Anyone Tried Protonmail?

[Smores]

With all of the anti-webcam actions being taken by many vendors, including recent moves by Google to shut down webcam accounts that use Google Drive, I wonder if any of you have considered a more privacy oriented email service like Protonmail? What I really like about Protonmail is that they encrypt your email database with a second password. That password never gets sent to their server. As a result of that design, it is impossible for anyone at Protonmail to read your email, after it gets stored in your database. In theory they may have designed it so that two Protonmail users sending to each other cannot have their mail read at any point in the process, except by each other.

 

[Smores]

Here is a nice article comparing Protonmail security to Gmail. Given all of the new problems created for models by FOSTA/SESTA legislation in the US, you need to really think twice about having your webcam work email on a service like Gmail or Yahoo. Services like Gmail are reading your email and doing automatic keyword scans to profile your account. They say this is done "anonymously" so that they can advertise to you, but in the context of FOSTA/SESTA it could end up being done to identify high risk email accounts that they then cancel in order to avoid legal risks under FOSTA/SESTA.

Protonmail cannot read your email, even if they want to read your email. It is in the design of the system that your email stays private to you.

 

[Ann_Sulu]

I signed up a while ago when switter suggested it. Haven't used it yet. Far as I can tell it seems like a good alternative.

 

[Smores]

I signed up a while ago when switter suggested it. Haven't used it yet. Far as I can tell it seems like a good alternative.

It is not as feature rich as Gmail, but Protonmail is the only vendor that I have found that takes email security seriously enough to recognize that privacy is actually something that should be real, not just some check-mark on a specification that ends up being a lie anyway. Services like Gmail have become giant spying engines for Google and for the government. And the point for models who network with each other extensively is that conversations you have where both parties on are on Protonmail will be extremely private.

It is also highly unlikely that the account will be deleted later - as it could be when Google realizes there are too many keywords in your emails that match websites they have on their FOSTA/SESTA blacklists. Tying your webcam site registrations to the Pmail address should also give you additional safety in case US vendors start shutting down all your accounts. I also like the fact that you can keep conversations in Pmail and know that no one can just hack their system and read your conversations.

In reality, I have nothing really worth protecting there, but just the idea that there is anything left in this world that is actually private means something to me.

 

[Lintilla]

I've been using Protonmail since before it was being suggested on SW Twitter. I needed a secure backup account for my Gmail accounts and various other things, especially crypto-related, and don't trust using any of my own domains for that purpose for several reasons. I've gone ahead and started transitioning some of my primary email accounts to Proton, because if my Gmail accounts were to get suspended for any reason, it'd fuck me over quite a bit. That leaves me in a situation where I need somewhere else to put my backup/recovery accounts. So I guess I'll be looking into that now!

 

[MzDDD]

I use it exclusively and love it. very easy interface and easy to organize with tags and folders

 

[Ann_Sulu]

I spent a couple of hours yesterday moving all my gmail things over to protonmail. Read over all the FAQ's and it seems like a good alternative for sure. Wish they had something like google drive though.

 

[Smores]

I use it exclusively and love it. very easy interface and easy to organize with tags and folders

The only thing I would caution people about is that Protonmail could - in theory - have performance problems once you receive huge numbers of emails. The reason is that the entire email database is encrypted so they may not be able to fully index it for performance. That is because their servers literally cannot see your email and so indexing keywords in that email is impossible.

I restrict all the traffic to my Protonmail to just high value activities like notices from a bank. Things like signing up for some worthless website or newsletter I send to other accounts. A Gmail email is a good target for such activity. If I were going to use it for a webcam business, I might have one hidden Protonmail just my work website registrations and financial institutions, and a separate Protonmail for conversations with customers. I would not want the high volumes of customer emails filling up my email database and compromising the performance of my important work/financial emails. The other point is that I would not want customers knowing the emails I am using for website registrations.

If you sign up for a paid Protonmail account, they let you create aliases for the one account, so you can also partition things to different emails that way, but that will not address the problem of accumulating too many emails in one database.