this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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I recently switched my email from gmail to proton mail, because fuck google's.. well... everything. Glad to hear that Proton Mail keeps fighting for privacy!
I changed back when google got rid of the free "mail for your domain" and frankly its been a great thing for me. They keep announcing new things that replacing my existing apps.
They have a password manager now that I use. They are finally adding actual fuction to their online drive storage so I can sync files and backup photos.
Its been well worth the price for me. If only they had an office suite lol
I really wish their password manager used a serif font, though. That's pretty unacceptable if you're generating secure passwords.
Could you explain why them not using a serif font is bad?
Generally speaking, serif fonts make it easier to distinguish between visually similar characters like o, O, and 0 or 1, I, and l.
Yeah that’s true, but I can’t see why distinguishing is required of a human. I use my password manager to generate and input passwords for me. I don’t even know any of them.
It's not uncommon for the password manager to not be on the same system as where the password is being entered - hence a human needs to type. For example: consumer electronics with their own dinky little screens. Smart TVs/game systems and servers where remote access is not possible (or copy/paste does not work by design).
Oh yeah that makes perfect sense; I just hadn’t thought of it because those scenarios haven’t applied to me for a bit. One solution would be to generate readable passwords like discernible sentences. Longer in most cases so more entropy, and less chance to confuse characters.
Some password managers provide this as an option, though some authN systems require special characters because they think it improves security.
Or if you have to do business with a dinosaur company that won't let you paste in the PW field.
Please don't use serif fonts for UI elements. Imagine the buttons on your file manager being Times New Roman. (eww.) I think what you're looking for is a monospaced font that's designed to distinguish O/0, I/1/l, etc.
Plug for one of my favorite fonts: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
The only thing I haven't found a good replacement for was how G Drive also handles Office style documents. I make use of that a lot, especially from my phone. But I agree, Proton Mail hasn't been painful one bit.
Seriously? My workplace uses google drive, and many documents are made with word. ... A very common problem is that sometimes someone opens a word doc from the web interface of google drive - which automatically can conveniently opens it with google docs, which totally screws up the formatting and then autosaves it.
(I hate google, and I resent that even after I've removed all aspects of it from my home & personal usage, I still have to use it at work.)
I wish I could integrate it with like onlyoffice or something like that. Would be perfect.
For now I have to be happy with saving to my documents folder and knowing its backed up.
Dude, that email alias feature is the best thing about their password app! I've started using it all the time for services, new and old. Will make it easy as hell to find those selling my info.
Yeah the email alias rock. Especially when I was car shopping recently.
Want my email? Sure, here you go. SPAM? BEGONE, FOREVER BEGONE!
Proton's feature set is very limited and kind of all over the place depending on platform, and development is incredibly slow, especially for Linux, but I do believe they're committed to privacy and they do have a whole suite of products now under a single, very reasonably-priced subscription.
It's only slow for Linux because they can't find Linux devs. If you know any, tell them to apply.
I dont believe that for a second. It's slow because, like most things Linux, almost nobody used it.
However, it is undoubtedly the most private and secure desktop OS.
I use the web mail client and thunderbird client and it works fine. Protonvpn works fine in arch linux, there's gui and cli, I prefer cli. Drive isn't on linux yet but web client works wonderfully fast.
What part of Proton’s feature set is limited and compared to what other service? You can do a whole lot more with proton than with Gmail for example.
Couldn't forward emails until about a month ago.
Their drive app backs up only the computer it's on and other computers cant access that backup. It's like a sectioned off part. Or I can upload files that any of my devices can access.
Their calendar has some problems with compatibility of run into and it's things that the person on either side can't change. Not world ending but it's really annoying.
They literally just added the ability to automatically add holidays to the calendar. And of course I had set it up about a month prior so I manually entered everything.
The proton drive app for your phone doesn't automatically back up anything.
I'm not shitting on proton because I'm an active proton unlimited subscriber and I use a bunch of their services, but I also recognize the flaws and how it's not as seamless as Google yet, which I don't expect it to be.
I also wish they had some better Linux support in preaching to the choir with that.
Love their vpn and the netshield features. Email works great and I love knowing I can read an email and automatically have trackers blocked. Aliases are great but I use their simple login site free with my proton subscription too. So my point is I like them lots, but it's not a complete Google replacement yet.
Oh ok I was just referring to the email part. You are right that their non-email offerings do leave a lot to be desired. I’ve found that downloading files from Proton Drive as small as 3GB is almost impossible, because their download rate is atrocious and on iOS if you don’t keep the screen active during the download it’ll just stop with no way to resume later.
Their calendar, contacts and bridge don’t support CalDAV/CardDAV, so you can’t synchronise them anywhere.
The iOS app doesn’t synchronise contacts or calendars either. There’s a one way “upload to proton”, but not the most helpful.
The public holidays only include some countries (not mine).
Their VPN is terrible with 20% packet loss, despite sitting in the same data center as other VPN providers without that issue.
But, still not google, and their mail app is better on iOS than fastmail.
wow, that in particular seems like a minimum viable product feature
You could forward emails manually, but you couldn't setup a rule to automatically forward emails based on a rule.
Fwiw, I'm in the same boat as the other poster. Love proton, but it's not as seamless as Google.
Yep sorry I wasn't specific and thank you for clarifying. Auto forward so like I want my girlfriend to receive all my Walmart+ emails which doesn't let you have accounts like Amazon. So I forward all emails. Had to keep my Gmail to just make it easy. I'm sure there's a more complicated setup but it's Walmart... I just need email to get to both of us about orders.
It's like this because it's secure, there's was good reason they didn't have this feature. But it's inconvenient and I'm not using Proton because I'm a secret agent, I just to want to pay for a product instead of being the product.
I mean...that's a long list, my guy.
Gmail client, no, but I have my (work) Gmail connected to Shortwave, which honestly is a fucking Godsend for all the people who insist on continuing to use email. It just makes it so much easier to organize everything.
You can't do the same thing with Proton (for good reason) but there's no reason they can't incorporate those features.
I'm just finishing up that transition myself and glad to hear I made a good choice!
Same, using Proton mail and I am now blissfully Google free. Something else I found the holidays good for is finding out all the old accounts I have floating out there from sites that I interacted with over the years so I can cancel them or change the email if i decide to keep them. But, no more Google! Next on my list is Amazon.
I'm in the (gradual) process of switching all my stuff from Gmail and Google to Proton mail. I really like the mail client and Proton Drive works better on my computers than Google Drive did, but Proton Drive doesn't back up my phone yet and I wish they had an office suite like Google does. I don't put anything important or private on Google docs, but it's useful to be able to access my textbook notes from any of my computers. I haven't used the password manager because I'm using Bitwarden, which I really like.
They just released photo backups on android
I want Proton Drive support on Linux.
It's currently completely useless to me, unfortunately.
Rclone supports proton
Indeed, but rclone is a CLI tool (with a web interface available, which I found to be a really clunky way to do things). I tried using Celeste, which uses the rclone backend, but it never finished backing up my documents folder.
The CLI process was pretty smooth for me, and afterward just works. I mean no offense when I say I didn't expect a Linux user to balk at using CLI. A GUI would be nice, I suppose, but I like the way rclone works for me.
Fine, you got me, I'll give the CLI a solid. :P
As a software developer, I work in CLIs and codebases all day, the last thing I want to do when coming home is more CLIs and code hahah
I feel you about coming home to code. You have my permission to tell rc to eff off
Same and windows arm too
I missed that update! This is great news!
In the same boat. I currently just forward everything from gmail to ProtonMail and am gradually changing my contact email one at a time. It dawned on me that I receive mails from services I don't give a damn about, so maybe I should not change those.
Protonmail isn't great, their deliberately misleading about the encryption. Many consider protonmail to be a honeypot.
Do you have anymore background on that?
https://www.wired.com/story/protonmail-amends-policy-after-giving-up-activists-data/
https://cldc.org/does-protonmail-snitch/
In addition protonmail do not protect your metadata (from memory), it's not encrypted in transit.
Protonmail also keep your public and private keys on their servers, it's PGP however they don't want the end users to have to manage their own keys. That to me isn't ideal.
Receiving from another provider you'll get TLS encryption until it hits protonmail servers but protonmail will then decrypt your email and again encrypt your email using your PGP stored on their servers.
Sending an email from proton to another provider will be encrypted on protonmail servers but that's where it ends. TLS will take care of the in-transit and again may not be stored securely on the receiving end.
He wrote their instead of they're, make your judgement.
Well god damn it! Did you have any links to articles about it? Also what would you view to be better then proton.me?
Tuta (in my eyes) is a step in the right direction, using a client like thunderbird or enigmail and managing PGP yourself would be more secure as the message is decrypted by the recipient and not a company owned server.
I appreciate the follow up! I'm looking into Tuta to learn more about it! It just sucks Tuta didn't come up at all when I was researching solid alternatives to Gmail.