I’ll start off by saying everyone’s economic situations are just as varied as their threat models and how people make decisions on which services can be specific to themself and not one that can apply to anyone else. The services one chooses to use for free or to pay for may be based more on what they can afford vs what’s the best broad reaching plan.
That being said i’d like to see what others think about the proton suit of services. I’ve been eyeing it as an option for a paid service for a while but am hesitant to put all my eggs in one basket. I’m interested in a vpn, mullvad seems to be the other popular choice. I’m also interested in email address anonymizing service like anonaddy. At $5 for mullvad, $3 for anonaddy, and $3 for base proton email it comes out to a dollar more than protons premium tier which gets cheaper if you pay for 1 or 2 years at a time.
As said above would the biggest reason not to use proton for all of these separate services be not putting all your eggs in one basket?
I’ve been on the Proton premium plan for about a year and a half and love it.
I mostly use it for Email and the VPN, but I do use Proton drive for some random stuff.
I don’t use Proton Pass because I already use Bitwarden for all my PW management needs.
Email and calendar services have been pretty much flawless so far. I like the interface, the Proton mail bridge works well for desktop clients like Thunderbird if you want to use those. The apps work really well on my Android device, all of them, Calendar, Mail, and VPN.
My torrent box Proton VPN CLI app has been solid too.
Proton Pass is useful for aliases that don’t count against your total addresses. Passwords go into BitWarden though.
I am annoyed it requires an app or browser extension though. No native web interface I could find.
Literally the exact same here. And I love this setup.
By default just did a video (piped link) on this and I 100% agree with him. The killer feature is simplelogin. Being able to use a different alias email for every single account I use is absolutely amazing.
There are other such services such as addy.io but SimpleLogin is a lot better integrated IME. Addy for example can be quite janky; adding a big message up top of the email and such.
There’s also the fact that you only need to trust a single entity for email if you use SL + ProtonMail.
I used to subscribe to Simplelogin as well - but lately I have been seeing sites/merchants who do not accept the Simplelogin email domains as valid, and I have to put in my personal gmail ID to proceed (e.g. the restaurant POS system “Toasttab”).
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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I use Proton Pass to generate aliases with the browser extension but otherwise use 1password which is much more mature and has great support on all platforms.
Yeah bitwarden will create simple login aliases natively.
One reason for deciding on which service(s) to pay for is which service do you want sticking around. I can get a wireguard VPN from a number of providers. I like the way Mullvad does things and so I choose to get my VPN from them. One could make the same argument for email from Proton or groupware from Kolab.
I think they are unnecessarily expensive for email. I would rather go with tutanota. I don’t like having all my eggs in one basket. Calendar/email/contacts in one provider and VPN service in another is the way to go, in my opinion.
WHY isn’t their email client on f-droid ? isn’t it opensource ?
F-droid doesn‘t accept the Proton Mail client due to integrated google notification framework. The APK however is available on protonapps.com.
Proton is currently rewritting the Android application completely.
It is available through the IzzyOnDroid repository if you want to download and update the app using an F-Droid client.
Agreed, that would be nice. At least they have a dedicated APK download site. https://protonapps.com/protonmail-android No self-updating though
For what is worth I haven’t been able to get the storage sync to work, the VPN app isn’t as simple/fast/as easy as mullvad, proton has little support for Linux. I use proton because it works with portmaster but I’m not a huge fan of it.
Some third party tools you might find useful.
I do use rclone but I’m pretty happy with b2 storage. I did a small test with proton and it seemed to work.
https://rclone.org/protondrive/
VPN in docker with port forwarding. Didn’t have any luck routing host traffic through it but I didn’t dig too deep. Might be useful for a web based torrent docker container.
https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/setup/providers/protonvpn.md
They offer OpenVPN profiles for their VPNs so you can use them on basically any platform where that’s available.
And even better: wireguard configs as well
I still can’t see how their Proton CAPTCHA system being proprietary is justifiable.
I don’t trust Proton enough to use it exclusively. Personally I use their free email tier as a secondary mailbox.
- They are not fully open source (I found only web client source code)
- Their last independent audit was in 2021 and was done for beta version of their email
- The audit itself was for security, nothing related to privacy
- They advertise their email service as encrypted: encrypted:
End-to-end encryption Proton Mail is a private email service that uses open source, independently audited end-to-end encryption and zero-access encryption to secure your communications. This protects against data breaches and ensures no one (not even Proton) can access your inbox. Only you can read your messages.
Which I see as deceptive: end-to-end encryption is working without user involvement only for emails between Proton mailboxes. In other cases user needs to establish PGP encryption on their own. Inbox may be not accessible by Proton (we actually have no clue because server side code is closed source), but unencrypted incoming messages can be easily intercepted by Proton relays.
I’m not saying that Proton does all this nefarious stuff, but their marketing is questionable.
When you send an encrypted email to a non-Proton user, you click on the lock icon to encrypt the email and assign it a password, which you need to get to your user. The recipient then receives an email with a link. They click on the link, enter the password and and can then view your email, which to my understanding is decrypted client-side.
I am on proton plus, have to decide between proton unlimited (1/2 year plan) to get proton vpn, or continue with proton plus and get mullvad vpn.
I’m using Proton Plus, and have no need for their other services. Don’t really see a necessity for VPN in my daylie use.
I’ve been using Nord, and I’m on the fence about switching to either Proton or Mull. I’d like to hear how people chose one or the other
You could setup your own VPN or use Tor
I prefer mullvad because it has the option to pay with monero. It also seems more trustworthy than proton because they don’t sell out users (that we know of), or make false claims
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
There’s usually a black friday sale. I use simple login with the email service and its great. The vpn and calender are solid as well.
Honestly, I think it boils down to our ecosystems. There are other mail + calendar providers out there. When children are involved, I think it’s worth a few bucks to get a custom DNS, a privacy-focused email/calendar provider, and give children the space to grow up in a world that collects as little metadata as possible.
Proton unlimited, and I don’t understand why did they go with Proton Pass. There’s products like Bitwarden and LastPass (and more) that are feature rich. Bitwarden is open sourced.
I think having separate services is good, especially if it’s cheaper that way. For photos I use ente even though I have 500gb just because they specialize in photos (same reason why Pass isn’t useful IMO)
So what if LastPass exists? They got hacked twice and covered it up. Proton pass auto fill works better than LastPass. Use what you want but why suggest a product shouldn’t exist because there is competition?
I’m arguing that they seem to waste resources instead of solidifying their existing product suite. Like features for Drive, basic ones like a desktop client for auto sync.
I know you can’t make a baby in 1 month with 9 women, adding another product with only basic fetures seems wasteful to me given the state of the other ones.
So when there’s products like Bitwarden I wouldn’t pay for Unlimited if you’re looking for the most bang for your buck.
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