- No search in Mail. You can use Bridge to pull your emails into something else, but this means it's no longer secure, and not really feasible for a non-techy partner!
- No search in Drive
- 3 domain limit for Mail(???)
- Drive sucks. No previewing files, viewing photos etc. due to missing docs suite
- No proper shared folders in Drive
- Pass is woeful at autocomplete
- Pass Aliases are independent of logins, so you end up with double entries for everything
- You can't sync the calendar with native apps, and the calendar doesn't show birthdays
- No contact sync
- Pass doesn't support SSH
- VPN lets you split tunnel by app on PC, app AND IP on Android, IP on the chrome extension. Some let you include, others exlcude. How hard is it to just allow exclude/include for hostnames?
There's tonnes more that I'm missing that I can't think of from the top of my head, but it seems like Proton have stretched themselves very thinly. What I would consider a lot of basic features are missing. One look at their UserVoice community shows a lot of frustration
I think it's probably best to pay for individual services that focus on one area. I ended up with Fastmail, 1Password, and Windscribe for example.
I'm considering self-hosting Immich to replace photos, but not sure when I'll tackle that and don't fancy having to use Tailscale all the time. No idea about a Drive replacement as yet!
- No catch-all (yes, I use my own domain just for me, and I want a catchall to my mailbox)
- Outlook 365 webinterface becoming buggy and shitty in so many ways
- I had 2 domains set up (one private, one business) but O365 would not display which email a given was used as target (just display my name), nor would it let me choose FROM which Email I want send/reply to a mail
- O365 required re-authentication every 24h or so, but I always keep the webinterface open in my tab 24/7
Additionally, I had a Bitwarden paid subscription and looking for another VPN subscription, plus a commercial AI subscription. Proton is has all of that in a one-package deal.
2. Agreed
3. Yes, inbox rules could color these
4. Something must wrong in CA, this should not happen (if you don't want it to)
It was irritating.
I just assumed it was "IT policy" and accepted the inconvinience.
It’s the price of end-to-end encryption.
The only workaround is synchronising everything locally and searching locally.
I tried synchronising the data directly in the browser, without any email client and the search is mediocre and slow.
This is not a great experience for search.
But again, it’s not a critique of Proton, it’s just how it is with E2EE. At least it demonstrate they are really doing E2EE.
I still hope some time in the future homomorphic encryption will help, but I think we are at least a decade away from that.
The way I interpreted is that first password is for the account, so verify I am who I say I am. But since the emails are encrypted, browser can't show my messages in human-readable form. Second/mailbox password decrypts it and shows the emails in human readable format.
This is just a guess.
I would love to hear about second password from other/more knowlegeable folks.
Proton does not have access to your email contents, no matter if you use one or two passwords. They do not have you password, neither the first one, nor the second one, they have a hash of it, to be able to verify you have types the correct password. Only the actual password (the first one or the second one) can decrypt email content. Decryption only happens in the browser (Or in the proton app).
Of course you need to trust them on this, it’s difficult to verify, but it as been audited multiple times.
The second password is an old vestige of the time where they couldn’t manage to use a single password for both authentication and decryption.
I use the second one as well, but I use it so I can use VPN on some common devices the family use as well, without having to enter the second password. So if the family device is lost or compromised, only my first proton password has ever been used on it.
Whatever nostalgic love there has been for the company from the olden days has completely evaporated by now. It will take a decade for the OS competitor to emerge but once that happens, MSFT will hopefully die in the fiery blaze of death it completely deserves at this point.
This opinion comes fresh off of having to had to engage with their partner center "experience", where basic UI functions are broken beyond repair and simple form submissions have to go through three layers of subcontracted customer "support" which is best described as a broken telephone where you have to explain the problem repeatedly to an endless stack of support staff.
Not to mention Windows 11 BSODing every week and failing to make basic functions like bluetooth work on it.
This may seem dramatic but its an 100% true and accurate representation of how everything works with them these days.
I could only wish my own business were this screwed.
At the same time, they also win on the little things that diehard opponents choose to ignore, like search that kind of works. I don't like Office 365 but I'm a paying customer because, after long research, I haven't found a competitor that meets all my requirements.
my experience of asian software development is they simply build enterprise for the users, how the users want it. rather than trying to shape consumer behaviour. in some ways it could be argued that it is less innovative, but when big orgs figure out a USD$500 laptop running WPS+Harmony + email client can replace msft enterprise contracts a lot of asia co's will never go back
culturally homogenous dev teams producing software for a culturally homogenous market is quite powerful. then outsiders will adapt. rather than winslop focus on support everything, localise to every market, hardware, whatever
i see future of:
HarmonyOS or MacOS for corps then misc tablet systems
this will acelerate with hardware shortages making unified OS+hardware product like huawei or macbook more competitive
Probably
> they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365)
You forgot Github, the once-reliable and once-generally-fast but now pink-unicorn-bedraggled slow-as-molasses 'forge' site. Oh how they messed it up and am I ever glad I only ever used it as a mirror for my own repos.
How they manage to screw up just about every product they purchase remains a mystery to me but by ${deity} are they good at it.
M365 has become an intangible mess of a multitude of different admin dashboards redirecting you around and complicating things beyond comprehension. For the migration, I wanted to backup my entire email backlog. It took me two hours to finally get it connected to thunderbard via IMAP and do the backup. I was redirected from Docs pages to the M365 dashboard, M365 Exchange dashboard, Security dashboard and whatnot. I had to turn on 2FA which only worked afer enabling some hidden "Security defaults" until I finally could enable IMAP login, and then took several AI assisted attempt to get the server and credential details.
When I cancelled my subscription MS asks you to give a reason, and the first bullet point is "This product is too complicated to manage" - so they even know about the mess they created.
For now, Proton replaced my M365 subscription, bitwarden, and Kagi (I use protons LUMO AI, which uses different models in the backend and gives you unlimited requests). I didn't have a VPN plan before, now it is also included. The value proposition of Proton is unbeatable in itself, the privacy on top is just the icing on the cake.