Why Proton means privacy

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MICROSOFT 365 By Peter Deegan If you want privacy in your email, cloud storage, and other parts of your digital life, then go to Proton’s suite of ver
[See the full post at: Why Proton means privacy]

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rizzquery, windbg, Steve, fisher75, Steve S., DLivesInTexas, Casey S, lmacri, Microfix, abbodi86, Lars220, rc primak, Norio

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Proton’s products and products are good, although it’s wise to approach them with a little bit of caution.  As noted, for email access with an external client, it’s necessary to use ProtonBridge — not a problem, but an additional thing to install.

To me, Proton’s name is well enough known that messages sent with a Proton return address announces “I’m sensitive about privacy”. For some communication, that might be a good thing, but for other communication, that may be a liability.  And for good measure, if using ProtonMail’s free tier, you’re limited to web-only access, and an advertising tag on all outbound messages. If you’re serious about wanting ProtonMail’s features, I generally encourage signing up for a paid account, and then supplying your own domain.

One other thing that’s built into ProtonMail is capacity for close integration with PGP encryption.  Although PGP is clumsy enough to use that it’s not practical for routine mail, if you have need for PGP, then Proton is a good way  to do that.

I agree that Proton’s “try before you buy” tier of unpaid service is a good thing, and they’re the one security/privacy-enhanced service that I’m willing to trust with unpaid access.  This is especially true for ProtonVPN, where they use unpaid as a way of promoting upgrades to their paid tiers of service, and not as a vector for advertising.

For business use, Proton also facilitates 30-day demo accounts that have the full capacity of all their offerings.

For Proton’s other services (ProtonDrive, ProtonDocs and ProtonPass), it’s worth being aware that those are relatively new additions to Proton’s array of tools.  From the evaluation I’ve done of Proton, I don’t see any differences of quality and robustness from ProtonMail or ProtonVPN, but the others are still new enough that it could be worth waiting a while (maybe a year or two), while those products mature.  With suites from any vendor, the expertise that makes one component compelling doesn’t necessarily transfer to other components, and just because there may be a unified UI and sales and marketing process doesn’t necessarily mean that there is the same unity among the individual components.

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Steelsox1, AlexEiffel, windbg, Peter Deegan

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I’ve used Proton Mail, free version, for years when I need to send encrypted messages.  Works great, no issues.

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rizzquery, Steve, Microfix

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Correction: ProtonVPN does have a web browser extension

https://protonvpn.com/blog/browser-extension

Get up to speed on router security at RouterSecurity.org and Defensive Computing at DefensiveComputingChecklist.com

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windbg, Steve

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Thanks for the update … my bad for missing that, despite looking.

Peter Deegan

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Michael432 wrote:

ProtonVPN does have a web browser extension

Which works well, but is slow. (Personal experience.)

cheers, Paul

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I’ve been using Proton VPN in Edge for both Windows and Mac … now an AW reader pointed me in the right direction.

Browser integrated VPN allows control over browsing security and location while letting other computer programs run normally.

ProtonVPN available for both Chromium (Chrome/Edge etc) and Firefox based browsers.

https://protonvpn.com/blog/browser-extension

Just last month the browser extensions where extended to include Proton free accounts as well as paid plans.

The browser extension installs and logs in easily.  The log-in process for extensions is sometimes annoying because the login autocomplete isn’t available but ProtonVPN opens a standard browser login page so it only takes a click to authenticate.

In my informal tests, the speed has been fine but as Paul T notes — “your mileage may vary”.

Peter Deegan

 

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Michael432

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Re: Proton Mail

Sending a secure email message from Proton Mail to a normal email account takes extra work as noted here. Same for receiving a secure message from a normal email account. What this article failed to say is that between two ProtonMail users messages are encrypted automatically with no extra work required.

This encryption applies to the body of an email message and to any file attachments. It does not apply to the FROM address, the TO address or the SUBJECT line of the email.

 

Get up to speed on router security at RouterSecurity.org and Defensive Computing at DefensiveComputingChecklist.com

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rizzquery, windbg, Steve

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Re: Proton Drive

Note that there are other file storage providers that also provide end-to-end encryption (EEE) such that they can not read your files. As described here

https://defensivecomputingchecklist.com/SecureFileStorage.php

some file storage providers never use EEE, others, like Proton Drive, always use it, and still others leave it up to you whether you want to enable it or not.

Also note that Proton Drive can share a file that requires a password to read. How the recipient of the file gets the password, is another issue. Shared files can also have an expiration date for the sharing. On the down side, Proton Drive can not limit number of downloads, even with a paid account.

Get up to speed on router security at RouterSecurity.org and Defensive Computing at DefensiveComputingChecklist.com

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rizzquery, windbg, Steve S.

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Couple of other points about Proton, which I use

1. You can create an encrypted email message, including attachments, to send someone who does not have Proton.  They enter the password you provide them over the phone, open the message, and can print and save attachments on their PC. You can also set the encrypted message to self-destroy after a time you set. Brilliant security.
2. Proton have very good support. Email them a query and they don’t take long to reply with the answer – usually a day at most.
3. Proton have a mixture of very good and very poor  FAQs and Help pages.  Hence, I think I need to email support more than I ought to, if they were better presented. For example their “Bridge” to apple Mail can fail and it its hard to find out why. They could do with making FAQs out of their Support queries, and make them easy to find.
4. IMHO Proton email falls down on its user interface, which I find very clunky and non-intuitive. Menus are scattered at randon around the screen, formatting is poor, settings are hiodden, etc I could go on.
5. IMHO Proton Docs is another with a poor interface, although the docs themselves are great.
6. Proton send a regular newsletter with useful information.
7. Proton also give one discounts from time to time for long standing members.

All in all, wonderful security and concepts, with some quite bad User interface points. Still I would not change. They are the only ones thinking of their users needs.

RobB

RobB

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Steelsox1, windbg

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Thank you for the article, I appreciate it.

I’ve been using Proton Mail (paid version) for over a year and won’t switch despite some of its failings and annoyances. We have two Macs, one Windows 10, one Linux Mint, one Raspberry Pi running Raspian and two iOS phones/machines in our house. There is nothing Microsoft or Widnows or Google in our house anymore. I’ve tried all of the combinations of Mac Mail, and Thunderbird as well as the browser connections using Safari, Firefox and Brave with all of the Operating Systems at my disposal. I have the following to report for anyone who cares to read on. By the way, I’ve contacted Proton many times about the issues listed below and they were unable to solve them.

Mac Mail works OK using Proton Bridge, but it does not load all embedded graphics in messages, even after I hit “Load” in the message. It’s also inconsistent from day to day about which embedded graphics it filters out. The situation is worse when Proton VPN is in use. A lot seems to depend on which server (country) the VPN is going through.  Also, when selecting “Erase all trash from all email accounts,” the Proton Trash is not cleared and remains in the All messages folder. The only way to clear messages from the All messages folder is to go in via a browser, which kind of defeats the purpose of having an email app on one’s computer or device.

Thunderbird Mail is hit and miss. It seems to work for a while (a bit longer?) and is easier to set up and keep working when used on a Linux-based machine.  But Thunderbird is never easy to set up. A couple of times, updates killed all previous settings and it was a chore to set it up again from scratch – the automatic setup of Thunderbird never worked for me ever since I first tried it over ten years ago.

Proton seems to be aimed at and encourages access via a browser and has problems dealing with email apps, especially when going through Proton VPN.

As for Proton VPN, I found it annoying that with version that you get included with your paid email account, you are extremely limited as to which server you’ll be going through. I live in Canada, but none of the Canadian servers are available to my version of the VPN. The US server(s) are usually not available which means that I’m always going through a non-English-speaking country’s server, usually a Netherlands server and that often produces Dutch versions of the web pages that I’m browsing.

For the above reasons, I’ve abandoned Proton VPN since I’m unwilling to pay extra, just to find out that if the paid version of the VPN will allow me to permanently set a server (Canadian?) or at least one in an English-speaking country. (Proton was unable to tell me if that was possible, at least the last time that I asked them)

As for 2FA, for my use, it’s a feature that I don’t need given the advertised security of Proton’s systems – I find 2FA mostly annoying.

Bottom line: I like Proton and I’ll stay with them because it seems to be the best choice at the moment, but I don’t have to like it.

Cheers

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Steelsox1

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