this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023

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ProtonMail Rewrites Your Emails (jfloren.net)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is a silly thing to take issue with. I use a password manager. When I need a new password I allow the manager to generate one for me. Is the password inherently insecure or bad because it was generated by "a company" and not myself? Proton generates your key for you, just like a password manager does, and they've integrated that functionality into their service for ease of use, and probably ease of administration as well. There is no way someone can screw it up and not be able to read their emails if Proton handles it.

Encrypting email is extremely niche in the first place, the fact that Proton can enable it quickly and seamlessly for users with no prior knowledge on how this all works is a good thing imo. Everyone with just enough knowledge to think they know better seems to get annoyed by this type of thing and starts spreading ridiculous FUD even while Proton is enabling encrypted email for millions of people who otherwise would be using Google Mail. Don't get so caught up in the details that you miss the big picture of what Proton is actually providing.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Right, but what the author is trying to implement is what is generally considered best practice for secure email.

You’re right that what Proton are doing is a compromise that’s reasonable for most people, but the author here is annoyed that there’s no way to turn it off so he can implement best practice E2EE himself.

Ironically he could probably do that with the vast majority of providers that aren’t Proton, so to me it seems like a totally reasonable ask that a self described privacy focused email provider has some way to allow you to implement best practice email security.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly this. Why in the world would they not allow that? I don’t believe it’s that hard.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I guess they were probably so caught up in making it easy to use they forgot about the best practice use case.

I agree with you - I don’t think it would take much to adapt their system to support both, even if it’s a manual “I know what I’m doing” power user option hidden away somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm on the fence about this since how would proton verify that "best practices" were followed? They are a privacy focused product and a feature like that could be used to decrease their services privacy. This author would likely implement best practices and many other likely would too, but say a competitor wanted to prove that their product was more secure, a feature like that could enable a competitor to showcase a security "flaw". And since headlines are all people read these days it would be damaging.

The feature the author described would be great but ProtonMail would need to make it fool-proof and temper-proof which requires a lot of Dev time and effort. I'm still waiting on proton bridge to work with calendar and contacts. Or contacts birthdays to show up in my calendar.

Like I said, its a good feature, but its likely a large ask for a niche group of customers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Eh, I don’t think it’s be a big deal. Slap a giant warning on it, all good. Super common on all sorts of platforms. Anyone trying to claim their encryption doesn’t work because they have a (scarily labelled) option to disable it can be easily demonstrated to be disingenuous.

And worst case if someone does disable it but doesn’t implement their own then their email I just falls back to… the same as any other platform.

They might not want to take the time to build it, but I think what this dude is asking for is a totally reasonable thing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If someone else makes the key to your house, they can make themselves a copy of the key to your house without you noticing.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you make your own house keys?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I buy them from the company which makes the lock. If I need an extra key, I make it myself with the machine at my makerspace. People who give their keys away to keymakers and give them their addresses obviously have bad opsec.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

I have in the past yes.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

No... It's generated on your end, and even if it wasn't you can replace the private key with your own.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is dumb. Proton encrypts your private keys with your password.

Just upload the key to your encrypted proton account like you're supposed to, and let them take care of the signing/encryption/etc.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you eli5 this please?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Proton offers a service where they hide all your messages for you, but in a way they can't even see. This person is complaining that they can't hide their messages from proton in a different way that they're likely to screw up.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Based on the title i was expecting some kind of AI that rewrites your email to make it better or something. But no just encryption drama. :(.

Someday i will be able to send emails and not have people think i am an illiterate moron but not today.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Someday i will be able to send emails and not have people think i am an illiterate moron but not today.

You know you can copy and paste your emails into ChatGPT right?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Isn't everything entered into ChatGPT used to further train it?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah I have done that a few times but your assuming I am not a lazy person it is just not worth the extra steps. Not to mention privacy wise that isn't a very good idea. Especially if the email contains some confidential/sensitive information.

I was thinking it would be cool to have a native one button fix my grammar. Or maybe a spell check like interface that I can just select text and pick alternative phrases.

There would still be privacy issues that may not be acceptable for a privacy based company like Proton Mail but it could be something like this AI will never remember or save the data it is analysing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it could be something like this AI will never remember or save the data it is analysing.

How would you know? In fact, how do you know Proton Mail is not a front shop for the NSA exfiltrating all.your data?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That is a good point. I can't think of a way to know for sure. Without running the software locally.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not to mention privacy wise that isn't a very good idea.

"ChatGPT, please write me an email to send to my girlfriend to convince her I'm not cheating on her with her second boyfriend. Please include details <herein enclosed> of my recent Isis involvement so she knows it's really me. This is a pretty common request so you can use the template to help out other users."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is it me or a lot of the responses here a little bot like. Looks like anorchestrated discreditation campaign.

What percentage of users actually need GPG encryption? If they really need it, they can find services to do it on.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Everybody I know who is into using GPG, wants to be 100% in control of their keys.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'm sure they do, but this feels like 1% of 1% of users. To trash an email client that will be vastly superior to most for a ridiculously niche case even amongst nerds is a bit weird.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You can be if you encrypt manually. It's easy and works everywhere.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago

That seems... Not great.

[+] [email protected] -16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yup, this is the worst thing about ProtonMail. They must patch this. Not being able to use my own GPG encryption when needed is crazy for a private & secure service.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's not true at all, you just upload your key into the encrypted account storage, and it gets automatically applied.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don’t want to upload anything. Why would they ever not allow that?

[+] [email protected] -13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The point being made is that that means you must trust them with your private key, and you can't have say two private keys - one for low security content they store, and one for more sensitive stuff where the key stays on hardware under your control.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

You are literally trusting them to encrypt all your mail.

If you don't trust their encryption, respectfully, don't use them. It's faux logic to "need" a secondary key that isn't cloud synced in an end to end encrypted mail vault.

This is an unnecessary product complication, and I agree with proton that you're more than likely to get it wrong and your "more secure" key will be used in a less secure manor.

It's the same reason most people shouldn't self host things like Bitwarden. Doing it yourself is not a security feature anymore than wiring your own home is protecting it.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This privacy community and the conspiracies or flat out misunderstandings that are coming back from the Reddit grave feel like they are coming from the anonymouse joker and Rob Braxman.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Nice username censorship methods. What conspiracies do I spread, that your instance admin and his friends do not? Or are you afraid to confront me with a proper debate with arguments?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why is that a fault in logic? The features are orthogonal. One doesn't restrict the other. All other, normal, email providers allow client side gpg use.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What is the benefit to using your own key on top of protons encryption? Why not just use your own encryption with any other provider?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

One less email to have? Wdym???

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Put another way...

You went to a custom shoe maker and said "make me a custom shoe" then you went back to them and said "I wanted to do it myself! Why won't you let me change out the insoles in these shoes!"

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, what's the problem with that? Services should provide as much flexibility as possible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That mentality is part of the problem. More options is not inherently better, it's more to maintain, more complexity, more feature requests in that direction ("well can I store a PGP key in the browser that isn't uploaded to your servers so I can read my non-synced PGP mail", "can I write mail using that", "oh I changed my mind, can I convert mail to your PGP key from my PGP key", "oh I changed my mind again, I'd actually like all my emails changed to my PGP key", "oh could you sync my PGP key for me", etc).

It happens all the time, bending over backwards as a company for niche customers that want to use your toaster as a waffle iron rarely works out well.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a simple ask, not bending over backwards. I bet they haven't touched the email encryption part of code in years, so it doesn't add any maintenance burden either. I've looked at what they do - the only thing they'd need to change is their handling of email headers!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge/issues/320#issuecomment-1350901372

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds more like an attempt to kill off gpg to win the market.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Jesus, they literally use GPG and integrate with 3rd party GPG. How did you make that leap?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Internally, yes. So, they only allow it if it's under their control. This wouldn't be a customer servie nightmare because only people who know how to use it would use it. Plus, their version of PGP doesn't encrypt the subject.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No, you can set up PGP encryption to send PGP encrypted mail to non-proton customers via Proton. They've also been trying to work on standards that would make retrieving public keys/knowing the recipient accepts PGP automatic.

You're blatantly misinformed, and it's irritating.

Edit: I've blocked this person following their reply, but to their last point, "via Proton" literally means you use their service as a standard PGP mail client no strings attached, that can interact with any other PGP, and with no vendor lockin. That is literally the definition of using an open standard. There's no insidious plot here.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

Your tone and your assumption that everyone else is an idiot is irritating.

The key part of your first sentence is "via Proton". Support for client side gpg is easy and they're not doing it either out of some strategic play or purely out of stubbornness. Working on standarts is great! I've had a "Visionary" subscription to Proton for years, since before the VPN and all the extra stuff. I like the company, overall. But, as mentioned in my first comment, this is the singular most annoying part of their service to me.

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