As the article states, they were forced to by Swiss authorities. They tried to fight against it, but in the end no reputable provider is going to put the whole company on the line for 1 user against a lawful order from their government.

Uh-huh. Then perhaps they shouldn't be touting Swiss privacy laws like they're some holy golden shield. And once again:

> Why's a privacy-first service logging IPs in the first place?

Did you read the article you yourself linked?

> French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users

They weren't logging until they were forced to.

And since then they have been logging thousands upon thousands of other addresses

A while back on the very hackernews thread when the news of the French activist being jailed it was highly discussed, the source of the data being ProtonMail themselves

You always have the option of connecting to PM over tor [0] if you are concerned about this. You can also use any of the VPN services that are available. Get yourself an anonymous mulvad account, and pay with some laundered btc good luck to anyone that wants to track down your IP.

[0] https://protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleegetolb73fuirgj7r4o4vfu7...

> You always have the option of connecting to PM over tor [0] if you are concerned about this. You can also use any of the VPN services that are available. Get yourself an anonymous mulvad account, and pay with some laundered btc good luck to anyone that wants to track down your IP.

Yes, you could do all that. But if you're doing all that, you can also just use Gmail.