Proton mail has some extra (security?) feature, or they just lack smtp support, and you cannot directly use it on thunderbird. They offer a “bridge” app which allows you to do it, I just use that.
Proton’s whole thing is it’s meant to be secure, private, encrypted, etc. To achieve that, it requires the Proton app or website as an endpoint, so your email never leaves Proton’s environment. As long as your reading your email in the Proton app/site, they can guarantee its privacy and security.
Once it sends your emails to Thunderbird or another client, it’s leaving the Proton environment, and they can no longer control it. You’re sacrificing the inherent privacy/security of Proton when you use Thunderbird (they claim).
All of that being said, it’s an absolutely bullshit excuse. Tutanota does this same shit, only they don’t even provide the bridge like Proton does.
It’s true it’s technically more secure for those emails to stay in the Proton environment, but they’re still your god damn emails, and they should operate like every other email service by giving the user the option to export those emails in whatever way they damn well please, for free.
It’s just more platform lock-in garbage. Your emails are trapped on their server, so they’ll be no moving away to a different provider easily.
It’s more that they claim they cannot decrypt your data, so how do they send it to Thunderbird? The bridge does the decryption. Theoretically Thunderbird could add support for it.
Corps have used that BS excuse for ages. The whole “your phone is more secure when we control it” is a garbage BS line. Make it open source, give developers the tools & they’ll make any app more secure than some bureaucracy that is constantly influenced by the national security agencies.
None of those actually document their API nor provide source for the backend server code. Other than building hydroxide from PRs for CalDav, are there even any other open source implementations of CardDav/CalDav for Proton? I can’t find a single implementation of Proton Pass that allows you to sync your passwords locally and be used in a different app. There is no shortage of people complaining about this:
Why would anyone be interested in efforts on a platform with a closed-source backend and that is not developer focused? Not to mention, entirely unnecessary why you should have to use a bridge gateway in the first place with IMAPS & PGP/GPG, CalDav & CardDav. Like I said, Proton is engaged in some questionable practices.
Why would anyone be interested in efforts on a platform with a closed-source backend and that is not developer focused?
Because most people don’t care about those particular things. Almost all the world uses completely proprietary tools (Gmail) that also violate your privacy.
Not to mention, entirely unnecessary why you should have to use a bridge gateway in the first place with IMAPS & PGP/GPG, CalDav & CardDav. Like I said, Proton is engaged in some questionable practices.
It’s not unnecessary, it’s the result of a technical choice. A winning technical choice actually. PGP has a negligible user-base, while Proton has already 100 million accounts. I would be surprised if there were 10 million people actually using PGP. They sacrificed the flexibility and composability of tools (which results almost always in complexity) and made an opinionated solution that works well enough for the mainstream population, who has no interest in picking their tools and simply expects a Gmail-like experience.
And if you really have stringent requirements, they anyway provided the bridge, so that you can have that flexibility if it’s really important for you.
IMAPS & PGP/GPG, CalDav & CardDav
IMAPs is just IMAP on TLS, so it does not have anything to do with e2ee in this context.
PGP/GPG is what they use. They just made a tool that is opinionated and just works, rather than one which is more flexible but also more complex. Good choice? Bad choice? It’s a choice.
*DAV clients expect cleartext data on the server. If you encrypt the data, you need to build all this logic into the clients, and you are not following the standard anymore, which means you will anyway be bound to your client only (and those which implement compatibility). Proton decided that they want to implement e2ee calendar, and they decided to roll their own thing. It’s up to everyone to decide whether e2ee is a more important feature than interoperability with other tools. I don’t care about interoperability, for example, and I’d take e2ee over that.
IMAPs is just IMAP on TLS, so it does not have anything to do with e2ee in this context.
If you use GnuPG or one of the GUI implementations it does.
You do realize e2ee merely means that two users share public keys when they communicate in order to decrypt the messages they receive, right?
*DAV clients expect cleartext data on the server. If you encrypt the data, you need to build all this logic into the clients, and you are not following the standard anymore, which means you will anyway be bound to your client only (and those which implement compatibility).
You’re talking about people paying for cloud services that manage everything for them. Nothing to stop you from hosting your own on an encrypted drive. EteSync does E2E already, and there is already a plethora of apps supporting PGP on Android and Desktop to encrypt/decrypt messages.
If you use GnuPG or one of the GUI implementations it does.
No, because it’s the server that terminates the TLS connection, not the recipient’s client. TLS is purely a security control to protect the transport between you and the server you are talking to. It doesn’t have anything to do with e2ee. It’s still important, of course, but not for e2ee.
You do realize e2ee merely means that two users share public keys when they communicate in order to decrypt the messages they receive, right?
And how does TLS between you and your mail server help with this? Does it give you any guarantee that the public key was not tampered when it reached your server? Or instead you use the fingerprint, generally transmitted through another medium to verify that?
Nothing to stop you from hosting your own on an encrypted drive.
An encrypted drive is useful only when the server is off against physical attacks. While the server is powered on (which is when it gets breached - not considering physical attacks) the data is still in clear.
EteSync does E2E already
And…it requires a specialized client anyway. In fact, they built a DAV bridge (https://github.com/etesync/etesync-dav). Now tell me, if you use this on -say- your phone, can you use other DAV tools without using such bridge? No, because it does something very similar to what Proton does. If proton bridge will get calendar/contacts functionality too (if, because I have no idea how popular of a FR it is), you are in the exact same situation.
Proton mail has some extra (security?) feature, or they just lack smtp support, and you cannot directly use it on thunderbird. They offer a “bridge” app which allows you to do it, I just use that.
You have to be a paying customer to use that app IIRC.
And a paying customer to use the desktop app too. Well, besides a 14 day free trial.
Proton’s whole thing is it’s meant to be secure, private, encrypted, etc. To achieve that, it requires the Proton app or website as an endpoint, so your email never leaves Proton’s environment. As long as your reading your email in the Proton app/site, they can guarantee its privacy and security.
Once it sends your emails to Thunderbird or another client, it’s leaving the Proton environment, and they can no longer control it. You’re sacrificing the inherent privacy/security of Proton when you use Thunderbird (they claim).
All of that being said, it’s an absolutely bullshit excuse. Tutanota does this same shit, only they don’t even provide the bridge like Proton does.
It’s true it’s technically more secure for those emails to stay in the Proton environment, but they’re still your god damn emails, and they should operate like every other email service by giving the user the option to export those emails in whatever way they damn well please, for free.
It’s just more platform lock-in garbage. Your emails are trapped on their server, so they’ll be no moving away to a different provider easily.
It’s more that they claim they cannot decrypt your data, so how do they send it to Thunderbird? The bridge does the decryption. Theoretically Thunderbird could add support for it.
Corps have used that BS excuse for ages. The whole “your phone is more secure when we control it” is a garbage BS line. Make it open source, give developers the tools & they’ll make any app more secure than some bureaucracy that is constantly influenced by the national security agencies.
https://github.com/ProtonMail
glhf
None of those actually document their API nor provide source for the backend server code. Other than building hydroxide from PRs for CalDav, are there even any other open source implementations of CardDav/CalDav for Proton? I can’t find a single implementation of Proton Pass that allows you to sync your passwords locally and be used in a different app. There is no shortage of people complaining about this:
https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/932842-proton-calendar/suggestions/8985673-cardav-caldav-support https://brainbaking.com/post/2023/01/goodbye-protonmail/ https://minutestomidnight.co.uk/blog/email-migration-from-proton-to-mailbox/
Why would anyone be interested in efforts on a platform with a closed-source backend and that is not developer focused? Not to mention, entirely unnecessary why you should have to use a bridge gateway in the first place with IMAPS & PGP/GPG, CalDav & CardDav. Like I said, Proton is engaged in some questionable practices.
Because most people don’t care about those particular things. Almost all the world uses completely proprietary tools (Gmail) that also violate your privacy.
It’s not unnecessary, it’s the result of a technical choice. A winning technical choice actually. PGP has a negligible user-base, while Proton has already 100 million accounts. I would be surprised if there were 10 million people actually using PGP. They sacrificed the flexibility and composability of tools (which results almost always in complexity) and made an opinionated solution that works well enough for the mainstream population, who has no interest in picking their tools and simply expects a Gmail-like experience.
And if you really have stringent requirements, they anyway provided the bridge, so that you can have that flexibility if it’s really important for you.
If you use GnuPG or one of the GUI implementations it does.
You do realize e2ee merely means that two users share public keys when they communicate in order to decrypt the messages they receive, right?
You’re talking about people paying for cloud services that manage everything for them. Nothing to stop you from hosting your own on an encrypted drive. EteSync does E2E already, and there is already a plethora of apps supporting PGP on Android and Desktop to encrypt/decrypt messages.
No, because it’s the server that terminates the TLS connection, not the recipient’s client. TLS is purely a security control to protect the transport between you and the server you are talking to. It doesn’t have anything to do with e2ee. It’s still important, of course, but not for e2ee.
And how does TLS between you and your mail server help with this? Does it give you any guarantee that the public key was not tampered when it reached your server? Or instead you use the fingerprint, generally transmitted through another medium to verify that?
An encrypted drive is useful only when the server is off against physical attacks. While the server is powered on (which is when it gets breached - not considering physical attacks) the data is still in clear.
And…it requires a specialized client anyway. In fact, they built a DAV bridge (https://github.com/etesync/etesync-dav). Now tell me, if you use this on -say- your phone, can you use other DAV tools without using such bridge? No, because it does something very similar to what Proton does. If proton bridge will get calendar/contacts functionality too (if, because I have no idea how popular of a FR it is), you are in the exact same situation.