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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40864914

用户分享了他们与 Fastmail 积极而复杂的关系。他们承认垃圾邮件略有增加，但主要将其归因于使用量的增加。他们发现垃圾邮件过滤器很有效，尽管有时它会捕获合法电子邮件，需要手动检查垃圾邮件文件夹。对于促销电子邮件，他们建议根据列表 URL 创建过滤器并取消订阅。一些用户可能会忽略取消订阅请求，从而导致被列入黑名单。关于软件应用程序，他们提到了 Android 上的 Proton Mail 应用程序遇到的困难，特别是用户之前拥有的 Pixel 7 Pro，由于性能问题留下了负面印象。相反，iOS版本运行良好，没有任何问题。此外，用户还强调，以每月 10 美元的固定费用，在 Proton 套件中拥有所有必要的隐私相关工具既方便又节省成本。最后，他们讨论了 Sieve 过滤，这是一种高级电子邮件管理工具，可简化电子邮件组织并通过标签和到期日期自动执行任务。为了确保跨平台的连续性，他们建议使用自定义域、定期导出数据并避免对单一提供商的依赖。总体重点仍然是保持对个人和公司信息的控制。

Seems like Proton is chasing the mythical customer that wants to run their company on the Proton suite (mail, calendar, drive, docs), because for some reason being super private is very important to the company.

I don't think this segment exists. Most companies' top priority is a no hassle and reliable stack (Google or Microsoft) and not one that is trying to catch up from a feature standpoint.

They should just focus on their main customer segment: individual users.

I agree but I also think that individuals can benefit from this new offering. They don't have to get a Google/Microsoft account for basic office needs.

But I do agree that there are probably some better things to be done, I don't think they can be competitive long term, someone who needs just a little bit of collaboration or more advanced tools will run back to Google/Microsoft very fast.

In a way it reminds me of the Apple Office suite: kinda cool but also very limited in many ways and a nightmare to collaborate with a wide range of people. The things you might want to use it for are pretty niche...

Yeah, but why would anyone use the competitor? Proton’s biggest advantages are its security and privacy. It’s hard to back that up with code and even more with plain words.

Having their code be open source is a very important step in maintaining that image, and that image is not something a competitor can just plagiarize.

(Paying customer) I wish they would focus more on their existing product(s). There's a huge synergy between Calendar and Mail, but Drive, Pass, VPN, are useless (but the VPN is well-done). There's still no Caldav support or scheduling, and a lot of things are annoying in Mail, of course some of these are hard to solve with E2E, but at this point, their E2E claim is also half-baked and mostly for marketing, why not fix all of things?

What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

I'm even more convinced that me being a Fastmail customer is a good thing. Fastmail has been rock solid for years.

Their email, calendar and contacts solutions work well with iOS and android (using the DAVx app).

WebApps work flawlessly on Firefox. They have all sorts of customisation for spam filtering, catch all email addresses, etc.

They don't do all the things (vpn, passwords, drive, what have you). But what they do, they do very well.

Absolutely, very happy Fastmail customer here! My only qualm is that their apps could be better at multi account (switching is too much of a hassle), but that's the only problem I ever had, and I work around it by using different mail/calendar clients.

If you just have a single account with them though, their app is quite excellent and has everything (mail, calendar, notes), no need to get multiple apps and stuff like DAVx unless you want to.

I love the service but hate their android app. It fails to load any content when offline. Absolutely maddening when you need to look up anything, like gig tickets, in a low reception area.

How do you deal with spam in Fastmail?

I switched from GMail to Fastmail about a year ago, but ever since my Inbox is just filled with lots of spam. I tried writing email filters, and have about 50 now, but it is just not cutting it.

And also those promotional mails that I don't want to mark as "spam" but still shouldn't end up in my Inbox ... they drive me nuts.

Since I started using Fastmail, my main means of communication is shifting away from e-mail, which is sad.

My experience on fastmail doesn't align with yours. While spam has slightly increased over the years, I attribute that to just using my email more often. It's very rare that I get spam in my actual inbox. In fact, my experience is that the spam filter is a bit too strong and I actually have to check the spam folder now and then.

For the promotional emails, there are some general rules you can set up to catch a lot of it, such as https://pietrorea.com/2021/10/22/filter-emails-by-the-list-u.... However, the best way to manage them is to actually just unsubscribe to them as you receive them. If unsubscribe is ignored, then blacklist the sender.

For general spam, there's a setting under "privacy and security" to make the filtering more or less aggressive. My setting is on "standard" and I haven't had any problems, but you could try adjusting that.

Here's one little-known tip I learned from Fastmail support some time ago: it's only possible to train the spam filter using their Web UI. If you're using a 3rd-party client, simply moving messages to your spam folder will have no effect on your filter quality. So to truly flag a message as spam, you must switch to your browser, login to FM, and handle it from there.

But I don't want to mark everything that should not grab my immediate attention as spam.

Some stuff like promotions or social messages deserve their own folder. Google did this right.

Why dont you use their masked/alternate addresses. That was one of the primary selling points for me. Any questionable site/service gets its own address and is easily removed or filtered if spam starts showing up.

I have those too. But the problem is I migrated away from GMail, where everything worked even with 1 email address, so now I'm stuck with that email address being used by all the people and companies that want to send me email.

(By the way, in GMail you can move emails to "promotional" and "social" folders, and then GMail automatically does that for you for future emails; this is quite handy, but after migrating to Fastmail this is leaving me with quite a mess in my Inbox, since Fastmail doesn't have this option).

You're not stuck; slowly change addresses with the different companies, people, etc. I did it over the course of a few years without hassle. If you spend $10/year for your own domain, then you can use a catchall, and if you ever decide to leave Fast ail for another provider, you don't have to change all the addreses again.

The fact that it requires slowly changing over years is a sign of getting stuck no? We can theoretically slowly migrate anything. But when effort > X, we consider it being stuck.

>in GMail you can move emails to "promotional" and "social" folders, and then GMail automatically does that for you for future emails

It's not quite as elegant, but you can create a rule from an existing email in the mail options. It will try to guess at the best set of filters to match that type of email (and obviously you can refine that manually if needed), so you can send those types of mails to a Marketing folder.

My solution was to start over with a new "root" email address and then keep it private. Having unique email addresses for each service (which then forwards to the "root" email address) is a bit of a pain but it does work for spam and, depending on what else you share with the service, privacy as well.

For better or worse if you want to reliably control who you receive email from you need to control who knows your email addresses and have the ability to disable/filter them.

the same is true for SMS/call spam - my phone number is a single digit off from my wife's, she gets 6-10 total spam messages and calls a day, i get one a year. It's because she uses her cellphone number to sign up for fuel rewards and stuff, and they immediately sell it. I use my voip number to sign up for anything, and i have notifications shut off for SMS - and a phone tree for calls. Spam calls never get through a phone tree/IVR.

Promotional mails you've subscribed to aren't spam, just add a rule and label them "Ads" and click the "Archive (skip inbox)"

That's what I've been doing and my inbox is pretty much empty from useless stuff.

spam as in unsolicited? I get 0 in any of my inboxes. I get lots of stuff i don't care about from spammy businesses (E Y E GL A S S // S A L E 80% O FF) that i've used before. But there's a way around that as well, it's more expensive. Buy a domain name. Set up DNS. Let fastmail host the actual mail service. Set up a catchall account *@domain.tld. Give per-site/whatever emails whenever you give an email.

If the email gets sold, just tell the fastmail UI that everything sent to that address is spam. It hasn't failed yet, and i've been using fastmail since it was $5/year. It's $15/yr now and they recently doubled my storage from 500mb to 1000mb!

I'm using the Hey approach in Fastmail, so my main folders are Inbox and Screener, with a filter like this:

Matches NOT fromin:contacts -> Move to Screener

I'll check the Screener less frequently, and whenever I feel like it I'll take a message from it and use Actions -> Add rule from message.. and send messages from that sender to a Newsletter folder.

I still get lots of crap in the Screener, but then again I don't really use e-mail to communicate with humans, so in a sense all e-mail is automated nonsense from systems where I have some kind of user account.

(another happy paying customer of Fastmail here)

I am pleasantly surprised that Fastmail has no AI cruft in it especially that Fastmail is founded by one of the godfathers of modern AI, Jeremy Howard.

As soon as somebody decides that a brand's future requires adding more top-level features rather than specializing in top-of-class delivery of core features, product design becomes an endless treadmill (death spiral?) of adding "yet another half-baked product"

That's not to say that "one thing well" products are sure to be viable, and the "bullet point maximizers" that dominate product design for the last 10-15 years may know best, but this is what it looks like once they run the show either way.

This happened so bad with Wyze. They had a really great little camera for a very brief time. Then I turn around and they're just a white box product reseller, with everything from vacuums to earbuds. Meanwhile, their camera service is a shadow of its former self.

If this is a Proton grievance panel, I really wish they'd optimize their web app, at least with Firefox. If I leave the Protonmail tab open, the amount of CPU and RAM usage for Firefox just spikes up like crazy, and it shoots back down once I close that tab.

I can get around this with the ProtonMail Bridge and using Mutt, which works fine and makes me feel cool, but the web app is considerably more convenient.

Both their web app and their android app are extraordinarily sluggish, unfortunately. And I currently am forced to use the web app in a PWA on my phone because the Android app has a current bug where the contents of emails won't load. In other words it's 100% useless, and I uninstalled. By the PWA is agonizing to use, so I've been missing emails lately. For a service to keep getting worse over the years when I want to like it is difficult to swallow, but every day I'm a little closer to canceling my subscription.

Don't get me started on the fucking Android app.

When I would type and send an email too fast, it would only send the first half or so. I would have to type out the email, wait about 30 seconds, then send it. Presumably it had to fully save some draft before sending it, but it came off as extremely amateurish. Not to mention that it just utterly killed my battery life.

The iOS app is fine, and since I'm on iPhone again I'm still on Proton, but I haven't completely lost the bitter taste in my mouth over the Android version.

I cannot imagine that it could get much worse.

I don't have an Android phone anymore, and to be potentially fair to Proton, my last Android phone was an utter piece of shit (Pixel 7 Pro). I know people who had the Pixel 7 Pro and they didn't seem to hate it, so it's possible that it had some hardware issues, but it certainly didn't seem like hardware issues. I hated that thing so much that it completely turned me off of Android for the foreseeable future, since this was not a cheap phone, and it was Google's flagship phone: if they couldn't get a good experience on the flagship product, I didn't see why the experience would be much better on anything else.

Anyway, it's possible that the Proton app didn't suck as generally on Android as it did for me, it could have been the phone's fault, but it did leave a very bad taste in my mouth. As stated, the iOS version of the Proton app is totally fine, I haven't had any issues with it other than I don't really like the theme, but that's hardly worth complaining about.

With the previous android app, not the one they just launched last month, i had a similar issue (it would take ages to load an email), clearing the cache in the settings had solved it though.

I feel like this is a somewhat recent change, so I don't know what happened on my computer or within Protonmail; I have an Intel Macbook Pro, and it really seems to slow everything down. Maybe I screwed up a setting but as I said everything else seems to work fine and when I use the Protonmail Bridge it works fine.

Yes, could potentially be related to a different CPU architecture, but could also be something else eg RAM capacity (I have 64GB) or Proton Mail settings (do you have offline enabled? I don't).

I have 64gb of RAM as well. I don't think I have offline enabled. My CPU is an i9.

I'm happy enough with my Mutt solution, and the iOS app is generally ok, and I do like the service overall, so while I complain it's not out of hatred. I just want the service to get better.

CalDAV and CardDAV support missing is the only reason I still have a google account. I understand it's "tough" with e2ee but adding support to the bridge would be perfectly sufficient, then at least I could use local Calendar/Contact apps.

It's pretty easy to self-host CalDAV and CardDAV. I went with Baïkal, it took me maybe 15 minutes to install on a server, it's supported by all of the calendar tools I use, and it's worked perfectly fine for a few months now. So now I'm completely free of Google.

Maybe not for everyone, but a way more feasible option than most people seem to realize.

Yeah I've investigated it a couple of times but never pulled the trigger with self-hosting. Could run it on my rpi and access via Tailscale, but seems like something that should be provided by the email provider that I pay money for. They also do have Contacts and Calendar products, but they're completely self-contained and apparently can only be used by protonmail which is mostly pointless.

I've been considering switching from Fastmail to Proton for Mail/Calendar/Contacts, but I didn't realize their bridge didn't do CalDAV or CardDAV. Also, apparently the bridge is desktop-only -- no mobile? That's kind of a deal breaker.

Also a paying customer. I completely agree. They keep doing this, widening their scope constantly while every new product launched seems to get less ongoing attention than the last one.

This. Also a paying customer. My Android mail app is definitely not fully baked. At times it drains my battery trying unsuccessfully to fetch notifications. Other times it fetches a ton of notifications I had already seen.

Proton is on a good path in many ways, but these rapid launches of new apps will kill the company if they don't do it well.

> What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

New product often means new segment of customers they can go after. Whereas refining existing ones will help reduce the churn.

Their sales/marketing pitch gets that much better.

Well I'm also a paying customer and I'm really glad they're doing this — this way I don't have to awkwardly piece together a VPN, a password manager, a mail client, a notes app, and a Google Docs alternative all from different places, probably paying separate subscriptions to each since I wouldn't trust free services. Instead I get a reasonably good suite of apps for everything privacy-related I need, all for $10/mo. The more they add, the more that money feels worth it and the more affirmed in my choice to pay it I feel.

Missing Caldav support is really painful. I've had to spin up my own Caldav container (Radicale) and leave Proton Calendar behind, but I'm still unable to send calendar event notifications from any calendar app on mobile, only from thunderbird.

The connection is encryption, and having all of these services paid for and therefore have better support. I really like protonpass so I was happy to see that I already pay for it

Paying customer for many years.

I like Proton Pass and switched to it about a month ago from 1Password. It's not quite there yet; I'm thinking of switching back. There are still some sharp edges like lack of support for credit cards, addresses, etc.

Autofilling when buying online, having the details handy/ready to be copied if autofill is not an option, keeping track of them in a single place while being encrypted together with other personal info... To me the benefits are many!

(Disclaimer: Work in Proton Pass)

Thats cool but also so unusual for me. You just don't add card details at all here, and if you do, you just trust that service and save it permanently. If someone is actual heavy card user, he will have temporary/shortlived cards anyway.

VPN are pointless for the vast majority of people.

You're essentially just shifting the person you're trusting from your ISP to proton.

Downloading copyrighted media is pretty much the only usecase I can think of for such a service, and most people don't do that.

The only other usecase would be to conceal your traffic on a public wifi, but you'd be better served just going through your home connection at that point. Pretty much all decent routers provide you with dyndns+VPN services builtin

You're right, I forgot geo blocking entirely as all services I've used it on added mitigations over the years.

The last time I've successfully used a VPN for that was around 2015, but there might be services around (which I just dont use) that can still be unlocked by changing the IP, so that'd be a valid usecase for a few people

In the UK your ISP is obligated to log all your DNS queries and make it accessible to a large number of government agencies without a warrant. Your VPN provider makes money from not being able to provide that data, many times proven in court. They are not at all comparable.

> Pretty much all decent routers provide you with dyndns+VPN services builtin

Most people don't know how to use that or that it even exists. Hell, I didn't know it existed until right now and I'm decently tech savvy.

> You're essentially just shifting the person you're trusting from your ISP to proton.

Yes absolutely, this is the reason I use a VPN. I have negative trust of every ISP in the USA. They will harvest and sell your browsing history to anyone who will buy it. I have no doubt about that. Some VPN providers probably won't.

It is interesting to watch them try to grow so quickly. At some point they'll need to turn more profit to hold all this scale up. We'll see if they can stick to the privacy claims or start to sell out.

They are probably targeting to provide services for companies. It's hard to convince someone to pay for mail if your competition (like Google Suite or Ms365) offers mail AND a bunch of additional stuff. They also just want to tie customers to they services as much as possible to prevent them leaving

I can't even search on the mobile app for android... I could about two years ago until they decided to push out half baked rewrites or something.

Edit: they have since added support for this, my bad --- I am still bummed that ProtonMail doesn't support automatic forwarding. Their rationale is that E2EE makes this impossible, but most of my incoming mail is unencrypted anyway, and I could decrypt the rest myself with Thunderbird and GPG. Lack of automatic forwarding support makes it harder to switch mail providers, on the other hand.

It’s misleading marketing. They sell their email service as “E2EE”, even though the majority of emails flowing through their system are in fact NOT end to end encrypted, they’re visible to Proton in plaintext upon receipt. This is a fundamental limitation of email protocols. You only get E2EE by using PGP at both ends.

Indeed, and as far as I understand, even PGP-encrypted mail can be automatically forwarded and viewed easily, provided I have the correct PGP key installed in my client.

This is a matter of semantics... anyone who actually cares about E2EE probably understands the nature of email being cleartext over the wire and that Proton can't control what is outside of their control. Maybe inaccurate but I doubt they are misleading (in the sense that they are hoping to fool people into thinking their email is encrypted over the wire).

Marketing copy would not likely care to include "E2EE" .... "at the point that Protonmail recieves your message" on their frontpage.

Further, this is explain quite clearly on their FAQ: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained

I’m gonna start selling sugar-free soda and when people point out that there is sugar in the soda I’ll explain to them that the sugar was added to the mixture by a different supplier before the mixture arrived at my factory.

My factory does not add any sugar to the soda. Therefore it’s clearly fair to market it as sugar-free!

Thanks for letting me know. Seems like it's a paid feature, however, and I'd rather not pay a monthly subscription for a service I no longer want to use - that was the primary reason I needed automatic forwarding anyway.

But I do distinctly recall that Proton has said the feature isn't possible to implement due to E2EE when this question was brought up. What has changed?

What irritates me is that their ProtonMail iOS client always sends a notification when I log into ProtonMail from my laptop and I can't turn that notification off without turning off all notifications. I don't want to be spammed by yet another useless security-freak notification.

It's not going to be as half baked as other products they've released in the past that were made from scratch because this is basically Standard Notes that they bought directly integrated in Drive.

(Paying customer) Yes! I cant believe I still cant share a folder with another account on proton drive (apart from read-only sharing via link), but now instead they add .....

Also a paying customer, I'd like it if they would email an invoice every month instead of me needing to go login to the web UI and dig for it when I do my monthly tax reporting.

If this is invoice griefing group, please

   1. Everyone make invoices PDF
   2. Send them out every month
   3. If I need to log in, make them easy to find on the first page
   4. Name them ----.pdf

Thanks!

My biggest issue with Backblaze B2. It’s so much effort to get my invoice each month. I don’t get why companies send out billing emails but don’t just attach the invoice or insert a link directly to the invoice.

I can see it as trying to compete with say a google in all competencies.

So hopefully once they have tool parity with Gsuite they would buckle down and work on features of each application?

They need to keep in mind that Google spend decades getting to where they are with the current toolset. Proton shouldn't be expected to replicate it in a couple years.

I'm sure people are asking for this stuff, but I hope it is sustainable. I'm a paying customer and only use the email today. With the pace of these releases, I'm not comfortable investing in these new tools, because I'm not sure how long they'll be around. I'm starting to question the email choice, since I'm worried they are spreading themselves too thin. I'm not sure what their financial situation is like, but I hope this isn't all from a bunch of funding or debt they will need to answer for at some point.

>> Google spend decades getting to where they are with the current toolset. Proton shouldn't be expected to replicate it in a couple years.

Well, with AI that's probably possible now.

certainly not in all competencies, but there is definintely a demand for O365 or GSuite that's not going to actively datamine the hell out of you.

This isn't even a "im a paranoid l33t hacker", just that I don't want someone capturing 100% of every document and communication in my business.

like holy shit, we're gonna let MS hookup their AI to monitor everything all the time? cuz that's what my org is doing with Copilot...

> What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

Growth. I'm also a (happy) customer, I've been using their products for years and my personal impression is that they're trying to catch up and build a full productivity suite as fast as possible.

> What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

I suspect they're attempting to build up an attractive package for business customers, competing with the likes of O365 and G-Suite. There's probably a lot more money in that than in personal email hosting.

They can't add direct caldav support because it's e2ee, they should add a caldav bridge to their mail bridge, they also should work on contact sync.

I agree that drive is underpowered, they still don't have a syncing client on Linux, and their android/iOS client is quite limited and the photo integration is really half baked. However Pass is really great, it has better UI/UX compared to Bitwarden.

On the one hand I can agree with this—I would love them to focus on refining the current suite of Proton apps.

On the other hand, Google’s ability to monitor the contents of Google Docs and engage in censorship is extremely concerning and Proton seems well-placed to provide an alternative.

Seems like a massive distraction from their offering for a small company, wonder why they didn't consider something like tight integration with OnlyOffice or similar. Setting out to build a new office suite feels about as sensible as building a new web browser from scratch. Except at least with a browser, you have open specs helping you through most of the endless supply of compatibility problems.

I always feel conflicted by these kind of announcements, because for me there is significant value in spreading my dependencies across different companies, to reduce risk. I think Proton are great, I would like them to succeed - but I'm not sure I want to put all my eggs in their basket.

Then you should welcome the announcement as it offers yet another alternative for hosting docs. I don't think Proton implies that you must use the entire bundle of services — you could always mix and match them with other providers (or self-host, for the ultimate freedom).

This specific case seems reasonable. Mail implies Drive (you want to keep large attachments somewhere), both imply Docs (you want to preview those docs somewhere and maybe add some edits).

If you want to diversify, Pass may be a good candidate for not using it.

This is good news considering that it's amazing that in 2024 we still don't have any decent alternative to the Google Docs suite that is not Microsoft.

In our small company we tried a self hosted Nextcloud instance and we ended up moving away from that after years of pain. Now we are in HedgeDoc, that is neither ideal because of its lack of central way to manage files collectively, etc. So, I guess good news.

This is how I see it. People arent thrilled that they aren't as feature rich in other products (cal/mail) but I see it as trying to compete with the whole of Gsuite. And hopefully the more niche features that a hyper technical hackernews reader might want will come then.

I used Zoho when I was younger and trying out new technologies was still fun. Their mail, docs, CRM, contacts programs were all pretty good, and honestly technologically pretty impressive as far as user-friendly SaaSes go. It's too bad they never got popular in the West (it's an Indian company).

In everyday life as an adult, they just don't have the mindshare that the big clouds have. I default to Google Workspace for everything (or whatever it's called now) because that's what everyone else in my social circle use and what most employers use, and being able to seamlessly share stuff with other Google users is much lower friction than trying to get them to sign up (much less pay for) yet another similar service. The network effect is more important than any minor difference in technical merit...

Yea, I tried going all in on Proton with my consulting work.

A client who was using Google scheduled a meeting that I was invited too and I put it on my calendar. Then somebody had to move the meeting but didn’t click the option to send an update when they did.

Everyone’s Google calendars updated. My Proton didn’t because they didn’t send the update. Everybody else was on time and I wasn’t, making a terrible impression.

In investigating, I found that my Google calendar that had been setup prior to the Proton move also had the update even though it wasn’t on their domain.

That is the network effect in action.

Yeah, calendar invites are a big one. But also the ease of being able to manage sharing via Drive (and be automatically alerted when a Google account owner can't access it), co-edit in Docs (and tagging in comments there), being able to use it as SSO in many places, and having all of that synced to your browser and managed by your Workspace admin. It's the ecosystem that's extremely valuable, not necessarily any individual app.

Google Docs isn't even good, though? Give me MS Office or even LibreOffice running on the desktop any day of the week. I hate when I work at a place that makes use of Google's shitty imitation.

What does Word do better? I feel the opposite, I hate when I have to use Office products. GDocs for my uses has at least feature parity, and collaboration and sharing feels much cleaner.

I’ve been a paid Proton user for about a year now and I can’t recommend it highly enough. They’re seriously hard core about security and privacy and the usability is easily a match for any comparable offering.

When Google CAPTCHAs me on every single query from a known reputable exit node, yeah, I want that security.

Interesting take. I was a paying personal customer who switched away from ProtonMail. I appreciate it for what it is, but ultimately for me it was just way too slow. The website is incredibly sluggish, and the mobile app is worse. I spent a good 5-10 seconds waiting on a loading screen everything I wanted to check my email.

Very strange. I use Protonmail with Thunderbird on desktop, and the Protonmail app on my phone. I've never once seen any slowdown. That's part of why I switched to it, it was so much faster than my prior mail.

I don't interact with the website, so I can't comment on that.

I've evaluated Proton multiple times over the years as a replacement for my existing solution, though each time it feels a bit off. I don't quite know why, but there's too much going on and, from what I understand, much of it is still half-baked or too inconvenient to use.

"much of it is still half-baked"

Imo, it's not. It's more like 80% baked. More than good enough for daily use, but not on the level of polish or quality of any of the market leaders. Proton Drive is not as nice and convenient as Dropbox, Proton Mail is not as nice and convenient Gmail, Proton Pass is not as nice and convenient as 1Password, and so on.

But each of their offerings are good enough to get the job done, the price is fair, and you get the added privacy.

This is exactly why I like it. I understand it won't be for everyone, but it does everything I need for daily use. Mainly mail + calendar, plus drive for some occasional file sharing/upload. The VPN works fine for what I need, and I still use a separate password manager.

It’s years and billions behind Google. It’s a lot of work to catch up. I’ve been really happy with them and it’s great having my email domains through them

Lexical contributor here. I love what you've build here! A full-fledged collaborative rich text editor. I'm glad that Lexical worked well for you, we'd be happy to take your feedback throughout the development process, you can reach out to me over Discord by the same username or on our server.

Meanwhile, the iPhone app is still so unreliable, I wouldn't sign up for Protonmail again today if I wasn't already in it.

Pity, because on desktop - and, when it works, on mobile, it works great. I really like the company.

Switching email addresses has so much friction - maybe I should keep a notebook of everyone who has my address so I can let them know of my new address.

> iPhone app is so unreliable

that's interesting. iirc the iPhone app got most of their attention early on, so I figured it would have been solid experience.

the early android app was so awful that they rewrote it. the rewrite is much better but it still has its issues.

one of the most painful issues I encountered: I'd reply to an email, hit send. then when my reply showed up in the thread, it would be incomplete. at first I thought it was truncating but it turned out to be the last draft that it auto saved before I hit send. I very nearly cancelled my subscription over that one.

the web and desktop (which is an electron/tauri/whatever app) does work great.

a bit off topic for this thread but sieve filtering is amazing. it makes email automation a breeze.

I have it set up so that when an email comes in from a contact, it applies the label that contact has to the email. then any email with certain labels gets (or doesn't) an expiration date. eg: webstore notifications, eg for shipments, are deleted in 30d while notifications about upcoming sales or product announcements are deleted in 3d.

likewise GitHub notifications for my repos get 7d expirations and go to my inbox while all others get 3d expirations and never hit the inbox.

Adding this to "simple solutions I've never considered but wow, I should"

Seriously, I've had this same thought after switching to HEY getting pretty frustrated with it. Considered other options, but worried that I'd just repeat the process. However, if I use a custom domain next time around, this whole problem goes away. Yay

I'm trying to make HEY work as well. Can we start a side discussion about it? I was initially impressed but now it feels like I have a part time job manually flagging things that should have been seen as spam right away

I switched to using my own domain for important emails some 10 years ago, after a friend got his Google Account taken over while on a month long hike without internet. When he got back his account had been banned because they used it for click fraud, no way to contact Google to get it reinstated, he lost access to his GMail, with it all email history since 2004, logins to accounts tied to it, etc.

I don't want ever to go through this nightmare.

How good is the proton ecosystem if I have multiple mail addresses and calendars?

Say I have [email protected] and [email protected], can I use one unified inbox, and can I use both addresses to send and receive calendar invites?

Moreover, how easy is it to combine my calendars with my work calendar?

I heard it's also not possible to sync contacts with iOS, is that true?

It's great for multiple mail addresses. I get mail from multiple domains all in my ProtonMail inbox. Very easy to send from multiple addresses as well.

You can also turn on catch all addresses where you'll get all mail sent to anything @yourdomain.com. Very handy to create unique emails for sites I don't want to have my emails I actually use with contacts.

I can't really comment on multiple calendars. I haven't experimented much with that and get all my invites sent to one address.

Don't know about calendars. They are one of the better ones for multiple address - there's a limit on the number of a) domains) and b) email addresses you can reply from (but no limit on the number you receive from, with a catch-all).

I think their different plans allow different numbers.

The one what doesn't have any limits other than bandwidth is migadu. But they don't support second fact properly, last I looked.

I pay for both, use them for different things, but to be clear, fastmail does not have the encryption features that ProtonMail does. Not a direct replacement if you’re interested in the privacy aspects.

I ended up switching to Fastmail after it being recommended here ages back, and it’s been fantastic.

I’ve also used Google Workspace, O365 or whatever MS calls it this week, and Proton as well as self hosting mail in the past.

I'm honestly shocked by how long I've been using Fastmail without having a single complaint to talk about.

Usually after using a tool for an extended period of time, there's gonna be some annoyance that you just have to learn to deal with. After five or so years of me using Fastmail, I can't think of a single thing that actually bothers me.

Sorry. I intentionally chose an internal codename that was ambiguous, generic, and hard to Google, just in case the name leaked before we were ready to go public. It was never supposed to be the public name, it was just another part of the Steam Play umbrella. But, in the end I guess it stuck. Oh well!

I’ve been running Linux for ~20 years. Proton is, without a doubt, a huge leap forward for the ecosystem. I stopped dual booting Windows for games ~5 years ago and haven’t looked back. It’s positively wild to me that native Linux builds for games are often harder to get working than just using proton and the game’s windows build.

I just want to thank you for this awesome project you started that has largely enabled me to use Linux as a main desktop.

I've long felt that gaming's "home OS" should be Linux (or at least an open-source OS... in my case, big fan of NixOS, even with its new-user warts). Especially when you look at the long term (running older games to show your kids, etc). I'm glad Gabe felt this way too (for a long time now, it seems). Microsoft is too capricious an overlord for what is essentially almost all of gaming, I think.

Now if only there was something like proton for macOS that enabled windows API gaming on M1/2/3/4 Macs... (I know Apple has some sort of half-baked-seeming "game porting toolkit" that I believe might make use of it, but just something native to Steam on Mac would be sweeeeet)

Emails, password manager, VPN, and now documents—absolutely not a wise thing to do. Never put all your eggs in one basket; your whole personal and even professional life shouldn't be entrusted to a single company.

Completely agree. I love Proton, been a paying customer for many years now. I do use the Proton Drive app all the time, and occasionally the vpn when I'm at an airport or hotel.

But I refuse to use their Pass app, and I similarly will refuse to use this new docs app. I use Standard Notes for all my notes (funny enough they joined with Proton this year lol) and Bitwarden for passwords. And then I just let Apple sync all my contacts, and for calendar it's kind of required that I use the ios calendars for family member sharing reasons.

Not quite right: never be in a position where there is no easy migration off any platform you use.

Use a custom domain with ProtonMail or any other provider.

Frequently download email, calendar, etc. from Proton, Google, etc.

There are a lot of good comments in this whole conversation about nice to have Proton improvements, but I suggest we not lose sight of the benefits of not having personal and company data in the hands of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.

Companies and individuals who aren’t worried about the costs and risks of the lack of privacy should not use Proton.

There's benefit to doing so, though - and that's integration. It's part of why Apple is so successful. It offers real convenience that users are genuinely willing to pair a premium for.

If you want to be more cautious, sure. But the likelyhood that they're going to collapse so hard and quickly that you lose anything significant is pretty slim.

Did Engadget jump the gun on this one? I don't see a link, blog post or press release on any of Proton's sites, and I don't see a link in the article.

There are many Google Docs alternatives, including some great open source options such as HedgeDoc and Outline.

What is missing a great Excel or Sheets alternative. I wanted to break my business out of the Google Workspace ecosystem earlier this year, but the lack of a good spreadsheets alternative was one of the main things holding me back.

(Paying customer) I wish they concentrated more on their core offerings and making them as solid as possible.

If they developed an entire (web) wordprocessor from scratch that seems like an enormous effort and cost quite outside of the core offerings.

If they have (or will) open source it that would be grand.

I am a long paid user of ProtonMail so I am glad to see more services. I am trying it now using Safari on iPadOS and it is functional except for one thing: the page layout is very narrow, just 50 columns, and I don’t see how to change that.

They are falling into the hole of adding products on top of products, while their core apps are decaying.

Please. Fix. The. Android app! It's unusable. I feel like I beg for them to do this in every yearly survey, and then they change the design a little bit, it loses a few features and gets some new ones, while missing basic stuff like unmarking an email as spam. This wouldn't be a problem if it was possible to use K9 or AquaMail with Proton, but that's obviously not an option.

> They are falling into the hole of adding products on top of products, while their core apps are decaying.

It's not a hole, it's only natural. It's easier to add new products than it is to improve existing ones (tech debt), and new products can bring in new customers, make existing customers happier, etc. which is easier to see and justify.

That being said, the Android app has some weird gaps (like can't snooze an email) that probably won't take long to fix.

> Doesn't seem to be much of the latter in this thread (but then again, this is HN...)

Insert famous "Dropbox is just FTP, who would pay for it" comment here :)

> that probably won't take long to fix.

That's what I told myself about the spam thing I mentioned when they released the redesign, and it's still not possible, at least on the version I'm using at the moment.

I'm sure there's a lot of background here and corporate dynamics we're not aware of, it just doesn't feel great as a paying customer. The apps have never really been fully adequate.

Google docs’ value is the network effects. Everyone has a Google account, so GDocs is like a universal collaboration tool. Does not seem like there’s a huge space for something like this, it’s going to be a huge pain every time I want to share a doc with someone. Seems like it would be way better to try and distinguish their already successful products by continuing to improve their feature set. For example: their email search bar is hot garbage. Give me the perfect email and calendar client and I’ll be subscriber forever, but I definitely don’t want to pay for an ecosystem of half-finished Google knockoffs

I’m so happy to see this. I’m not sure why people are complaining here. Maybe you just aren’t their target audience. But many of us want a privacy focused alternative to big tech.

They’re not outside the law, if the police come knocking with a legal request they have to provide data\details they have. What would you have them do?

In this specific case of a recovery email address, maybe there is something that could be done so that they wouldn't hold the email address itself. At least 2 options come to mind.

Daily reminder thats actually Apple.

From article:

> The core of the controversy stems from Proton Mail providing the Spanish police with the recovery email address associated with the Proton Mail account.

> Upon receiving the recovery email from Proton Mail, Spanish authorities further requested Apple to provide additional details linked to that email, leading to the identification of the individual.

Daily reminder that Proton is a company that operates legally in jurisdictions that have police forces and laws. If you're a dissident in one of those countries you'll definitely need something else (or a few layers on top of Proton to protect your real IP), but it's weird to see people turning this into a moral problem with Proton.

Sure, but maybe don't advertise "protecting free speech" as part of their "impact", because it only goes so far.

https://proton.me/about/impact

And you don't even need to be a dissident in "one of those countries". As long as Europol's arm (or some other organization that Swiss is part of) can reach you, you are not covered, as in https://restoreprivacy.com/protonmail-logs-users/

I don't have an opinion on whether this is ok or not (protecting dissidents and protecting "real" criminals), I am just sick of false advertising.

It is because of these reasons I chose Fastmail over Proton when I was looking for an alternative. The E2EE itself is almost bogus, and I would rather look for othet features that I need.

There's a great blog post that identifies your position as the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics [0]:

> The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.

Proton is guilty because they attempt to protect free speech and aren't able to do so completely. Fastmail is not guilty because they don't do anything more to protect free speech than any other provider.

Do you see the problem?

[0] https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/ethics/2015-06-24-jai-theco...

Recipients who do not have a Proton account need to create a free or paid Proton account to access the shared content. The email invitation includes a link to the Proton sign-up page.

Once account creation is successful, they will receive another email with the link that allows them to access the file.

One of these days I might finally move off of just the Mail (~3$ per month) and onto a bigger plan.

VPN might be nice so my ISP doesn't yell at me for torrenting if I screw it up, and my copy of VueMinder is getting pretty ancient at this point. I could stand to get a newer calendar app.

Has anyone (Proton included) talked about their E2EE encryption claims for this web-based document editor? My understanding of E2EE on the web is that it's as much marketing hype as it is true security, given that they can freely break it at any time they please.

Have they actually attempted to solve any problems associated with this space or are they just claiming it and getting the marketing points?

This title is beyond confusing, and the article doesn't even attempt to make it clearer. What does "own version of Google Docs" even mean? I took two reads of the article to understand that Proton's "flavor of Google Docs" actually has nothing to do with Google and is just a collaborative document product that intends to compete with Google Docs. The title makes it sound like Proton is offering a reskinned-Google-Docs-in-an-iframe which is incredibly odd.

Proton seems to be suggesting that this is somehow more secure than Google Docs [1].

But Google Docs/Workspace already supports what they call "client-side encryption" [2] if you want to pay for it and enable it. Docs never sees your actual data.

How is this any different?

Trying to go up against MS Office and Google Docs/Workspace sounds like an unbelievably difficult, huge, and therefore risky proposition -- akin to writing your own browser from scratch and trying to compete with Chrome, Edge, and Safari. Not really sure this is a wise business move for Proton.

[1] https://proton.me/blog/docs-proton-drive

[2] https://support.google.com/a/answer/10741897?hl=en

> Trying to go up against MS Office and Google Docs/Workspace sounds like an unbelievably difficult, huge, and therefore risky proposition

My guess is that Proton sees that it appeals to individuals wanting an alternative to Google and Microsoft's online services. Email alone is not enough to cut the umbilical, so Proton is adding more and more coverage.

Ah got it -- if this is aimed at individuals not businesses then it makes more sense.

Also because individuals tend to mostly use only Google Docs, much less Sheets and almost no Slides -- so the Docs clone by itself would be sufficient.

Ever since Google Docs launched, it has been the most valuable thing about having an account. Document sharing and central management are a hard thing that Google Docs solves realy well.

I'll be very glad to try this out.

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