Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail

Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by reacharavindh on Monday October 23, 2017 @10:46AM (#15533527)

The engineer in me loves the promised End-End encryption and all the cool stuff. But, the inconvenience of "unable to search contents of emails" is a deal breaker towards encrypted email for me. My primary concern was Google/Microsoft scraping my emails to build a profile of me. My emails could give away very personal information that I do not want to be used for advertising.

My money finally went to Fastmail. Excellent email service - just works and doesn't try to be super smart and take over the world.

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by duality on Monday October 23, 2017 @10:49AM (#15533551)

Didn't Google stop scanning Gmail for ads targeting?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by nevir on Monday October 23, 2017 @10:58AM (#15533635)

They still scan email for product features. Travel receipts for things like "my flights" & Google Now, etc

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by paxy on Monday October 23, 2017 @08:46PM (#15538275)

Only for business users (i.e. custom Google Apps domains)

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by rurban on Monday October 23, 2017 @11:10AM (#15533732)

More importantly they give any government agency free access without any warrant to fulltext search any customer.

US law interpretation of IMAP. Only with a POP3 service you are safe.

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by skybrian on Monday October 23, 2017 @11:18AM (#15533797)

"Without any warrant": what do you mean?

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by linkregister on Monday October 23, 2017 @11:46AM (#15534007)

Under the Stored Communications Act, law enforcement may get emails or other information under third party control with only a subpoena.

Retrieving email via the POP3 protocol typically deletes the email upon retrieval, making it impossible for the third party to comply with requests for already-retrieved emails.

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by bhandziuk on Monday October 23, 2017 @05:03PM (#15536914)

>POP3 protocol typically deletes the email upon retrieval

What POP3 client are you using that does this? I've not seen it before. It gets marked as read but that's it.

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by linkregister on Monday October 23, 2017 @07:00PM (#15537640)

Geez, Eudora? Outlook Express maybe? I haven’t used POP3 in a decade.

It used to delete from the server after downloading locally. This was when most email mailboxes had a capacity of 10MB.

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by bhandziuk on Tuesday October 24, 2017 @12:31PM (#15542859)

I'm writing something that uses POP3 right now and thankfully it doesn't delete anything. I'd have to do things a lot differently if that were the case

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by xfer on Tuesday October 24, 2017 @12:39AM (#15539253)

So you think google storage systems work like your normal filesystem?

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by linkregister on Tuesday October 24, 2017 @01:34AM (#15539461)

You don’t think that files can be deleted from a Google file system? Does gmail even store email like that, in flat files?

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by xfer on Tuesday October 24, 2017 @08:06AM (#15540938)

They can be but not instantaneously, because of multiple replicated copies in a distributed environment.

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by datguacdoh on Monday October 23, 2017 @12:00PM (#15534152)

Source?

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by gr3yh47 on Monday October 23, 2017 @05:27PM (#15537077)

all of the news about how the 3-letter agencies operate from the last decade

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by bad_user on Monday October 23, 2017 @11:01AM (#15533657)

G Suite (former Google Apps) has a different Terms of Use compared with Google's user oriented products, like Gmail.com, otherwise usage wouldn't fly in most big companies, especially in Europe.

In general, if you aren't paying, then you're the product.

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by seveneightn9ne on Monday October 23, 2017 @11:59AM (#15534137)

You can totally search email contents with ProtonMail -- it just does it clientside. I just tested with my 125MB of emails and it was fast (under 1s) but maybe if you have more emails it could be slower.

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by reacharavindh on Monday October 23, 2017 @02:03PM (#15535384)

Have you tried searching for a keyword that is only in the content of the email and NOT on the subject? I tried even now. It doesn’t work for me.

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by maxk42 on Monday October 23, 2017 @02:22PM (#15535560)

I have: It works.

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by bhassel on Monday October 23, 2017 @04:42PM (#15536785)

I'm curious how? This FAQ page on their site claims you cannot search email contents, although they plan to support that in their upcoming Protonmail Bridge (which works with a desktop client to search locally): https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/search/

That is what I'd expect, since obviously they cannot build a search index over text they cannot read. Transferring the entire contents of your emails to your web browser to search locally would be slow and impractical on anything but a very fast connection.

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Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail by mycoborea on Monday October 23, 2017 @11:15AM (#15533772)

+1 for fastmail just works. good support, clean and fast web interface, plays nicely with mbsync + mutt. identities feature is a nice bonus.

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