https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/how-to-use-pgp...
"This means that with ProtonMail, anybody can use PGP, regardless of their technical knowledge."
Something like this would make things even more transparent to end users:
When you’re communicating with email addresses outside of ProtonMail, their servers will see your emails. Your emails might then be encrypted “at rest”, but they’ve passed through their servers unencrypted anyway.
To workaround it, for sending to email addresses without a ProtonMail account, AFAIK they also give the possibility to send a link to a ProtonMail interface for decryption.
And also web interfaces are inherently insecure for E2E encryption, which ProtonMail encourages.
This is not how email is supposed to work.
Speaking of email ProtonMail also doesn’t work via standard IMAP and SMTP. You need an adapter to use classic mail clients and that only works on the desktop.
In other words ProtonMail is anti-standards.
And for me standards are more important than promises of privacy that an email service can’t really meet.
Unless you’re doing PGP or similar, independent of the email service being used, then email is incompatible with encryption.
Decryption is done in the browsers so it's not passing through the servers unencrypted. (ProtonMail is one of the biggest contributors to Openpgpjs).
> To workaround it, for sending to email addresses without a ProtonMail account, AFAIK they also give the possibility to send a link to a ProtonMail interface for decryption.
And you can add the recipient PGP key in ProtonMail settings so it's pure PGP. (I've heard that they're working on Web Key Directory support for automatic contact key retrieval)
> And also web interfaces are inherently insecure for E2E encryption, which ProtonMail encourages.
Not strictly true. The problem is web interface hosted on a foreign host. For a secure web interface see e.g. Mailpile.
There are also other ways of minimizing risk like using Mailvelope that communicates with GnuPG through Native Messaging.
> In other words ProtonMail is anti-standards.
Not for all standards for example ProtonMail is very active in OpenPGP mailing list.
For the record I'm not using ProtonMail but I like that they're promoting PGP by showing that it can be made relatively easy. Too much people think that the UI complexity in PGP is intrinsic.
That cannot be for unencrypted emails, which is how most communications over email are going to be, because:
1. Most people or businesses are not on ProtonMail
2. Usage of PGP is nice, but very few people have published PGP keys
3. Opening a link to view a message is a big problem; personally I ignore such emails, can’t remember the last time that happened
It also doesn’t work for unencrypted emails being sent to you, which are a majority.
If I were to guess 99%+ of emails sent or received by ProtonMail customers are seen by ProtonMail’s servers in unencrypted form.
And this is why ProtonMail is snake oil.
Sending a link with a symmetrically encrypted mail is still possible for users without PGP but those aren't in cleartext on the server either (they are encryped and decrypted) in the client.
(in theory, PM could swap code in the webclients but you can use the Bridge or Android/iOS app to circumvent that hole easily)
