Perhaps they'll remain niche, but honestly that isn't terrible. If they can remain profitable, that's the main point. I think also expansion into popular services like VPN can offset some of the expenses of running email. The business advice for many (most?) companies is that they must continue to grow. But the more companies grow the worse the experience often gets. Instead of trying to make every company one that gives infinite returns to shareholders, a sustainable private company could just be the right way to go for Proton.
I pay the same for a Proton ultimate account that I did for ExpressVPN and it gives far more value. Not only is it a more private VPN in a jurisdiction outside the 5 Eyes, but it comes with a private email and 500 GB of encrypted cloud storage. What's not to love? 🥰
The right to privacy is not absolute, and for a good reason. The right to privacy must never be absolute, but it must also be able to exist in a significant manner. It's the same category of right as the right to free speech, reproductive rights etc. The actual dystopia would be a world in which even some of those were absolute - a world in which rights to privacy, free speech and reproductive rights, ex., turn into rights to criminal scheming, hate crimes and sexual exploitation and molestation at a whim. And that is why we regulate private, free speech and reproductive rights, among others, as privileges, or rights with exceptions, rather than absolute, unalienable, or whatever else exclusionary term you'd use to describe a right.
@@Milecarful The right to free speech MUST be absolute. If it's not, you force ideologues to plot underground where they can't be Hitchslapped by c-nts like me. But what do I know, right? I've only witnessed how completely free expression works and the effects of murdering it. Shall I fetch your brown shirt and jackboots? Or do you prefer red?
@@233kosta You either force them to plot underground, where you can get them, or you enable them to plot on an encrypted app, where you cannot get them even if you have the messages in front of you. The choice is obvious. There is no free expression. There is no law in the world which allows for absolute right to free speech. Please, stop deluding yourself and others.
@@SnakePlissken25 Of course it is. Not only scary, but dangerous. That's why we have laws and rules, to limit that freedom as little as possible in order to provide as much as possible safety to have a good enough life according to our standards. The freedom to conspire against a person or a group of people is ultimately not a worthwhile tradeoff for the ability to stop harm from happening. And it's not like it wouldn't be compensated by other measures as well. I want LESS weapons in my life, I want less reasons for intrusions of privacy. I don't want the world to become a shithole like USA, where the possession of weapons is justified by the need to defend yourself.
A reason why some haven't switched is because a single person is likely to have hundreds of different accounts on different websites, all using their current email. I personally would find switching "easy" but it would take an insane amount of time to really transition.
Very true. I've been at it for some time now. With their acquisition of SimpleLogin, I've now got more than 50 email addresses. Nice thing is I've really totally eliminated the ability to spam me. But, I'm also now paying for an email / VPN / cloud service AND also paying a CA for a domain name. I'm happy - I now have control over my data and confuse the heck out of any doubleclick like data collection companies or email metadata collectors as they can't tie me to any one email address. Add in the ability to create Sieve filter rules, and suddenly emails are organized and you can easily expire emails like marketing since nobody needs archives of 3 day sales from 3 years ago.
i would use gmail for the saving accounts and website and for personal use protonmail, that saves alot of space and convinience while still protecting personal privacy
@@slide_twtWell, even if protonmail is a honeypot, so what? What are the alternatives for you? Email is an inherently insecure protocol first-things-first. And don't even bring hosting in your own, you know the majority of email providers outright reject emails from unknown and poorly setup in-home mails...
That's extra important when you also consider this allegation that "ProtonMail Sends User IP and Device Info to Swiss Authorities" th-cam.com/video/QCx_G_R0UmQ/w-d-xo.html
well seeing how we are being open and all - ~ USA PATRIOT Act 2001 ~ ProtonMail Complied With 336 Government Requests - 2018 ~ ProtonMail deletes 'we don't log your IP' boast from website after French climate activist reportedly arrested - 2021 ~ ProtonMail Amends Its Policy After Giving Up an Activist’s Data -2021 ~ ProtonMail provides Swiss authorities with user data -2021 ~ ProtonMail Surrenders User Logs And Changes IP Logging Policy - 2022 ~ RESTRICT ACT - PATRIOT ACT on steroids ~ Pegasus Spyware ~ Says ur ALL hackable "legally" :-) That only took 8 mins. BTW . Just sayin - if its not full disclosure - its deception - which then turns criminally fr4ud .. NOT TO MENTION : my account was breached and reported it to them as it hit headlines within a week :-) Think they replied when I have people showing me the hack ...
Not only that but there was a case in France I believe where a student he used ProtonMail to talk about skipping school to go to a climate rally and they caught him So much for that encryption
If you don't use email for actual productivity and just use it for, well, the modern world requiring an email (accounts on websites, emailing customer support of a company, etc...), then the free plan is absolutely enough. I switched to Proton like 2 years ago and I still haven't even hit 200mb (I do have the paid plan though because I need custom domains)
For real. Just the amount of times they have come in handy for that makes the service worth it. I accidentally let an ungodly amount of emails build up, and it still didn't even touch my limit, as well.
What are 'custom domains' used for? Also, I've been using Proron email for a year now and like it. I'm stil trying to figure out how to reate aliases - I can't add the extension to Chrome. I'm 78 and a bit slow, now. I have a Gemail account, but honestly hate it.
After doing some research into Proton I'm actually strongly considering switching! (Not the intended message of your video ig but there we are). Admittedly it's a _bit_ pricey just for emails but considering they do a calendar, vpn and file storage too, it's not a bad bundle for how much it is. Plus the fact it's open source and more secure make me feel good as a techy person who values both of those things. The only thing I'd massively miss is the file syncing feature of onedrive/gdrive but their drive client is pretty new and it's on their roadmap so maybe soon!
@muspell7628 yeah I know, I looked into all the bundles and came to the conclusion that _in the long run_ I'd want to switch everything wholesale, it's just the lack of file syncing that gets in the way. But you're correct there's a lot of stuff that's available for free so maybe a gradual switch is a good plan 🤷♂️
If the free plan's 1GB storage is enough, no reason not to try it, but if you're going to pay, you may as well pay for a VPS and setup your own mail server. There are many dockers that make this super easy to setup. Security on these is not as intense as ProtonMail, but the data is encrypted at rest and someone would need to hack your credentials or your server to access them. But how secure do you need your emails? It's not like you should send sensitive information via emails regardless and the ProtonMail-level encryption makes searching emails slower and more annoying. Not to mention, if you prefer having a mail client on your device(s), they usually cache most things so the encryption is whatever at that point. Unless you turn that off somehow, then the experience is just super slow.
They also just launched Proton Pass (a fully encrypted password manager) in beta for Unlimited & Lifetime members. The plan is to release the app in full later this year. :)
Sync is a private equivalent of OneDrive, Gdrive, Dropbox that I use. Similar model to Dropbox in that you get 5GB storage for free and extra by doing a few things and introductions. It’s sufficient for my needs as I don’t need a huge amount of storage. Essentially just a backup for text files rather than multimedia.
Personally I'd advise against getting proton mail and go with somebody else who has better morals. They were caught lying about what information they collect and handing it over to law enforcement for the arrest of activists and political dissidents. If they were caught lying about their core philosophy and what they would do and then had to update their terms of service to reflect that. I can't give them money for a privacy service.
Moving existing accounts is also a pain even if you do switch. I learned that the hard way when I switched to Proton Mail and had to sort through dozens of accounts and change their email addresses (and some of them couldn't even be changed). That said, I've primarily used Proton Mail for the last three years or so, and I really prefer it over Gmail - though part of that has to do with me not doing a good job at all at keeping up with my emails there. I found it easier to just start fresh than to sort through literally thousands of emails.
I can’t remember ever hearing of Proton mail before. But this definitely makes me think about switching. I’m tired of having my inbound slammed with spam and knowing it’s secure is attractive.
Proton is slowly but surely taking over market share. They mail is great, their new password manager is great, as well as their drive and vpn. But what’s just as important is I think proton and other privacy-focused companies are slowly pushing the big players to adopt more privacy and security-centric companies. We see that most from Apple’s recent security enhancements.
The FIDO alliances' getting passkeys to be more mainstreamed is an example of such. As much as Big Tech can make it easy to harvest and profit from our data, the same/comparable tech can be used to protect it. I'm all for it despite the learning curve. It's a lot of work to drastically shift gears.
It doesn't matter, security features or not. Proton Technologies is based in Switzerland that is a neutral country and does not share information with the US and EU agencies. Furthermore, neither the US or the EU have jurisdiction in Switzerland grounds, but only the Swiss authorities can order something, for example an investigation, and before they start it they need to see proof not just speculations. Combined the strong privacy laws with the powerful technology supporting proton makes it the only true private and secure service. Anything outside of Switzerland is monitored by the 5 eyes Alliance
@@AGENT47istyeah look up how they turned over information on political dissidents and got them arrested. Then they had to change their terms of service because they were collecting information they said they weren't and turning it over when they said they wouldn't. And this violates the core philosophy they were preaching at the beginning of the company. Why would I trust somebody who's been proven to be liars with my privacy and/or security. Not to mention this isn't the first time they folded it was just activists and political dissidents this time so it made the news.
1:52 You seem a bit confused about how TLS works. The problem is NOT that they use TLS. TLS is for encryption in transmit. The problem is that they don't use end-to-end encryption. Proton mail of course uses TLS as most websites do, but they also end-to-end encrypt the emails with PGP. Both are used with Proton mail.
They don't use PGP for emails to email accounts who do not have PGP. i.e. if you email your mom's gmail account, PGP doesn't do anything to "secure" the message. It's a niche within a niche, because it's only supported by very few email services.
@@Biru_to Yeah that's because of how email works. And technically you can do pgp with a gmail account. A bit of a pain though. The message you should be getting here is that you need to stop using gmail already
It is also important to note that proton mail has handed data to authorities in the past. While it might promise some "encryption" and privacy, when it's the government who asks for data, they will make sure to hand it to them.
@@coolinmac They have given to Swiss authorities a French climate activist’s IP address and browser fingerprint. There has been some media coverage on the matter, I would suggest mental outlaw's video for a quick and reliable summary.
(Edited because TH-cam did not add the second paragraph) That's because under Swiss law and Swiss law only, they are required to cooperate with law enforcement agencies on criminal investigations within the framework of Swiss laws and privacy regulations.This is said in the law enforcement legal page as part of their ToS and Privacy Policy. And in their Transparency report, the first 2 paragraphs say this: "From time to time, Proton may be legally compelled to disclose certain user information to Swiss authorities, as detailed in our Privacy Policy. This can happen if Swiss law is broken. As stated in our Privacy Policy, all emails, files and invites are encrypted and we have no means to decrypt them. Under Article 271 of the Swiss Criminal Code, Proton may not transmit any data to foreign authorities directly, and we therefore reject all requests from foreign authorities. Swiss authorities may from time to time assist foreign authorities with requests, provided that they are valid under international legal assistance procedures and determined to be in compliance with Swiss law. In these cases, the standard of legality is again based on Swiss law. In general, Swiss authorities do not assist foreign authorities from countries with a history of human rights abuses."
In less than a minute, you had me convinced to switch. I paused the video. went to the website, made an account, and migrated my various Google and Microsoft accounts. This service is awesome.
@gullible119 proton at one point logged the IP Address of some French Protesters. Yeah and they can also give away recovery emails but aside from that, there's not much to worry about with email contents as they're encrypted and this unreadable. It's not perfect but it's miles better than Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook/Hotmail
I've been a member of proton long enough to still have a legacy 'visionary' account. I love their service, and I use their vpn, calendar, drive, email, and custom domain service regularly. I think they are worth the money, and honestly hope they stay a small sustainable independent company into the future - if they ever became a large public company I would possibly be shaky about continuing to support them. They have had some hiccups in the past when it actually comes to the privacy, but at the end of the day as someone working in the security industry I find it lovely to get to support a company that - at least on paper and in most of their actions (not all though) - seems to hold similar values as myself when it comes to data protection, privacy, etc. Good video as always!
Retired last year and as a BPOS/Office 365 user since 2008 have moved to Proton on the 10€/month subscription. I like Sieve and have used the new Bing Chat service to create code for my custom filters. I also like the catch all addresses which were not available on O365. Android apps work fine as does the VPN. Well worth the monthly subscription!
Honestly, the price for ProtonMail is more than justified. I run my own email and password safe server (because A. I want to and B. I like to have my data accessible to me all the time). If I sum up the cost for that, I would've probably bought myself and my SO ProtonMail Unlimited, AND I would probably also get support for it. With my self-hosted solution, *I* am the support.
What are your experiences running your own email service? I an considering doing so one day and I am wondering if it's very time consuming or costly to maintain?
@@kenansabic2901 you have to pay for: the server (if you self host, that includes the machine and the electricity to run it, spare parts and redundency) the domain (if you wish to have a real domain name) the bandwidth and probably more things I did not think of. for a few users, it can work, if you start getting big, the costs might start to rise a lot
@@kenansabic2901 For something as critical as email, that server at least should be a proper one with some sort of RAID configuration and ECC RAM. Then if you are doing it really right, plus the cost of another server for high availability and another for a load balancer (really probably best done with a kubernetes cluster where you have your master server and 2 nodes) . You are going to need to update and maintain the machines from time to time and you will have to be able to take one down without missing an email. You will want a decent router and firewall, and switch with VLAN support to isolate from the rest of your network. Then a proper UPS. Then there is the challenge of backups (which you may want off site). Then there is dealing with your residential home internet, (most large businesses pay a lot for a static IP). Best you can do is make use of cloudflare or some equivalent service. Hard enough if you just have a dynamic IP but a real challenge if your provider has a CGNAT (look into cloudflare arc tunnel). Only then is there the actual challenge of setting up the email server safely and *correctly*. And figuring out how to get other email providers to not reject your domain instantly (That is learn about MX records DMARC and SPF and all that great stuff). This is something you definitely do for fun, because it's a lot of work and money. Personally I'd start with a less critical project, like a personal website. No one cares if that goes down from time to time and you will figure out half of those challenges just doing that.
I can assure you it's easier than you'd think. I'm currently moving away from everything Google related (TH-cam excluded but that's a WIP) and have succesfully transitioned to using Protonmail and ProtonVPN for all my needs.
I switched about a few weeks ago and it's immensely better than Gmail. I'm planning to get the Unlimited plan, it's so good and you should support their business!
The "promotions" tab isn't for ads sent by email providers. It is a smart sorting feature that sorts emails you've subscribed to from other companies, like uber eats discounts, etc.
For custom domain email addresses, Google charges $6/mo, which means that if you're a small business that needs email for your team, Proton is actually probably more affordable.
I've been on Protonmail for almost 2 years now, and I don't see myself moving away. I subscribe mostly to support the company, as I don't mind paying for something that most people see as free, because unlike gmail users, I'm not the product, I'm the customer. (My only use for my old gmail account is for using youtube, since you can't use other domains for youtube accounts anymore, to my knowledge.)
Even Google has adopted the use of Passkeys which means users can start to divorce their phone number from its services. It's one small step but huge, in the context of such a large company implementing it.
Already in the process of making the switch. I hate google anymore. They’ve become a horrible excuse for a company - and shown their true colors time and time again. Proton is pretty great. So far I have no complaints. I still use Microsoft’s products for professional purposes but I’m slowly transitioning to PM entirely
You won't regret it. I've been using Proton for years with a paid account. Do yourself a favour and buy a Yubikey as well if you don't have one (works with Proton)
Hey, I wan to ask- what is wrong with tech companies collecting your data? They plus encrypt it, and do not use it for bad purpose, I have no idea what's happening with this world. You can still keep your opinion but just curious.
Used the free version for a few months. I like it. now i upgraded to the plus and connecting it to my website emails for more secure communications especially when docs are sent. I feel it got a little boost and gained a bit of traction here in the US the last 6 months.
I've been using ProtonMail since it started and have a paid account. When it started, it's UI was buggy and there was no way of using it through Outlook, only through its web UI. Now, it's not only compatible with Outlook, but it's had its own app for several years, which is easy to use. For a while I never had spam mail, but then when spammers finally discovered PM, my spambox started filling up 😂. I love using it and have confidence in the company's privacy policies.
Spam has nothing to do with spammers discoering proton, but rather them discovering your personal E-mail address, as I have no spam on a gmail account but spam on an email with my own personal domain, you will get if you think about it for a second.
Am not an IT person and I found it easy to transition to proton for emails and drive mostly, but I also use the calendar and VPN. I am an organized person though, so that probably made it easier. I love being private and not contributing to those corps collect too much data about me.
"No one wants it" but "it has 70 million users"? Ok, it has a lot less users than Gmail, but there's still lots of demand for it. This is something that really annoys me about TH-cam in general. Nuance is lost a lot of the time. It would be easy to rephrase this, be more accurate, get your point across, and still get clicks e.g. "Why ProtonMail is tiny compared to Gmail"
Email clients do not sync or store passwords. Before Chrome started offering a password manager it was standard for every browser to have the ability to export or import password lists. The problem of synchronizing passwords between multiple devices was not significant until after the introduction of the smartphone.
Yeah, wasn't the best example. Passwords and password sync can be handled at the browser level independent of the major cloud offerings (although they probably use them as a backend). But certainly not a part of the actual email service.
I've used Protonmail for awhile and I love it. I pay for the premium account, but I loved it even for free. I haven't had any issues, so I'm pretty happy.
Switched to Proton when I signed up for the VPN. Now I'm using their Calendar and storage drive, too. It's been surprisingly easier than I expected, since I have had my Gmail since 2005 when it was invite only.
I've straight up used proton for government stuff before because I forgot the password to my outlook and always had proton on my phone for years now. The reaction, of course, was "I've never heard of it".
I remember using it when mainstream e-mails started to require a phone number in order for you to register, i stopped using it because some websites didn't let you register with it as they marked it as "invalid" e-mail.
Guess what, they now also require not only e-mail but also necessary phone verification for registering, at least if you are using a vpn or proxy, which is a weird choice for a service boasting about their alleged privay-first-mindedness, almost as if it is their goal to dox you and as is known, many people have been imprisoned because proton logged their IP, AFTER promising on their website that they never log IPs, and then sent it to law enforcement, you can google it...
Really good note about the price being too high for non-western countries. I think it should also be easily accessible by students with a student plan so they get accustomed to it before they can actually pay for the service. Most kids in school probably won’t pay for an e-mail service.
@@jrausch2802 It might be high for some western countries as well but I’m sure it’s mostly targeted towards the western market where €100-120/year doesn’t really matter as much as the rest of the world. Even in some places in Europe, that’s about a quarter of a monthly salary.
@Benx86_64not necessarily, places like vector35 have a separate way of verifying student status which is then wiped, and you receive a discount link that’s valid for 24h.
People don't "hate" that their data is being collected. If they did, Google etc. wouldn't exist today. People just don't care and are too lazy to get out of their comfort zone when it comes to their own privacy. I personally think a healthy middle ground is the best solution, since you can't have anything without collecting any data, as you mentioned in your video.
I care but i've tried alternatives and they have not lived up to needs, free ones or free clients are often limited in some way and paid for ones seem to still fail a few upgrades down the road. I might try proton in the future but I'm not that hopeful.
I guess that's for everyone to decide for themselves... but you can't have Google Maps working without Google collecting any data is what I'm saying. You can listen to music without an Echo or Alexa speaker though. Some things only work in the cloud, and only with the necessary data, and other things like your speakers shouldn't even connect to the internet, not even the local network to begin with. That's how I see it at least
People don't care because they don't know how that information is being used and what exactly is being gathered. If a goverment official comes up to your door and reveals all the information they have on you, that expereince might shock you enough to start caring.
Was downloading Proton apps as you spoke. I already use kDrive and different password manager, so in principle I can distance myself even more from Alphabet's products.
why you dont use nextcloud. its open-source and private. you can make your own nextcloud server or use/buy others but if you dont want to you can just use the regular one
Just a heads up, Proton Pass was just announced and is scheduled for a full release later this year. So if you'd like to keep your passwords in the Proton ecosystem that option will be available in a few months hopefully.
@@TheVirtualObserver thanks! BTW, I'm slowly but surely replacing Alphabet with Proton. It takes time, especially when it implies sending and receiving emails, or making myself be invited to my new Proton address instead of the Google Calendar one, but things are changing in the right direction. Thank you for the heads-up
Lets clarify the encryption and privacy a bit and this is not a criticism of ProtonMail. PGP is not some magic bullet as it has to be configured on one or both ends manually for it to work, unless going from ProtonMail to ProtonMail account. Secondly someone has to eventually send something from ProtonMail to one of the majors, so their private information will eventually leak out to Google or Microsoft, PGP or not. TLS is currently sitting on the 1.3 standard, which is extremely robust and is very secure for transit. It's the same standard used for https. Yes, most mail servers are set for optional encryption but most reputable email servers will support encryption, such as the two majors. Also headers still have to remain unencrypted in order for the mail to actually get somewhere, so full privacy is never guaranteed. Kind of like postal mail.
I have been using it for a while and I can't say any bad thing to it. I must have saved so much energy not receiving pointless advertisement emails or powering the trackers. I prefer to only sign up for things I want to and has been managing multiple accounts on many platforms since early 2000s. Thing such as TH-cam forcing Google account or Minecraft forced migration to Microsoft are deeply troubling for me.
This may have changed since the video came out, I've never seen Proton as a mail service. Since I discovered it a couple years ago, I've always seen it as a suite. I originally only knew it as the VPN service, then I found the mail service and immediately considered it as a bundle of services that are secure with a nice UI. Seeing it as just Proton Mail, yeah it's a bad deal, but seeing it as Proton Mail, Drive, Calendar, VPN, Bridge, Pass and more that are upcoming, it's hard to not see it as a very powerful, secure and graphically pleasing suite that warrants the price you pay for it.
The problem with apps like these is that there already apps owned by big companies like Google apple micosoft and more that are the same thing. So people are to lazy to switch
Also you *have* to create a gmail account when buying a new phone. The alternative is either a rooted device or probably an Apple device? Idk if they mandate an apple account on first phone initialization...
My personality type fits for having this email. I put a greater focus on organizing my data these days. Because when I thought about it, I concluded it's better to live by my moral code than be a lazy guy, thinking that you should have an infinitely durable company behind your email service filled with unorganized trash is like saying to yourself you can keep your room messy because nothing is going anywhere. Well, of course, but that habit will ruin you.
Awesome vid....I'm a paying Proton user and tell people about it all the time. It's awesome. Can I pick you at 8:29 though? You say people are used to not paying for privacy....but they don't get privacy with gmail or their competitors! So they're used to not paying for spyware...
I'm mostly using proton mail. The cause is actually pretty simple, it's faster to load proton than Gmail for me. It's very noticeable in a slower connection, even HTML interface doesn't help, it's still slow. Not to mention the reconnecting issue that I sometimes face. Those inconveniences made me move to proton mail (though I still use Gmail for serious and educational purposes and also for its autofill feature). There is also Outlook too, but the constant ads in the top of the email list is annoying to me.
I currently have a proton mail account, but because of the limitations of the free account, I don't use it very often. I am considering getting a paid tier and use it more frequently. I will have to consider the people that block the protonmail address as this may be a problem. Thanks for the video.
ProtonMail requires another email address to sign up and they also don't allow you to reuse a verification email indicating that they store a record of it.
Actually I pay for Proton for other reasons. I used to use Mega for private cloud storage but Kim is saying weird things so I switched to proton, I already have all my other emails routing to my proton so it made a lot of sense. I also like that I can have multiple private email addresses
To me "encrypted" email services doesn't make a lot of sense. The email is encrypted only between two Protonmail users, of course when sending/receiving from "normal" SMTP servers it's not encrypted (the connection is probably TLS encrypted, but the message that passes inside is clear text, that is Proton can sniff the email if he wants). The thing that I don't like is that they use a proprietary protocol. There are standard protocol to encrypt emails, the most used and adopted is GPG, that is integrated in numerous email clients. They decided to roll out their own thing, that is not interoperable with other systems, to use IMAP you have to use their own bridge application, it's a mess. Why couldn't they use GPG, and hide that to the users that wanted the simple experience of the webapp, but this way allowing people using third party IMAP client that supports GPG (like Thunderbird) to use the service without an adapter?
Whoever manages to make self-hosting and identity management super convenient will seriously change the game though. It's often far too technical and risky for the average person to do currently, but who knows, that could change one day.
I believe lots of Google's market dominance stems from ignorance and a lack of viable alternatives. When I first made my gmail, I didn't even know alternatives existed at the time. Even if I knew Google was a privacy nightmare, they had so many services/platforms nobody could compete with. It's almost impossible to avoid Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple.
I've happily paid for proton since the early days. It took a long time for it to get to the polished level of Gmail, but I'm thrilled at the expanding Proton ecosystem.
Proton should offer plans with differentiated prices according to the country. Just as Steam has been doing for years, which could not have the amount of customers they have in Argentina if it were not for that. Proton's current plans can be very expensive with the current exchange rate in Argentina, which is very volatile. The same must be true in other countries, where they could have many more paying customers if the price were more adequate to the local income. In fact, all streaming services adopted the same strategy, compared to their countries of origin, they are much cheaper in dollars in countries with lower incomes.
The exchange rate doesn't change how much it costs for them to host your email account though. Unlike games where there is often no cost to lowering your price so other countries might buy, they actually have the pay the same amount per user no matter where you live.
@@javierph Though I do agree that ProtonMail is over priced, even in a country like Canada I really don't want to pay that much. I would be happy paying like $1 a month (paid yearly) for BASIC email without any extras. 15GB of storage, no custom domain, stuff like that. I feel like proton is way over priced. I have AnonAddy for email aliasing $ its $12 a year for their basic plan, for how little processing it takes I think this is a reasonable price. Also assuming I actually use the 115 GB of storage, how much does that actually cost a year? Assuming a 16 TB WD Gold hard drive costs $500, if their running in RAID 1 the hard drive cost per gigabyte is only 6.1 cents! I highly doubt their gonna be using WD Gold hard drives, & I know their cheaper than that. Like my issue with ProtonMail is I cant justify their insanely high prices! I don't want their bundled crap, I just want simple email that works fine. Yeah they have a nice email client app for mobile. I typically don't like "leaching" off free plans, but yeah I just cant justify their rediclious price to pay them even though I want too. Like my VPN costs $30 a month &their moving terabytes of my data each month, how the heck can they profitably do that & ProtonMail cant offer 15 GB basic plan for $12 yearly? Also screw them for saying $3.50 monthly but only if you pay for 2 years, then upping it to $5. Like that makes me not want to give them any money at all. $3.50 is WAYYY overpriced for the MONTHLY plan. As much as I like ProtonMail, screw them!
@@WitchMedusa If companies like these used RAID1's you would see news about lost data all the time, but it's not that common. They use much more secure arrays, so it's not like you can just buy a couple of drives. Paying 30 dollars for VPN is just insane, I'm paying for my VPS 12 dollars a year and use it as VPN too... And hosting mail is worth more than that because it's just more maintenance, and harder to set up.
"My VPN costs $30 a month": Proton Unlimited costs $9.99 PM, and with it, you get premium mail, premium VPN, premium calander, and premium cloud drive. It is their marketing strategy to compel users to subscribe to the Unlimited plan they offer rather than the basic one you're talking about; you get 500 GB total storage, a premium VPN with 65+ countries, you can also add upto three custom domains, make 15 normal email accounts, and also register upto 10 VPN connections. You're just mindlessly defaming a very good company because you have an obscure obsession to pay $30 PM for just some network tunneling service,@@WitchMedusa. And I don't doubt that you actually do pay $30 PM for some networking tunneling considering that you're comparing some email forwarding service with an actual email providing service. There's a huge difference between both buddy, you don't get the difference for $1 a month. If you're that rich to pay a fat amount of $12 PY just for some email forwarding, I don't think Proton Unlimited would be a hassle. Ordinary people pay $6-12 PY for a TLD, connect it to CloudFlare, and use some free email forwarding service like Mailtie; you get tons of other benifits from a personal TLD.
Regardless of which servers support TLS, Google does not end to end encrypt messages. TLS simply doesn't do end to end encryption for email. You need entirely different technology built on top of TLS
Thanks for spreading the word but there were a couple.of things you mentioned which was incorrect. E2E is only if you send to other proton users... The promotion tab in Gmail is your own newsletter subscriptions not just random emails from random companies...
I mean, just from looking at ProtonMail's Pricing page, it's limited to just USD, Euros, and Swiss franc. Meaning that people who live elsewhere, like myself, aren't financially supported; for example, I'd have to pay more due to the AUD-USD (or Euro) exchange rate, which makes this quite a bit less appealing.
I bet that if they reduced the price to 3 or 4 usd they would have much more sucess and way more paying users, here in brazil 10 euros are around 5% of someone's wage
@@Neonbutter They do, but as stated in the video itself it's way too limited to be useful, so it's not the workaround you seem to think it is. I'd be interested in paying for private emails, as would many other people, if only they supported more local currencies than just the big two (and Swiss francs, oddly).
I actually love Proton mail. A great upgrade could be a "Proton Vault" desktop application. For users who want commodities like auto-logins, credit cards, etc...
Good news then because Proton Pass (password manager) just entered beta like a week ago for Unlimited & Lifetime members. In their announcement Proton stated they plan on fully rolling the service out before the end of the year.
I went to join up when I first heard about ProtonMail, but I was told that I couldn’t join at that time. Ditto the 2nd time that I came across it. After that I simply forgot about it until now. And it’s not easy to switch over to a new email address, regardless of how “automated” they make it. That’s due to your email address being embedded in almost every one of your online accounts. For some accounts you can’t even change the email address, so you are forced to cancel the account and create a new one. And it seems that every account has a unique way/place in which to change your email address. Also, the free account only allows three (3) folders and 150 messages/day. I could never switch to their free account as I have many folders.
Perhaps most of the people don't mind sharing data as it gives features like adding calendar events automatically, etc etc. Perhaps most of the people are not privacy fanatics and just casual users. Perhaps people have multiple accounts separating private stuff from Google stuff...
When I first adopted Proton Mail, I was a weirdo. Now, I see it get talked about very often and treated like a viable alternative to Google. Give it some more time, and I think it will be "just another e-mail service." It took Google quite awhile to become the defacto standard. It would take quite a while for Proton to replace it (not saying it will, just that these things don't happen over night)
One of the biggest hurdles for me was the lack of storage at 500mb. They've upped the free accounts to 1GB now which makes it more appealing. But you still generally need a Gmail account anyway for other things like TH-cam, calendars, phone backups, playstore (for android devices).
The worst part about proton free tier is no third party clients (Thunderbird for example) Edit: And even if you pay for proton you cant directly use third part clients, you have to install proton bridge just to be able to use thunderbird
@@ronnieradon I think it's because of how encryption is setup. You'll need to manually configure it with proton bridge. Proton will transmit encrypted email with bridge and you'll have decrypt it locally. Don't quote me on that though. I'm not an expert
That's due to the encryption of Protonmail, everything in your account is encrypted by default. The only way you could use third party clients without the bridge would be with PGP keys. And frankly, I'd take Proton Bridge over fiddling with PGP programs all day.
So I switched a proton mail 7 months ago and I used their free plan and it's absolutely excellent I don't need my email shoving ads in my face But the only part that was really annoying was switching all of my accounts to use my proton mail and even getting used to typing my protonmail instead of my Gmail but either than that I am very happy with the service
You know, I recently realized things could have been different. Data collection could have been used to empower users, not exploit them. But greed always has to get in the way, as usual.
Just like when protonmail was collecting information they said they wouldn't and then sent it to different law enforcement organizations that got activists arrested. This is particularly damning because they had to change their terms of service after the fact to reflect what they are actually collecting on you and how they would go about handling law enforcement requests. Essentially they didn't want to have too much pressure from governments. So they rolled on their users without informing any one of the changes. They knew that would cause a bunch of customers to leave and that would cost them money so they didn't do the right thing. They could have done good and stood up for users and abided by what they promised. But instead they're just another company that I can't trust with my privacy for security because they've been proven to be liars.
Proton don't log your IP when you send an email but it does on every login. ProtonMail has handed out IP logs from account creation to authorities multiple times since 2021 when they slightly tweaked their privacy policy after a lawsuit.
I tried protonmail for like a month. None of my e-mails got through. So, I switched to my own domain. It was ironically cheaper! All I had to do was copy/paste a few config options into a cPanel, and bam, I've got my own e-mail address. And, I hadn't the slightest idea how to do any of this before buying the service, so there's no excuse for anyone who can open and use gmail.
Perhaps they'll remain niche, but honestly that isn't terrible. If they can remain profitable, that's the main point. I think also expansion into popular services like VPN can offset some of the expenses of running email. The business advice for many (most?) companies is that they must continue to grow. But the more companies grow the worse the experience often gets. Instead of trying to make every company one that gives infinite returns to shareholders, a sustainable private company could just be the right way to go for Proton.
I use proton VPN. Don't use a VPN a ton, but it works great when I need it.
VPN services are almost pure profit, so I'm sure Proton is doing alright...
I pay the same for a Proton ultimate account that I did for ExpressVPN and it gives far more value. Not only is it a more private VPN in a jurisdiction outside the 5 Eyes, but it comes with a private email and 500 GB of encrypted cloud storage. What's not to love? 🥰
really want more sustainable private companies to pop up rather than public companies that need to neuter themselves as time goes on
This is paid advertisement this channel is going corpo shitprick. How much you got paid?
You know you live in a dystopia when "legality of encryption" is a thing people see as legitimate
The right to privacy is not absolute, and for a good reason. The right to privacy must never be absolute, but it must also be able to exist in a significant manner. It's the same category of right as the right to free speech, reproductive rights etc. The actual dystopia would be a world in which even some of those were absolute - a world in which rights to privacy, free speech and reproductive rights, ex., turn into rights to criminal scheming, hate crimes and sexual exploitation and molestation at a whim.
And that is why we regulate private, free speech and reproductive rights, among others, as privileges, or rights with exceptions, rather than absolute, unalienable, or whatever else exclusionary term you'd use to describe a right.
@@Milecarful The right to free speech MUST be absolute. If it's not, you force ideologues to plot underground where they can't be Hitchslapped by c-nts like me.
But what do I know, right? I've only witnessed how completely free expression works and the effects of murdering it.
Shall I fetch your brown shirt and jackboots? Or do you prefer red?
@@233kosta You either force them to plot underground, where you can get them, or you enable them to plot on an encrypted app, where you cannot get them even if you have the messages in front of you. The choice is obvious.
There is no free expression. There is no law in the world which allows for absolute right to free speech. Please, stop deluding yourself and others.
@@Milecarful Ah, yes, "freedom is scary", of course.
@@SnakePlissken25 Of course it is. Not only scary, but dangerous. That's why we have laws and rules, to limit that freedom as little as possible in order to provide as much as possible safety to have a good enough life according to our standards.
The freedom to conspire against a person or a group of people is ultimately not a worthwhile tradeoff for the ability to stop harm from happening. And it's not like it wouldn't be compensated by other measures as well. I want LESS weapons in my life, I want less reasons for intrusions of privacy. I don't want the world to become a shithole like USA, where the possession of weapons is justified by the need to defend yourself.
A reason why some haven't switched is because a single person is likely to have hundreds of different accounts on different websites, all using their current email. I personally would find switching "easy" but it would take an insane amount of time to really transition.
Very true personally I have 12 emails one of them is proton
Not rally. Just forward them
I have proton for v important stuff. Taxes. Govt. Work. Family. Gmail for junk.
Very true. I've been at it for some time now. With their acquisition of SimpleLogin, I've now got more than 50 email addresses. Nice thing is I've really totally eliminated the ability to spam me. But, I'm also now paying for an email / VPN / cloud service AND also paying a CA for a domain name. I'm happy - I now have control over my data and confuse the heck out of any doubleclick like data collection companies or email metadata collectors as they can't tie me to any one email address. Add in the ability to create Sieve filter rules, and suddenly emails are organized and you can easily expire emails like marketing since nobody needs archives of 3 day sales from 3 years ago.
i would use gmail for the saving accounts and website and for personal use protonmail, that saves alot of space and convinience while still protecting personal privacy
as long as proton remains in business and keeps their promise Ill continue to enjoy their mail service. in a word; WORTH
enjoy the honeypot :)
@@slide_twtWell, even if protonmail is a honeypot, so what? What are the alternatives for you? Email is an inherently insecure protocol first-things-first. And don't even bring hosting in your own, you know the majority of email providers outright reject emails from unknown and poorly setup in-home mails...
@@slide_twt Calm down McAfee. The more significant problem is Data harvesting and Tracking, it's much better than the alternatives in this regard.
❤💯💪
I personally love protonmail and 1GB storage is more than enough for me as i keep deleting old mails and stuff, i hope this service never dies.
You can help keeping it alive by subscribing to it :)
@@mazzysmainframe 👍
1:25 Small correction: Emails received from other ProtonMail addresses are e2e encrypted, but the metadata, including the subject, are not encrypted.
Thanks for the clarification bro
That's extra important when you also consider this allegation that "ProtonMail Sends User IP and Device Info to Swiss Authorities" th-cam.com/video/QCx_G_R0UmQ/w-d-xo.html
well seeing how we are being open and all -
~ USA PATRIOT Act 2001
~ ProtonMail Complied With 336 Government Requests - 2018
~ ProtonMail deletes 'we don't log your IP' boast from website after French climate activist reportedly arrested - 2021
~ ProtonMail Amends Its Policy After Giving Up an Activist’s Data -2021
~ ProtonMail provides Swiss authorities with user data -2021
~ ProtonMail Surrenders User Logs And Changes IP Logging Policy - 2022
~ RESTRICT ACT - PATRIOT ACT on steroids
~ Pegasus Spyware ~ Says ur ALL hackable "legally" :-)
That only took 8 mins. BTW .
Just sayin - if its not full disclosure - its deception - which then turns criminally fr4ud ..
NOT TO MENTION : my account was breached and reported it to them as it hit headlines within a week :-)
Think they replied when I have people showing me the hack ...
Are one's contacts encrypted in your proton address book.
Not only that but there was a case in France I believe where a student he used ProtonMail to talk about skipping school to go to a climate rally and they caught him
So much for that encryption
i already saw enough "good companies" getting bad after they grow enough.
I was going to say this too. ‘You can either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain’ -Batman
I am reminded of a certain company that used to have "don't be evil" as their motto.
damn, well fucking said bro 👏
It's the nature of capitalism. Profits seeking nature of capitalism change company.
Man it's just for content, if you see people / company only in the negative way all will become evil
I switched to proton like 3 moths ago, and it was a great decision.
I mean unless u're on a paid tier u gotta start deleting the mails pretty soon..
@@ks_scuffed about 90% of people don’t need old emails. And those that do could just export it and save on local storage.
@@emptydata-xf7ps about 81% of youtube sourced statistics are made up.
i love proton too. google isnt convenient, google is cutting the personal rights of every user.
If you don't use email for actual productivity and just use it for, well, the modern world requiring an email (accounts on websites, emailing customer support of a company, etc...), then the free plan is absolutely enough. I switched to Proton like 2 years ago and I still haven't even hit 200mb (I do have the paid plan though because I need custom domains)
For real. Just the amount of times they have come in handy for that makes the service worth it. I accidentally let an ungodly amount of emails build up, and it still didn't even touch my limit, as well.
What are 'custom domains' used for? Also, I've been using Proron email for a year now and like it. I'm stil trying to figure out how to reate aliases - I can't add the extension to Chrome. I'm 78 and a bit slow, now.
I have a Gemail account, but honestly hate it.
sir, one possible uses for it is for their job where they can use their full name for email @@psgiles
Been a paid subscriber for years. Great service and customer service. Gets better every year.
After doing some research into Proton I'm actually strongly considering switching! (Not the intended message of your video ig but there we are). Admittedly it's a _bit_ pricey just for emails but considering they do a calendar, vpn and file storage too, it's not a bad bundle for how much it is. Plus the fact it's open source and more secure make me feel good as a techy person who values both of those things. The only thing I'd massively miss is the file syncing feature of onedrive/gdrive but their drive client is pretty new and it's on their roadmap so maybe soon!
@muspell7628 yeah I know, I looked into all the bundles and came to the conclusion that _in the long run_ I'd want to switch everything wholesale, it's just the lack of file syncing that gets in the way. But you're correct there's a lot of stuff that's available for free so maybe a gradual switch is a good plan 🤷♂️
If the free plan's 1GB storage is enough, no reason not to try it, but if you're going to pay, you may as well pay for a VPS and setup your own mail server. There are many dockers that make this super easy to setup. Security on these is not as intense as ProtonMail, but the data is encrypted at rest and someone would need to hack your credentials or your server to access them. But how secure do you need your emails? It's not like you should send sensitive information via emails regardless and the ProtonMail-level encryption makes searching emails slower and more annoying. Not to mention, if you prefer having a mail client on your device(s), they usually cache most things so the encryption is whatever at that point. Unless you turn that off somehow, then the experience is just super slow.
They also just launched Proton Pass (a fully encrypted password manager) in beta for Unlimited & Lifetime members. The plan is to release the app in full later this year. :)
Sync is a private equivalent of OneDrive, Gdrive, Dropbox that I use. Similar model to Dropbox in that you get 5GB storage for free and extra by doing a few things and introductions. It’s sufficient for my needs as I don’t need a huge amount of storage. Essentially just a backup for text files rather than multimedia.
Personally I'd advise against getting proton mail and go with somebody else who has better morals. They were caught lying about what information they collect and handing it over to law enforcement for the arrest of activists and political dissidents.
If they were caught lying about their core philosophy and what they would do and then had to update their terms of service to reflect that. I can't give them money for a privacy service.
I switched to Protonmail and I love it. It will continue to catch on incrementally
Moving existing accounts is also a pain even if you do switch. I learned that the hard way when I switched to Proton Mail and had to sort through dozens of accounts and change their email addresses (and some of them couldn't even be changed). That said, I've primarily used Proton Mail for the last three years or so, and I really prefer it over Gmail - though part of that has to do with me not doing a good job at all at keeping up with my emails there. I found it easier to just start fresh than to sort through literally thousands of emails.
Get your own domain with email forwarding for about $20/year and you'll never have to do this again
I forward my old Gmail accounts to proton. Over the space of 4 years I have just gradually changed the ones which are important to me
@@asdfssdfghgdfy5940 Yep, they recently added that feature which makes moving over from Gmail (& Outlook I believe) significantly easier.
I switched once from Yahoo, and I have no problem going through it for Gmail.
@@TheVirtualObserverHonestly that's probably the greatest feature they've added to the service so far.
I can’t remember ever hearing of Proton mail before. But this definitely makes me think about switching. I’m tired of having my inbound slammed with spam and knowing it’s secure is attractive.
Proton is slowly but surely taking over market share. They mail is great, their new password manager is great, as well as their drive and vpn. But what’s just as important is I think proton and other privacy-focused companies are slowly pushing the big players to adopt more privacy and security-centric companies. We see that most from Apple’s recent security enhancements.
The FIDO alliances' getting passkeys to be more mainstreamed is an example of such. As much as Big Tech can make it easy to harvest and profit from our data, the same/comparable tech can be used to protect it. I'm all for it despite the learning curve. It's a lot of work to drastically shift gears.
Though governments are wanting to weaken security to allow themselves access, while also criticising companies for security and privacy lapses!
It doesn't matter, security features or not. Proton Technologies is based in Switzerland that is a neutral country and does not share information with the US and EU agencies. Furthermore, neither the US or the EU have jurisdiction in Switzerland grounds, but only the Swiss authorities can order something, for example an investigation, and before they start it they need to see proof not just speculations. Combined the strong privacy laws with the powerful technology supporting proton makes it the only true private and secure service. Anything outside of Switzerland is monitored by the 5 eyes Alliance
@@AGENT47istyeah look up how they turned over information on political dissidents and got them arrested. Then they had to change their terms of service because they were collecting information they said they weren't and turning it over when they said they wouldn't. And this violates the core philosophy they were preaching at the beginning of the company. Why would I trust somebody who's been proven to be liars with my privacy and/or security. Not to mention this isn't the first time they folded it was just activists and political dissidents this time so it made the news.
@@AGENT47istnot at all, the EU is not a country, its not even a federation. It has no means to do what you’re writing about.
1:52 You seem a bit confused about how TLS works. The problem is NOT that they use TLS. TLS is for encryption in transmit. The problem is that they don't use end-to-end encryption. Proton mail of course uses TLS as most websites do, but they also end-to-end encrypt the emails with PGP. Both are used with Proton mail.
They don't use PGP for emails to email accounts who do not have PGP. i.e. if you email your mom's gmail account, PGP doesn't do anything to "secure" the message. It's a niche within a niche, because it's only supported by very few email services.
@@Biru_to Yeah that's because of how email works.
And technically you can do pgp with a gmail account. A bit of a pain though.
The message you should be getting here is that you need to stop using gmail already
@@crusaderACRJust pay to opt out. Google Workspaces has been great.
@@Biru_to and even if it did, as soon as it hit google servers to be read, Google would have everything out of it anyway. So it would be pointless.
It is also important to note that proton mail has handed data to authorities in the past. While it might promise some "encryption" and privacy, when it's the government who asks for data, they will make sure to hand it to them.
What a clueless comment. What have they handed over in the past? An IP address. Give over
@@coolinmac They have given to Swiss authorities a French climate activist’s IP address and browser fingerprint. There has been some media coverage on the matter, I would suggest mental outlaw's video for a quick and reliable summary.
I don't mind much having data handed to governments. But having my data handed to advertisers and companies I know nothing about is rather annoying
(Edited because TH-cam did not add the second paragraph) That's because under Swiss law and Swiss law only, they are required to cooperate with law enforcement agencies on criminal investigations within the framework of Swiss laws and privacy regulations.This is said in the law enforcement legal page as part of their ToS and Privacy Policy.
And in their Transparency report, the first 2 paragraphs say this:
"From time to time, Proton may be legally compelled to disclose certain user information to Swiss authorities, as detailed in our Privacy Policy. This can happen if Swiss law is broken. As stated in our Privacy Policy, all emails, files and invites are encrypted and we have no means to decrypt them.
Under Article 271 of the Swiss Criminal Code, Proton may not transmit any data to foreign authorities directly, and we therefore reject all requests from foreign authorities. Swiss authorities may from time to time assist foreign authorities with requests, provided that they are valid under international legal assistance procedures and determined to be in compliance with Swiss law. In these cases, the standard of legality is again based on Swiss law. In general, Swiss authorities do not assist foreign authorities from countries with a history of human rights abuses."
@@coolinmac that is a huge deal.
What do you mean no one wants protonmail? They keep getting better every year.
In less than a minute, you had me convinced to switch. I paused the video. went to the website, made an account, and migrated my various Google and Microsoft accounts. This service is awesome.
enjoy the honey pot
@@slide_twtwhat are you talking about bot
@gullible119 proton at one point logged the IP Address of some French Protesters. Yeah and they can also give away recovery emails but aside from that, there's not much to worry about with email contents as they're encrypted and this unreadable. It's not perfect but it's miles better than Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook/Hotmail
Well, it is open-source and probably audited aswell. It has been about 10 years and there are no signs of fbi honey pot. What are you tryna say
@@slide_twt Yes, because gmail truly has your best interests at heart and is totally more private
I've been a member of proton long enough to still have a legacy 'visionary' account. I love their service, and I use their vpn, calendar, drive, email, and custom domain service regularly. I think they are worth the money, and honestly hope they stay a small sustainable independent company into the future - if they ever became a large public company I would possibly be shaky about continuing to support them. They have had some hiccups in the past when it actually comes to the privacy, but at the end of the day as someone working in the security industry I find it lovely to get to support a company that - at least on paper and in most of their actions (not all though) - seems to hold similar values as myself when it comes to data protection, privacy, etc.
Good video as always!
I would agree but I dont think they're a small company.
@@NotKewlcompared to Google or Microsoft or even a company like Yahoo they are
I've used Proton fr a few years now...bought up to paid version. So far I'm pleased.
I have been using it for as long as 5 years for academics and serious work. Still loving it.
SAME!
Same here it’s amazing
Retired last year and as a BPOS/Office 365 user since 2008 have moved to Proton on the 10€/month subscription. I like Sieve and have used the new Bing Chat service to create code for my custom filters. I also like the catch all addresses which were not available on O365. Android apps work fine as does the VPN. Well worth the monthly subscription!
lol imagine paying for something that is already free
@@AEGIS-RED-MEGA-VIEWSYou know what they say, There is no free lunch.
@@AEGIS-RED-MEGA-VIEWS Imagine not being able to write anything without saying lol.
Honestly, the price for ProtonMail is more than justified. I run my own email and password safe server (because A. I want to and B. I like to have my data accessible to me all the time). If I sum up the cost for that, I would've probably bought myself and my SO ProtonMail Unlimited, AND I would probably also get support for it. With my self-hosted solution, *I* am the support.
What are your experiences running your own email service? I an considering doing so one day and I am wondering if it's very time consuming or costly to maintain?
@@kenansabic2901 you have to pay for:
the server (if you self host, that includes the machine and the electricity to run it, spare parts and redundency)
the domain (if you wish to have a real domain name)
the bandwidth
and probably more things I did not think of.
for a few users, it can work, if you start getting big, the costs might start to rise a lot
@@kenansabic2901 For something as critical as email, that server at least should be a proper one with some sort of RAID configuration and ECC RAM. Then if you are doing it really right, plus the cost of another server for high availability and another for a load balancer (really probably best done with a kubernetes cluster where you have your master server and 2 nodes) . You are going to need to update and maintain the machines from time to time and you will have to be able to take one down without missing an email. You will want a decent router and firewall, and switch with VLAN support to isolate from the rest of your network. Then a proper UPS. Then there is the challenge of backups (which you may want off site).
Then there is dealing with your residential home internet, (most large businesses pay a lot for a static IP). Best you can do is make use of cloudflare or some equivalent service. Hard enough if you just have a dynamic IP but a real challenge if your provider has a CGNAT (look into cloudflare arc tunnel).
Only then is there the actual challenge of setting up the email server safely and *correctly*. And figuring out how to get other email providers to not reject your domain instantly (That is learn about MX records DMARC and SPF and all that great stuff).
This is something you definitely do for fun, because it's a lot of work and money.
Personally I'd start with a less critical project, like a personal website. No one cares if that goes down from time to time and you will figure out half of those challenges just doing that.
They are also working their own End to end Encrypted password manager too. It's called Proton Pass. They are slowly rolling it out in beta form.
I would surely love to switch to ProtonMail one day.
One day haha
@@LogicallyAnswered 😅
I can assure you it's easier than you'd think. I'm currently moving away from everything Google related (TH-cam excluded but that's a WIP) and have succesfully transitioned to using Protonmail and ProtonVPN for all my needs.
I switched about a few weeks ago and it's immensely better than Gmail. I'm planning to get the Unlimited plan, it's so good and you should support their business!
You can do it ✨️
I only use it for serious uses only. Loving it.
Glad to hear that dilean!
The "promotions" tab isn't for ads sent by email providers. It is a smart sorting feature that sorts emails you've subscribed to from other companies, like uber eats discounts, etc.
For custom domain email addresses, Google charges $6/mo, which means that if you're a small business that needs email for your team, Proton is actually probably more affordable.
Good point
Jeez yes. Is Google Sheets free
I use my own domain with proton. So if they ever go bad, I can just change the mx records and be on my way with a different provider
I've been on Protonmail for almost 2 years now, and I don't see myself moving away. I subscribe mostly to support the company, as I don't mind paying for something that most people see as free, because unlike gmail users, I'm not the product, I'm the customer.
(My only use for my old gmail account is for using youtube, since you can't use other domains for youtube accounts anymore, to my knowledge.)
you can use other domains for a google account, which im pretty sure you can use on youtube
(have not tested)
Even Google has adopted the use of Passkeys which means users can start to divorce their phone number from its services. It's one small step but huge, in the context of such a large company implementing it.
Already in the process of making the switch. I hate google anymore. They’ve become a horrible excuse for a company - and shown their true colors time and time again. Proton is pretty great. So far I have no complaints. I still use Microsoft’s products for professional purposes but I’m slowly transitioning to PM entirely
You won't regret it. I've been using Proton for years with a paid account. Do yourself a favour and buy a Yubikey as well if you don't have one (works with Proton)
Plus their logo is a Freemason symbol.
Look it up.
Facebook is just like it too.
Facebook's logo is also a Freemason logo.
@ithecastic the only creators of it no longer own it.
Look up the current owners.
I am not surprised.
Hey, I wan to ask- what is wrong with tech companies collecting your data? They plus encrypt it, and do not use it for bad purpose, I have no idea what's happening with this world. You can still keep your opinion but just curious.
How do you know which purposes they use or will use it for in the future.
@@SaturnNova
Used the free version for a few months. I like it. now i upgraded to the plus and connecting it to my website emails for more secure communications especially when docs are sent.
I feel it got a little boost and gained a bit of traction here in the US the last 6 months.
I've been using ProtonMail since it started and have a paid account. When it started, it's UI was buggy and there was no way of using it through Outlook, only through its web UI. Now, it's not only compatible with Outlook, but it's had its own app for several years, which is easy to use. For a while I never had spam mail, but then when spammers finally discovered PM, my spambox started filling up 😂. I love using it and have confidence in the company's privacy policies.
Spam has nothing to do with spammers discoering proton, but rather them discovering your personal E-mail address, as I have no spam on a gmail account but spam on an email with my own personal domain, you will get if you think about it for a second.
Am not an IT person and I found it easy to transition to proton for emails and drive mostly, but I also use the calendar and VPN. I am an organized person though, so that probably made it easier. I love being private and not contributing to those corps collect too much data about me.
"No one wants it" but "it has 70 million users"? Ok, it has a lot less users than Gmail, but there's still lots of demand for it. This is something that really annoys me about TH-cam in general. Nuance is lost a lot of the time. It would be easy to rephrase this, be more accurate, get your point across, and still get clicks e.g. "Why ProtonMail is tiny compared to Gmail"
Email clients do not sync or store passwords. Before Chrome started offering a password manager it was standard for every browser to have the ability to export or import password lists. The problem of synchronizing passwords between multiple devices was not significant until after the introduction of the smartphone.
Yeah, wasn't the best example. Passwords and password sync can be handled at the browser level independent of the major cloud offerings (although they probably use them as a backend). But certainly not a part of the actual email service.
I do serious things on my laptop only (local encrypted pass manager), so no need to sync with smartphone.
Switched a few months ago and upgraded to the paid service and custom domain. So far it’s been great
I don't see ad/data-supported revenue models as sustainable so I'm perfectly okay paying a small subscription for such an absolutely critical service.
I've used Protonmail for awhile and I love it. I pay for the premium account, but I loved it even for free. I haven't had any issues, so I'm pretty happy.
Switched to Proton when I signed up for the VPN. Now I'm using their Calendar and storage drive, too. It's been surprisingly easier than I expected, since I have had my Gmail since 2005 when it was invite only.
Wow that is so messed up that companies don't let you sign up with a Proton Mail email. Really messed up for them to blacklist this reputable company.
For example, the Web hosting company Hostinger, and their free service 000webhost.
they are not reputable they will give all your data if the fbi asks for it, happened many times before
@@redesu What data have they given to the FBI? answer me that.
I've straight up used proton for government stuff before because I forgot the password to my outlook and always had proton on my phone for years now. The reaction, of course, was "I've never heard of it".
Shodan won’t let you register with a proton mail address which is stupid if you ask me
I remember using it when mainstream e-mails started to require a phone number in order for you to register, i stopped using it because some websites didn't let you register with it as they marked it as "invalid" e-mail.
To avoid it being called invalid you could just get a custom domain. It's cool to have and is seen as professional, too.
Guess what, they now also require not only e-mail but also necessary phone verification for registering, at least if you are using a vpn or proxy, which is a weird choice for a service boasting about their alleged privay-first-mindedness, almost as if it is their goal to dox you and as is known, many people have been imprisoned because proton logged their IP, AFTER promising on their website that they never log IPs, and then sent it to law enforcement, you can google it...
Really good note about the price being too high for non-western countries. I think it should also be easily accessible by students with a student plan so they get accustomed to it before they can actually pay for the service. Most kids in school probably won’t pay for an e-mail service.
@Benx86_64 ah that makes sense.
it is also for western countries, believe me
@@jrausch2802 It might be high for some western countries as well but I’m sure it’s mostly targeted towards the western market where €100-120/year doesn’t really matter as much as the rest of the world. Even in some places in Europe, that’s about a quarter of a monthly salary.
@Benx86_64not necessarily, places like vector35 have a separate way of verifying student status which is then wiped, and you receive a discount link that’s valid for 24h.
People don't "hate" that their data is being collected. If they did, Google etc. wouldn't exist today. People just don't care and are too lazy to get out of their comfort zone when it comes to their own privacy. I personally think a healthy middle ground is the best solution, since you can't have anything without collecting any data, as you mentioned in your video.
I care but i've tried alternatives and they have not lived up to needs, free ones or free clients are often limited in some way and paid for ones seem to still fail a few upgrades down the road. I might try proton in the future but I'm not that hopeful.
and what's that middle ground exactly?
I guess that's for everyone to decide for themselves... but you can't have Google Maps working without Google collecting any data is what I'm saying. You can listen to music without an Echo or Alexa speaker though. Some things only work in the cloud, and only with the necessary data, and other things like your speakers shouldn't even connect to the internet, not even the local network to begin with. That's how I see it at least
People don't care because they don't know how that information is being used and what exactly is being gathered. If a goverment official comes up to your door and reveals all the information they have on you, that expereince might shock you enough to start caring.
I'm paying for proton and love it
Was downloading Proton apps as you spoke. I already use kDrive and different password manager, so in principle I can distance myself even more from Alphabet's products.
why you dont use nextcloud. its open-source and private. you can make your own nextcloud server or use/buy others
but if you dont want to you can just use the regular one
Just a heads up, Proton Pass was just announced and is scheduled for a full release later this year. So if you'd like to keep your passwords in the Proton ecosystem that option will be available in a few months hopefully.
@@TheVirtualObserver thanks! BTW, I'm slowly but surely replacing Alphabet with Proton. It takes time, especially when it implies sending and receiving emails, or making myself be invited to my new Proton address instead of the Google Calendar one, but things are changing in the right direction. Thank you for the heads-up
I Love proton mail, been using it since middle schools and its just gotten better over the years. Im happy to pay
I've been using ProtonMail for over 5 years. I love it.
Lets clarify the encryption and privacy a bit and this is not a criticism of ProtonMail.
PGP is not some magic bullet as it has to be configured on one or both ends manually for it to work, unless going from ProtonMail to ProtonMail account.
Secondly someone has to eventually send something from ProtonMail to one of the majors, so their private information will eventually leak out to Google or Microsoft, PGP or not.
TLS is currently sitting on the 1.3 standard, which is extremely robust and is very secure for transit. It's the same standard used for https.
Yes, most mail servers are set for optional encryption but most reputable email servers will support encryption, such as the two majors.
Also headers still have to remain unencrypted in order for the mail to actually get somewhere, so full privacy is never guaranteed. Kind of like postal mail.
I have been using it for a while and I can't say any bad thing to it. I must have saved so much energy not receiving pointless advertisement emails or powering the trackers.
I prefer to only sign up for things I want to and has been managing multiple accounts on many platforms since early 2000s. Thing such as TH-cam forcing Google account or Minecraft forced migration to Microsoft are deeply troubling for me.
This may have changed since the video came out, I've never seen Proton as a mail service. Since I discovered it a couple years ago, I've always seen it as a suite. I originally only knew it as the VPN service, then I found the mail service and immediately considered it as a bundle of services that are secure with a nice UI.
Seeing it as just Proton Mail, yeah it's a bad deal, but seeing it as Proton Mail, Drive, Calendar, VPN, Bridge, Pass and more that are upcoming, it's hard to not see it as a very powerful, secure and graphically pleasing suite that warrants the price you pay for it.
You're not wrong in the recent months/years, but Proton was originally just Mail. Everything else came after
The problem with apps like these is that there already apps owned by big companies like Google apple micosoft and more that are the same thing. So people are to lazy to switch
Also you *have* to create a gmail account when buying a new phone.
The alternative is either a rooted device or probably an Apple device? Idk if they mandate an apple account on first phone initialization...
@Appoxo it's basically the same thing for Apple and micosoft, but instead of forcing you, they temp you
@Neon Butter why get a pixel in the f8rst place then? There literally owned by Google
My personality type fits for having this email. I put a greater focus on organizing my data these days.
Because when I thought about it, I concluded it's better to live by my moral code than be a lazy guy, thinking that you should have an infinitely durable company behind your email service filled with unorganized trash is like saying to yourself you can keep your room messy because nothing is going anywhere. Well, of course, but that habit will ruin you.
Been using it for YEARS and love it so far
Awesome vid....I'm a paying Proton user and tell people about it all the time. It's awesome. Can I pick you at 8:29 though? You say people are used to not paying for privacy....but they don't get privacy with gmail or their competitors! So they're used to not paying for spyware...
I'm mostly using proton mail. The cause is actually pretty simple, it's faster to load proton than Gmail for me. It's very noticeable in a slower connection, even HTML interface doesn't help, it's still slow. Not to mention the reconnecting issue that I sometimes face. Those inconveniences made me move to proton mail (though I still use Gmail for serious and educational purposes and also for its autofill feature). There is also Outlook too, but the constant ads in the top of the email list is annoying to me.
Bro, it's because there is no Gmail server near you. Proton mail server uses edge location so it is faster. Can I know which region are you from?
Just use an email client on your PC
Use an adblocker like ublock origin lmao
@@quickkcare605 Indonesia
@@retrocomputing Well, I certainly can, but it's more convenient for me when I can access it via web, like any other sites
I have multiple paid emails through them, and use their VPN, specifically because they respect their users.
I am not worried about other people. I want Protonmail and tbh gmail sucks.
I use PM and it is awesome. I was an early adopter and i have enjoyed how far they have come.
I currently have a proton mail account, but because of the limitations of the free account, I don't use it very often. I am considering getting a paid tier and use it more frequently. I will have to consider the people that block the protonmail address as this may be a problem. Thanks for the video.
ProtonMail requires another email address to sign up and they also don't allow you to reuse a verification email indicating that they store a record of it.
Actually I pay for Proton for other reasons. I used to use Mega for private cloud storage but Kim is saying weird things so I switched to proton, I already have all my other emails routing to my proton so it made a lot of sense. I also like that I can have multiple private email addresses
To me "encrypted" email services doesn't make a lot of sense. The email is encrypted only between two Protonmail users, of course when sending/receiving from "normal" SMTP servers it's not encrypted (the connection is probably TLS encrypted, but the message that passes inside is clear text, that is Proton can sniff the email if he wants).
The thing that I don't like is that they use a proprietary protocol. There are standard protocol to encrypt emails, the most used and adopted is GPG, that is integrated in numerous email clients. They decided to roll out their own thing, that is not interoperable with other systems, to use IMAP you have to use their own bridge application, it's a mess.
Why couldn't they use GPG, and hide that to the users that wanted the simple experience of the webapp, but this way allowing people using third party IMAP client that supports GPG (like Thunderbird) to use the service without an adapter?
I am also a protonmail annual subscriber and I couldn't be happier. I totally recommend it!
Whoever manages to make self-hosting and identity management super convenient will seriously change the game though. It's often far too technical and risky for the average person to do currently, but who knows, that could change one day.
It's great that there are alternatives
Proton Pass is going to eliminate the password problems quite dramatically, I expect.
I believe lots of Google's market dominance stems from ignorance and a lack of viable alternatives. When I first made my gmail, I didn't even know alternatives existed at the time. Even if I knew Google was a privacy nightmare, they had so many services/platforms nobody could compete with. It's almost impossible to avoid Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple.
Yes you can avoid the evil and the simple response is LINUX =/
I've happily paid for proton since the early days. It took a long time for it to get to the polished level of Gmail, but I'm thrilled at the expanding Proton ecosystem.
I've been using protonmail for 7 years
Proton should offer plans with differentiated prices according to the country. Just as Steam has been doing for years, which could not have the amount of customers they have in Argentina if it were not for that. Proton's current plans can be very expensive with the current exchange rate in Argentina, which is very volatile. The same must be true in other countries, where they could have many more paying customers if the price were more adequate to the local income. In fact, all streaming services adopted the same strategy, compared to their countries of origin, they are much cheaper in dollars in countries with lower incomes.
The exchange rate doesn't change how much it costs for them to host your email account though.
Unlike games where there is often no cost to lowering your price so other countries might buy, they actually have the pay the same amount per user no matter where you live.
@@WitchMedusa of course not, it's about volume
@@javierph Though I do agree that ProtonMail is over priced, even in a country like Canada I really don't want to pay that much.
I would be happy paying like $1 a month (paid yearly) for BASIC email without any extras. 15GB of storage, no custom domain, stuff like that. I feel like proton is way over priced.
I have AnonAddy for email aliasing $ its $12 a year for their basic plan, for how little processing it takes I think this is a reasonable price. Also assuming I actually use the 115 GB of storage, how much does that actually cost a year?
Assuming a 16 TB WD Gold hard drive costs $500, if their running in RAID 1 the hard drive cost per gigabyte is only 6.1 cents! I highly doubt their gonna be using WD Gold hard drives, & I know their cheaper than that. Like my issue with ProtonMail is I cant justify their insanely high prices! I don't want their bundled crap, I just want simple email that works fine. Yeah they have a nice email client app for mobile. I typically don't like "leaching" off free plans, but yeah I just cant justify their rediclious price to pay them even though I want too.
Like my VPN costs $30 a month &their moving terabytes of my data each month, how the heck can they profitably do that & ProtonMail cant offer 15 GB basic plan for $12 yearly? Also screw them for saying $3.50 monthly but only if you pay for 2 years, then upping it to $5. Like that makes me not want to give them any money at all. $3.50 is WAYYY overpriced for the MONTHLY plan. As much as I like ProtonMail, screw them!
@@WitchMedusa If companies like these used RAID1's you would see news about lost data all the time, but it's not that common. They use much more secure arrays, so it's not like you can just buy a couple of drives.
Paying 30 dollars for VPN is just insane, I'm paying for my VPS 12 dollars a year and use it as VPN too... And hosting mail is worth more than that because it's just more maintenance, and harder to set up.
"My VPN costs $30 a month": Proton Unlimited costs $9.99 PM, and with it, you get premium mail, premium VPN, premium calander, and premium cloud drive. It is their marketing strategy to compel users to subscribe to the Unlimited plan they offer rather than the basic one you're talking about; you get 500 GB total storage, a premium VPN with 65+ countries, you can also add upto three custom domains, make 15 normal email accounts, and also register upto 10 VPN connections. You're just mindlessly defaming a very good company because you have an obscure obsession to pay $30 PM for just some network tunneling service,@@WitchMedusa.
And I don't doubt that you actually do pay $30 PM for some networking tunneling considering that you're comparing some email forwarding service with an actual email providing service. There's a huge difference between both buddy, you don't get the difference for $1 a month.
If you're that rich to pay a fat amount of $12 PY just for some email forwarding, I don't think Proton Unlimited would be a hassle. Ordinary people pay $6-12 PY for a TLD, connect it to CloudFlare, and use some free email forwarding service like Mailtie; you get tons of other benifits from a personal TLD.
Regardless of which servers support TLS, Google does not end to end encrypt messages. TLS simply doesn't do end to end encryption for email. You need entirely different technology built on top of TLS
Proton takes time to get use to, but it is far superior to Gmail in all ways
Agreeed
Thanks for spreading the word but there were a couple.of things you mentioned which was incorrect. E2E is only if you send to other proton users... The promotion tab in Gmail is your own newsletter subscriptions not just random emails from random companies...
I always wanted to know what ProtonMail is, but never actually digged.
Thanks for the video!
You're right. The world is so used to free email at this point.
I mean, just from looking at ProtonMail's Pricing page, it's limited to just USD, Euros, and Swiss franc.
Meaning that people who live elsewhere, like myself, aren't financially supported; for example, I'd have to pay more due to the AUD-USD (or Euro) exchange rate, which makes this quite a bit less appealing.
I bet that if they reduced the price to 3 or 4 usd they would have much more sucess and way more paying users, here in brazil 10 euros are around 5% of someone's wage
@@Neonbutter They do, but as stated in the video itself it's way too limited to be useful, so it's not the workaround you seem to think it is.
I'd be interested in paying for private emails, as would many other people, if only they supported more local currencies than just the big two (and Swiss francs, oddly).
@@PokeMaster22222 they are a company based in Switzerland, so it makes sense they support Swiss francs
@@rknp96 Oh, didn't know that; thanks!
I actually love Proton mail. A great upgrade could be a "Proton Vault" desktop application. For users who want commodities like auto-logins, credit cards, etc...
Good news then because Proton Pass (password manager) just entered beta like a week ago for Unlimited & Lifetime members. In their announcement Proton stated they plan on fully rolling the service out before the end of the year.
Proton mail is the only email company with three factor authentication and 100% encryption
I went to join up when I first heard about ProtonMail, but I was told that I couldn’t join at that time. Ditto the 2nd time that I came across it. After that I simply forgot about it until now. And it’s not easy to switch over to a new email address, regardless of how “automated” they make it. That’s due to your email address being embedded in almost every one of your online accounts. For some accounts you can’t even change the email address, so you are forced to cancel the account and create a new one. And it seems that every account has a unique way/place in which to change your email address. Also, the free account only allows three (3) folders and 150 messages/day. I could never switch to their free account as I have many folders.
Perhaps most of the people don't mind sharing data as it gives features like adding calendar events automatically, etc etc. Perhaps most of the people are not privacy fanatics and just casual users. Perhaps people have multiple accounts separating private stuff from Google stuff...
Exactly.
Exactly.
Perhaps he touched on this in the video pretty well?
We are slaves to convenience. I do use protonmail as a side account but gmail for most of my mail since the googleverse is hard to escape 😂
I don't even use it but it's definitely hard to get out on Google
When I first adopted Proton Mail, I was a weirdo. Now, I see it get talked about very often and treated like a viable alternative to Google. Give it some more time, and I think it will be "just another e-mail service." It took Google quite awhile to become the defacto standard. It would take quite a while for Proton to replace it (not saying it will, just that these things don't happen over night)
So true. I find most people couldn't care less about privacy and security.
One of the biggest hurdles for me was the lack of storage at 500mb. They've upped the free accounts to 1GB now which makes it more appealing. But you still generally need a Gmail account anyway for other things like TH-cam, calendars, phone backups, playstore (for android devices).
The worst part about proton free tier is no third party clients (Thunderbird for example) Edit: And even if you pay for proton you cant directly use third part clients, you have to install proton bridge just to be able to use thunderbird
Wait HUH?? Thats.. actually ridiculous. I didn't even know that emails "not supporting" third party clients was POSSIBLE...
@@ronnieradon I think it's because of how encryption is setup. You'll need to manually configure it with proton bridge. Proton will transmit encrypted email with bridge and you'll have decrypt it locally.
Don't quote me on that though. I'm not an expert
That's due to the encryption of Protonmail, everything in your account is encrypted by default.
The only way you could use third party clients without the bridge would be with PGP keys. And frankly, I'd take Proton Bridge over fiddling with PGP programs all day.
Hate big tech. We have to be stuck with what they want. I have a protonmail address. Just got. Hopefully a good thing
5:10 it sounds rather scary for me that a 3rd party (PayPal) can freeze funds like that
So can all the credit cards
Switched to Proton Mail for my personal and business email a few weeks ago. I like it so far.
So I switched a proton mail 7 months ago and I used their free plan and it's absolutely excellent I don't need my email shoving ads in my face But the only part that was really annoying was switching all of my accounts to use my proton mail and even getting used to typing my protonmail instead of my Gmail but either than that I am very happy with the service
It’s a fed honeypot .
@@Gottrolledbythebest485 It most likely is however It's still not Google or Microsoft so I'm happy
You know, I recently realized things could have been different. Data collection could have been used to empower users, not exploit them. But greed always has to get in the way, as usual.
Just like when protonmail was collecting information they said they wouldn't and then sent it to different law enforcement organizations that got activists arrested. This is particularly damning because they had to change their terms of service after the fact to reflect what they are actually collecting on you and how they would go about handling law enforcement requests.
Essentially they didn't want to have too much pressure from governments. So they rolled on their users without informing any one of the changes. They knew that would cause a bunch of customers to leave and that would cost them money so they didn't do the right thing.
They could have done good and stood up for users and abided by what they promised. But instead they're just another company that I can't trust with my privacy for security because they've been proven to be liars.
Proton don't log your IP when you send an email but it does on every login. ProtonMail has handed out IP logs from account creation to authorities multiple times since 2021 when they slightly tweaked their privacy policy after a lawsuit.
Yeah, most people know it's a honeypot
lol
Thanks to you, I have finally resolved to try ProtonMail out
I started using Proton services and now i love it !
Encrypted email is a meme.
ProtonMail Complied with 5,957 Data Requests in 2022. 🤡
Which number they procided in their Transparency Report. But we don't know how many pertain to VPN and to Email accounts
I tried protonmail for like a month. None of my e-mails got through. So, I switched to my own domain. It was ironically cheaper! All I had to do was copy/paste a few config options into a cPanel, and bam, I've got my own e-mail address. And, I hadn't the slightest idea how to do any of this before buying the service, so there's no excuse for anyone who can open and use gmail.
What a pessimistic lament! I've been with Proton for years and have absolutely no complaints. Excellent service. Very affordable.
I've been using ProtonMail for a few years and it's the best email service I've used