: from 2012 apparently. time flies https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/02/the-future-of-thunderbird-why-were-rebuilding-from-the-ground-up/
It’s still under the Mozilla foundation though, which is what people who are talking about Mozilla usually mean (they’re the ones collecting donations and the parent organization).
If you like Thunderbird, I recommend checking out Betterbird fork as well that adds more features.
Yeah I’ve started using it again the past year. I use Proton Bridge with Thunderbird, and it works well. Much prefer it to webmail interfaces.
Thunderbird is fine.
Tbh I have no idea what they are doing though, they have more funding than GNOME but after Supernova I didnt see any updates.
See my list of flatpak repositories
There is an unofficial Thunderbird nightly Flatpak, that will likely reveal what the hell they are doing.
So Supernova is kinda nice, mainly a big overhaul of the underlying stuff, making it easier to maintain.
It lacks a ton of things like Threads (the addon TB Conversation works though). Also their “spaces” bar is useless, as it just opens tabs, so it is redundant. Good idea, but only if it could replace tabs.
Their search and filter stuff is still the same, really bad. Either displaced in the message list column, as the global search still opens a new tab which is kinda bad UI.
Some addons broke too, not a big deal though.
I have the feeling they removed nested filters, which is extremely bad, but filters still work.
Thunderbird works well.
I believe I read somewhere they’re focusing heavily on the mobile app at the moment (or rather turning K-9 into their mobile app). Once they get that out, we’ll see where the desktop goes.
That too but afaik thats a separate Android dev
I’ve never found Thunderbird search bad compared to alternatives, as long as I’m not looking to find content inside attachments. Really fast and responsive and being a desktop client without paginated results makes moving and deleting in bulk so much easier. Would love it to be as powerful as Voidtools Everything to get a bit more granular sometimes but otherwise pretty happy with it.
I mean, I think their global search is not that useful, while their inline mail list search is. So I have a cluttered UI with 2 search bars, to supplement the incomplete inline search.
Good job mozilla!
Mozilla don’t work on Thunderbird any more. It’s an independent project now. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-faq#w_who-makes-thunderbird
Yeah I installed it recently on my widows and it is super sleek.
Aaaand it’s electron garbage.
Out of the loop, what’s wrong with electron?
Everything
There are other options like Tauri that do the same thing as electron, but instead of bundling chromium with the app, it relies on the OS provided web view. It’s also built with Rust, which tends to be faster.
As an example, Mac would use Safari, Windows would use Edge (chromium), and Linux would likely use WebKitGTK, which is what safari uses.
By using the default browser, developers save a ton of space—at the risk of compatibility issues, which are very very rare nowadays.
WebKitGTK is only native for GTK desktops. On Qt desktops, you’d want QtWebEngine instead.
interesting!
It’s what you deploy to your users if you want to work around ad blockers and browser extensions. It’s a great tool to get operating system level access to exfiltrate information about your users and identify them uniquely, even if they would prefer that not to happen.
All that with the help of Google’s telemetry engine aka Chrome, which further helps Alphabet to manifest their interpretation of web standards in the world.
We worked to move things onto the web. Now people bring the web back to your desktop with every application bringing it’s own browser shell. We have come full circle and we’re now using 10x the resources.
Electron is the prime example of everything that is wrong in IT.
Wow. That sounds horrible. Do you have a source about the system level access statement? I would like to see people’s thoughts on it, if it’s as bad as it sounds, I’m surprised I haven’t heard about it before
Do you have a source about the system level access statement?
It’s literally what it is… a native app bundling chromium. As a native app obviously it can do anything.
Do you have a source about the system level access statement?
Electron apps are native apps with the Chromium browser embedded in their windows, so they can do anything a native app can. It supports Node.js modules for things like filesystem access, and can interop with C++ code by writing an add on (https://nodejs.org/api/addons.html)
What source do you need? It’s almost literally the mission statement of Electron.
Each electron App is actually a full independent chromium browser install running a website. It’s easy to code for and works cross platform as a result, but it’s essentially just a website, although they can run offline depending on what’s been built in to the local app.
Each electron app running on your system is a separate full chromium app running, with no sharing of resources between each instance. So they take up a lot of space each and duplicate all the resource usage, and potentially the security flaws.
oh yikes. that sucks.
It’s just the webapp. If we want the webapp we use a browser.
Slack desktop app is built with electron and works much better than the web app in my experience. So no it’s not actually always that simple.
It could be that simple. They just hinder their own website to get you to download the app.
You really believe that? It would be easier for them to maintain only the website, so this really doesn’t make sense to me.
Dev here.
Yeah that’s how it works.
I’m a web developer. I think there’s a misunderstanding here. The person I responded to said that slack purposely made the web version worse than the desktop app, which I’m doubting.
Both are Chromium apps.
First running on Chromium, second running on modified Chromium.
Slack is one of those apps which lags in a week on any hardware, it might be better than web version but it still sucks ass compared to fucking ICQ clients. Source: using it in the company I work for, for about 7 years already.
I don’t often have trouble with slack being slow, or buggy. Been using it like 9 years myself. Interesting you’re comparing slack to icq. Are you referring to a current version of icq, or the one that existed in the early 2000s?
I am not sure I understand comparing an app designed to do video/audio chat seamlessly, threaded conversations, channels, filesharing, plus has dozens of subtle nice features that make for a rich experience and a… Chat app, that worked fine for sending plaintext messages but didn’t really do anything else.
I compare it to qip or similar with voice calling support about 10 years ago. But still, Slack loses to pretty much anything on the market regarding performance, be that Element, Telegram, Skype or even Discord. It literally battles with biggest IDEs lol
Not my experience. Not sure what qip is either
Now that Chromium has persistent File System Access permission support, what benefit does Electron have over a PWA other than “Native-looking” menu bars?
Electron runs a core Chromium Browser + NodeJS + a bit more.
Unlike Chromium itself it is not backwards compatible and removes a ton of things like its sandboxing capabilities.
I am not sure how it is less secure, but it may use more RAM (also not always but generally yes of course), doesnt allow hardening (unlike android WebView apps) and breaks LD_PRELOAD-ing another memory allocator.
This is only a big problem in special cases, in general it makes apps strictly dependend on GNU glibc and others, no idea how it works on Alpine or others (that actually try to make a secure system).
If somebody knows more about security concerns about Electron, please add.
It’s basically Chrome. It’s not a real application, it’s a website pretending to be one. It uses a metric fuckton of RAM and eats your battery faster than Prince Andrew a minor.
No, one Chrome tab does not eat that much RAM. Yes it is not as good as native, but it is more platform agnostic, and an Electron app does not really go above 300 MB RAM.
I bought 32gb of RAM cause I was tired and gave up to eléctron apps
I bought 64 gigs of ram and still refuse to use it.
If Firefox could allow their engine to be packaged like this I’d use it. The problem I see here is chromium. Everything is a trade off and we need more ways to build maintainable cross platform applications.
Slack, for example, is Electron and it runs great. One of the best apps I’ve used. And it works better than the browser version…
The hate on Lemmy of electron is a bit of an overreaction if you ask me. Yeah it uses more ram than is necessary but again everything is a trade off. Not everything can be a hard to maintain rust app. Let’s try to embrace cross platform solutions, though yes fuck chrome/google, so sure criticize that part of it.
The hate on Lemmy of electron is a bit of an overreaction if you ask me
The issue is mainly developers using Electron when things like React Native and Flutter exist. I don’t know a lot about Flutter, but React Native uses native UI widgets and feels a lot nicer than Electron.
Let’s try to embrace cross platform solutions,
[JavaFX has entered the chat.]
I don’t know what javafx is, but java is hell. For me. I’m glad it works for others
I don’t know what javafx is
There is Tauri which packages it with WebKit and uses Rust as backend.
I think tauri uses the OS web view, so it depends
Let me get this right… you’re complaining about Chromium, but you use Slack? You do realize Chromium had better Linux support for things like HW-accelerated decoding than Firefox? Also, the Chromium sandbox is superior to Firefox.
Chromium had better Linux support for things like HW-accelerated decoding than Firefox?
Source? Experienced the exact opposite, especially on Wayland.
You can track the bug history here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1751363
You can see here Chromium had support for this for several years prior:
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/log/PKGBUILD?h=chromium-vaapi
Android being based on Linux prob has something to do with Chromium’s strong Linux support, but Mozilla has consistently prioritized Windows/Mac. Despite it still be challenging, building Chromium from source has always been a lot easier IMO than trying to create a custom build of Firefox.
Regardless, when it comes to privacy, Chromium itself is pretty stripped down and has policy-based integrations that put it on par with Firefox in terms of security. Even with Firefox, you’d have to modify quite a few policies to improve security. Tor/Mullvad Browser though do a better job in many ways and there is no equal to those privacy enhancements on Chromium that I know of, unless you’re using something like GrapheneOS.
Point being, people like to complain about Chromium a lot & act like Apple fan bois for Firefox, when in reality privacy is nearly the same with both with some minor configurations.
Chromium is not stripped down at all, just use googerteller and see. It contacts Google everywhere, on the password list, on the account list, in some settings pages, and just randomly sometimes.
It is very crazy. And also it is not fingerprint resistant at all.
I am using all flag settings, policies and GUI settings possibly existing and it still is like that. So no, it is not the same privacy-wise.
What the heck are you talking about? Chromium is one of the hardest packages to build and it takes forever. Firefox has FAR fewer dependencies. Chromium’s privacy enhancements are a joke.
I realize Firefox business practices aren’t total garbage for humanity and that they are constantly working to improve it on like .1% budget of Google. And that they are the only real competition which keeps us in a situation where we actually have a choice in browsers. So yeah let’s only care about the technical aspects, or something
And that they are the only real competition which keeps us in a situation where we actually have a choice in browsers.
That isn’t true. You’ve got WebKit-based browsers, LadyBird/LibWeb/LibJs, Goanna, and others. Why choose Mozilla to lead the efforts, when another open source community/foundation may be better? You can also participate in the various new web specifications yourself too if you’re not happy with the direction they’re headed.
They said competition, not alternatives. As things are right now, and knowing people, not just trying to make a technical point, Firefox is the only competition.
Rust is infinitely easier to maintain than mountains of untyped js garbage libraries built upon left pad
🙄
I went here for this info. Thanks.
Ugh, I was looking forward to replacing Thunderbird/Bridge, but never mind.
No way.
How do you know it’s not Tauri?
The GitHub repository for the project is here, and the tagline of the repository is:
Desktop application for Mail and Calendar, made with Electron
It says so in the repo
no proton drive??
This came way sooner than expected, be grateful. It’ll arrive soon enough. Patience, young padawan
Cool. Now please do Proton Drive and Calendar. Please and thank you Proton.
Calender is included in the mail app
On a related note? When my friend on proton send me (regular imap, openpgp) and several others (gmail, outlook) an email with all of us as recipients, it seems that proton cheats? I get to decrypt the message, where’s the others just read plain ø, unincrypted text.
At first i thought this smart. But now i kind of realize how much of a nightmare this seems to be.
On the other hand, i am not really sure how they do it? Is it to different mails, with fake headers? Or is it more like: if no encryption is available, show thisb (dentical) text instead?
deleted by creator
They generally require to have data visible on the server and/or handle independently encryption/decryption with related tools and key management (including key discovery).
For some, it might be worth, for 99% of the population who wouldn’t be able to do this but also doesn’t want their content availablento the provider, it’s not.
Finally? Why does it need an app all of a sudden…
Making email secure and good is very hard and it involves either making it inconvenient or getting rid of interoperability with existing systems. As long as I’ve been tracking it your choices for client when using Proton were webmail or mobile apps. The news here is that a new option has opened up not that an old option is being taken away
This is just patently false. GPG is not inconvenient & there are a plethora of apps that has made it much more user friendly. The fact that Proton has decided to take away freedom & tell you it is more secure is just bologna. There is no reason to trust Proton at all.
GPG is a huge pain in the ass to manage. Everyone knows this, because it’s the case. The web of trust also doesn’t scale and has many problems, handling key securely is hard, making GPG work on all devices is something which is completely impossible for people without solid technical skills.
If you think otherwise, you are just in a bubble.
You’re a serial killer. Everyone knows this, because it’s the case.
Do you see how that works? You can say whatever you want, but unless you can provide some proof then you’re just parroting whatever you’ve heard. If you want to learn how to use GPG then let me know and I’d be happy to show you several open source tools that make it very easy so you can stop parroting BS. Otherwise, you’re entitled to your opinion and I’ll continue to believe you’re a serial killer.
The bubble you’re referring to is your own ignorance.
There are certain things that are known facts, there is no need to prove them every time.
The simple fact that:
- There is not a standard tool that is common
- The amount of people who use PGP is ridiculously low, including within tech circles. Just to make one example, even a famous cryptographer such as Filippo Sottile mentions to receive maybe a couple of PGP encrypted emails a year. I work in security and I have never received one, nobody among my colleagues has a public key to use, and I have never seen anybody who was not a tech professional use PGP.
You can also see:
We can’t say this any better than Ted Unangst: “There was a PGP usability study conducted a few years ago where a group of technical people were placed in a room with a computer and asked to set up PGP. Two hours later, they were never seen or heard from again.” If you’d like empirical data of your own to back this up, here’s an experiment you can run: find an immigration lawyer and talk them through the process of getting Signal working on their phone. You probably don’t suddenly smell burning toast. Now try doing that with PGP.
A recent talk, I will quote the preamble:
Although OpenPGP is widely considered hard to use, overcomplicated, and the stuff of nerds, our prior experience working on another OpenPGP implementation suggested that the OpenPGP standard is actually pretty good, but the tooling needs improvement.
And you can find as many opinion pieces as you want, by just searching (for example: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/03/12/).
However, if you really believe I am wrong, and you disagree that PGP tooling is widely considered bad, complex and almost a meme in the security community, you are welcome to show where I am wrong. Show me a simple PGP setup that non-technical people use.
P.s.
I also found https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.08555.pdf, an interesting paper which is a followup of another paper 10 years older about usability of PGP tools.
I also prefer gpg but it is not super beginner friendly. I generally recommend people away from proton and tuta unless they really want encrypted email and gpg isn’t something they can figure out
GPG isn’t beginner friendly if you’re only using the CLI. However, even then there are tons of documentations and even Gemini/ChatGPT would prob be good at helping users create/manage their keys. However, I can provide a list of user-friendly GUI apps to create/manage/encrypt/etc. using GPG if you’d like that make it as easy. I mean, you can pay a company that says they’ll protect your privacy but history has shown paying for privacy is unreliable.
@timewarp @Quill7513 The only real alternative IMHO is hosting your own mail server and *that* is no alternative at all, because big-tech will blacklist your server immediately… so Proton/Tuta are the lesser of all evils. If you have a true alternative I am listening.
You can use PGP with just about any email service. I personally just use SimpleLogin, where you can add your public key to have all your messages encrypted. But Thunderbird, KMail, Evolution, FairMail, etc all support email encryption too with IMAP.
@timewarp ok, PGP … remember EFAIL… and all kinds of usability issues which inevitably lead to security issues by ‘wrong use’ at some point. And another *centralized* ‘web of trust’ (benign as it may be) is also not something I look forward to. O well, some genius will emerge at some point and deliver us 🥳 may he/she/it/them be FOSS-minded
I never really understood the need for such apps when mail clients such as Thunderbird exist.
The ProtonBridge used to be garbage so people have wanted a dedicated app for awhile now. Over the past year or two, the Bridge finally works fairly reliably so …a little too late.
So the bridge now syncs your calendars, contacts, files & passwords? 😛 Their bridge still sucks like it always has.
Proton mail has some extra (security?) feature, or they just lack smtp support, and you cannot directly use it on thunderbird. They offer a “bridge” app which allows you to do it, I just use that.
Proton’s whole thing is it’s meant to be secure, private, encrypted, etc. To achieve that, it requires the Proton app or website as an endpoint, so your email never leaves Proton’s environment. As long as your reading your email in the Proton app/site, they can guarantee its privacy and security.
Once it sends your emails to Thunderbird or another client, it’s leaving the Proton environment, and they can no longer control it. You’re sacrificing the inherent privacy/security of Proton when you use Thunderbird (they claim).
All of that being said, it’s an absolutely bullshit excuse. Tutanota does this same shit, only they don’t even provide the bridge like Proton does.
It’s true it’s technically more secure for those emails to stay in the Proton environment, but they’re still your god damn emails, and they should operate like every other email service by giving the user the option to export those emails in whatever way they damn well please, for free.
It’s just more platform lock-in garbage. Your emails are trapped on their server, so they’ll be no moving away to a different provider easily.
Corps have used that BS excuse for ages. The whole “your phone is more secure when we control it” is a garbage BS line. Make it open source, give developers the tools & they’ll make any app more secure than some bureaucracy that is constantly influenced by the national security agencies.
None of those actually document their API nor provide source for the backend server code. Other than building hydroxide from PRs for CalDav, are there even any other open source implementations of CardDav/CalDav for Proton? I can’t find a single implementation of Proton Pass that allows you to sync your passwords locally and be used in a different app. There is no shortage of people complaining about this:
https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/932842-proton-calendar/suggestions/8985673-cardav-caldav-support https://brainbaking.com/post/2023/01/goodbye-protonmail/ https://minutestomidnight.co.uk/blog/email-migration-from-proton-to-mailbox/
Why would anyone be interested in efforts on a platform with a closed-source backend and that is not developer focused? Not to mention, entirely unnecessary why you should have to use a bridge gateway in the first place with IMAPS & PGP/GPG, CalDav & CardDav. Like I said, Proton is engaged in some questionable practices.
Why would anyone be interested in efforts on a platform with a closed-source backend and that is not developer focused?
Because most people don’t care about those particular things. Almost all the world uses completely proprietary tools (Gmail) that also violate your privacy.
Not to mention, entirely unnecessary why you should have to use a bridge gateway in the first place with IMAPS & PGP/GPG, CalDav & CardDav. Like I said, Proton is engaged in some questionable practices.
It’s not unnecessary, it’s the result of a technical choice. A winning technical choice actually. PGP has a negligible user-base, while Proton has already 100 million accounts. I would be surprised if there were 10 million people actually using PGP. They sacrificed the flexibility and composability of tools (which results almost always in complexity) and made an opinionated solution that works well enough for the mainstream population, who has no interest in picking their tools and simply expects a Gmail-like experience.
And if you really have stringent requirements, they anyway provided the bridge, so that you can have that flexibility if it’s really important for you.
IMAPS & PGP/GPG, CalDav & CardDav
- IMAPs is just IMAP on TLS, so it does not have anything to do with e2ee in this context.
- PGP/GPG is what they use. They just made a tool that is opinionated and just works, rather than one which is more flexible but also more complex. Good choice? Bad choice? It’s a choice.
- *DAV clients expect cleartext data on the server. If you encrypt the data, you need to build all this logic into the clients, and you are not following the standard anymore, which means you will anyway be bound to your client only (and those which implement compatibility). Proton decided that they want to implement e2ee calendar, and they decided to roll their own thing. It’s up to everyone to decide whether e2ee is a more important feature than interoperability with other tools. I don’t care about interoperability, for example, and I’d take e2ee over that.
IMAPs is just IMAP on TLS, so it does not have anything to do with e2ee in this context.
If you use GnuPG or one of the GUI implementations it does.
You do realize e2ee merely means that two users share public keys when they communicate in order to decrypt the messages they receive, right?
*DAV clients expect cleartext data on the server. If you encrypt the data, you need to build all this logic into the clients, and you are not following the standard anymore, which means you will anyway be bound to your client only (and those which implement compatibility).
You’re talking about people paying for cloud services that manage everything for them. Nothing to stop you from hosting your own on an encrypted drive. EteSync does E2E already, and there is already a plethora of apps supporting PGP on Android and Desktop to encrypt/decrypt messages.
It’s more that they claim they cannot decrypt your data, so how do they send it to Thunderbird? The bridge does the decryption. Theoretically Thunderbird could add support for it.
You have to be a paying customer to use that app IIRC.
And a paying customer to use the desktop app too. Well, besides a 14 day free trial.
Proton forces you to pay for a bridge to use Thunderbird.
Tutanota doesn’t even provide that.
These “privacy respecting” email services don’t respect the user enough to let them use third party email clients easily if the user chooses to.
They cannot decrypt your data while sitting, so IMAP cannot work.
Go ahead and explain what you mean. I don’t believe you & think you’re just parroting their corpo speak.
It’s actually fairly simple: if the server never has access to the keys or the plaintext of messages (or calendar events, etc.), then you need a client tool to handle decryption and encryption operations.
They use PGP, and they have implemented this feature in a way that it’s completely transparent to the user to make it mainstream. So they chose building dedicated tools (bridge, web client), rather than letting users use their own tools, because the PGP tooling sucks hard and it’s extremely inaccessible for the general population.
This means that you need a fat client, whatever you do, or otherwise the server will have access to the data and there is no e2ee. Instead of using enigmail or other PGP plugins/tools, they built the bridge.
if the server never has access to the keys or the plaintext of messages (or calendar events, etc.), then you need a client tool to handle decryption and encryption operations.
Proton stores your keys, and you have the decryption password. How do you think they handle password-based logins? Only the user should ever generate and store the private key. All they need now is your decryption password & they can read your messages. This is reason #1 not to trust Proton.
They use PGP, and they have implemented this feature in a way that it’s completely transparent to the user to make it mainstream.
It isn’t transparent, because most users aren’t running their own frontend locally and tracking all the source code changes. They’ve already violated the first rule of PGP privacy by having your private key. Now you’re merely trusting them to not send you a custom JS payload to have your decryption password sent to the server. How many users are actually utilizing their hidden API to ensure that decryption/encryption is only done client-side? If they have your private key, how many users do you think are using long enough passwords to make cracking their password more challenging? This is reason #2 to not trust Proton.
PGP tooling sucks hard and it’s extremely inaccessible for the general population.
This is just entirely inaccurate and you’ve failed to provide any "proof’ for your generalizations here.
This means that you need a fat client, whatever you do, or otherwise the server will have access to the data and there is no e2ee.
If you actually understood PGP you’d know you can generate and use local-only keys with IMAPS and have support to use any IMAP client. Furthermore, the other apps by Proton like Proton Pass, Calendar, etc… all use undocumented APIs that they have yet to implement in their bridge using standard protocols like CalDav/CardDav/JSON or whatever else in order to be able to integrate with local tools. There is no security benefit in their implementation other than to lock you into a walled garden and give you a false sense of security.
some people want to be swindled.
Proton stores your keys
Proton stores an encrypted blob.
All they need now is your decryption password & they can read your messages
“All they need now is your private key”. It’s literally a secret, they use
bcryptand then encrypt it. Also, “they” are not generally in the threat model. “They” can serve you JS that simply exfiltrates your email, because the emails are displayed in their web-app, they have no need to steal your password to decrypt your key and read your email…It isn’t transparent, because most users aren’t running their own frontend locally and tracking all the source code changes.
Probably we misunderstand what “transparent” means in this context. What I mean is that the average user will not do any PGP operation, in general. Encryption happens transparently for them, which is the whole thing about Proton: make encryption easy and default.
Now you’re merely trusting them to not send you a custom JS payload to have your decryption password sent to the server.
Again, as I said before, they control the JS, they can get the decrypted data without getting the password…? You always trust your client tooling. There is always a point where I trust someone, be it the “enigmail” maintainers, Thunderbird maintainers (it has access to messages post-decryption!), the CLI tool of choice etc.
How many users are actually utilizing their hidden API to ensure that decryption/encryption is only done client-side?
I mean, their clients are open-source and have also been audited?
If they have your private key, how many users do you think are using long enough passwords to make cracking their password more challenging?
I don’t know. But here we are talking about a different risk: someone compromising Proton, getting your encrypted private key, and starting bruteforcing
bcrypt-hashed-and-salted passwords. I find that risk acceptable.This is just entirely inaccurate and you’ve failed to provide any "proof’ for your generalizations here.
See other post.
If you actually understood PGP you’d know you can generate and use local-only keys with IMAPS and have support to use any IMAP client.
Care to share any practical example/link, and how exactly this means not having a fat client that does the encryption/decryption for you?
There is no security benefit in their implementation other than to lock you into a walled garden and give you a false sense of security.
Right, because *DAV protocol are so secure. They all support e2ee, right…? There is a security benefit, and the benefit is trusting the client software more than a server, especially if shared. You can export data and migrate when you want easily, so it’s really a matter of preference.
You are awesome!
Proton stores an encrypted blob.
It doesn’t matter that your private key is stored on their servers encrypted/hased or whatever. If you were simply storing it there, that would not be an issue. The problem is that you’re also logging in and relying on whatever JS is sent to you to only happen client-side.
Probably we misunderstand what “transparent” means in this context. What I mean is that the average user will not do any PGP operation, in general. Encryption happens transparently for them, which is the whole thing about Proton: make encryption easy and default.
Most users aren’t sending emails from their Proton to other Proton users either. Furthermore, the users that want encryption seek it out. They don’t need to use Proton for encryption, especially when it would be easy for them to get an unknowing users decryption password.
Again, as I said before, they control the JS, they can get the decrypted data without getting the password…? You always trust your client tooling. There is always a point where I trust someone, be it the “enigmail” maintainers, Thunderbird maintainers (it has access to messages post-decryption!), the CLI tool of choice etc.
Yes, you have to trust source code somewhere, but with Thunderbird or other mail clients that is open source and their apps are signed or you can reproducibily build from source. However, once that is built it doesn’t change. With Proton, everytime you visit their site you don’t know for sure that it hasn’t changed unless you’re monitoring the traffic. A government is much more likely to convince Proton to send a single user a custom JS payload, than to modify the source code of Thunderbird in a way that would create an exploit that bypasses firewalls, system sandboxing, etc.
I mean, their clients are open-source and have also been audited?
You mean their PWA/WebView clients that can still send custom JS at anytime, or their bridge?
Care to share any practical example/link, and how exactly this means not having a fat client that does the encryption/decryption for you?
First, explain what you mean by a fat client? GnuPG is not a fat client.
Right, because *DAV protocol are so secure. They all support e2ee, right…? There is a security benefit, and the benefit is trusting the client software more than a server, especially if shared. You can export data and migrate when you want easily, so it’s really a matter of preference.
Being able to export things is a lot different than being able to use Thunderbird for Calendars, or a different Contacts app on your phone. DAV is as secure as the server you run it on and the certificate you use for transport.
