Basically any company that you give money to is going to be led by arseholes. By definition. The only easy way is self hosting but that has its own difficulties. (And even then it’s still hosted by an arsehole)

Though, I learned my lesson and bought my own domain. So this pivot should be better.

Fuck it. Let's make an easy open source email host and all the corpse can wall us out and we'll just email each other. Wait this sounds familiar.

Yeah, it's taken me a similar time to migrate away from Gmail and I'm not keen to repeat the process. But if this is what Proton's code quality control is going to be like going forward - employees forced to push improperly-tested code because of their unhinged CEO - I'm going to have to go through the whole process again. Sigh.

I spent the day getting things set up to leave.

Pass went to KeePass, which was easier than I expected.

Drive is now replaced with Filen.io

Standard Notes is now Obsidian

Looking at AirVPN, but not ready to pull the trigger on that yet.

Still looking for a calendar. Thunderbird has one but it's not on mobile for some reason.

The big one is mail. I was the same as you migrating from gmail so I'm learning my lesson now. Set up Thundermail today and have 3 custom domains set up. Spent hours today swapping out account emails. It's rough, but I did it to myself. I knew going full Proton ecosystem was a bad idea, but at the time I just wanted out of Google. Take your time.

I canceled my renewal but I’be been putting off finding a replacement because what you said. It’s exhausting.

Same exact situation. In fact I'm not even fully done migrating away from Gmail although most of my stuff is on Proton now. sigh I guess I'm starting all over again soon.

If I'd only put off de-googling a bit longer before I saw the news I could have skipped this hop. Oh well...

I'm eyeballing Tuta. Anyone have other recommendations?

The only reasonably future proof solution is to get your own domain, and redirect emails sent to @yourdomain.com to your email provider.

Then you can freely change providers in the future but your email addresses stay the same. Doing that costs very little and doesn't require any self hosting, just buying a domain. Looks professional too.

$1/month for a custom domain. One last migration. And then moving platforms is much easier because you don't need to change the email on every service.

That said, I still hear you.

I think I'm going to start using my own domain, so I can change hosts if needed without having to change email addresses. This seems like it's going to be an issue we'll always need to be prepared to deal with.

I mean I believe you, but thoughts on this comment: reddit

Proton monitors employees' AI code generation"

This is also a distortion. Proton has a tool that labels which code is AI-generated and which is human-written, which is important for many reasons. It can't be used to evaluate how much AI somebody is using. The design document for the tool states this clearly. This document is available to all employees: r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I'm breaking my silence The security point

The list goes on and on. Same with the security point. I have access to that chat. Andy never said don't do pen testing. It's true, he used shitty language and he personally apologized to the whole company. However in that same security chat he also said something 404 omitted: "The baseline is, we must do this plus be faster at the same time" in reference to security testing. r/ProtonMail - I’m a Proton employee and I'm breaking my silence

He agreed with the additional pen testing, and it was even recently implemented at Proton. What he didn't agree to was it slowing down the pipeline. About hiring engineers

This quote “this is the last year that we hire engineers” is also out of context. At Proton, the engineering and product management roles are merging and we call this new discipline "Product Engineering". Proton also mostly hires product managers with engineering backgrounds. It means we stop hiring engineers who just code, and hire instead product engineers who also exercise product judgment that AI doesn’t have, not that we don’t hire engineers at all. I know this because I help with hiring for the whole company. One last thing

I want to put a few words out there that aren't about quotes or screenshots, but about my experience.

To be honest to you, we're all in a bit of a shock after reading the articles written, and some of the criticism hurts me because it described a company I don't recognize. Reading the comments on Reddit hurts me because so many of them do not reflect reality. Proton is not rushing into AI without concern for safety, it is actually being done very carefully.

If you're deciding whether to keep using Proton, I'd just ask that you make that decision after getting the full picture, and not solely on the quotes that have been intentionally taken out of context. Otherwise, you are only hurting the workers that you claim to want to protect.

Exact same situation with me. Going to start this weekend on self hosting email and then the transition process. I still have around 6 months left on my proton subscription, so enough time to move everything.

Coincidentally I was thinking about cancelling just for the financial benefit since I will be making significantly less money soon

Tuta is a good alternative. I am in the process of migrating there right now.

Yen's support for republicans wasn't poorly worded. He explicitly said they are for the little man while the democrats are for big business and praised one of trumps cabinet picks.

He's a piece of shit. Nothing about that was poorly worded.

Don't forget about Proton sponsoring Nazi YouTubers.

Ok, the first 2 instances are wildly out of context, don't know how much it is the case in the newest case.

The congratulations to Trump were for the appointment of Gail Slater, which he very much agreed to because of Slater's reputation as being "not good for big tech". (Slater did not last long, as expected)

And the "data transfer" to authorities was a legal requirement imposed by the courts of the country they are in (based on "terrorism" charges by the french authorities - for essentially squatting), with no actually doable legal recourse left (as it often is in "terrrorism" cases). No preexisting data was available. They had to wait for the activist to log in, to catch the IP address of the client connecting to the surveilled account in the live system.

Refusing to comply with lawful orders of the country you are seated in can absolutely wreck your shit, and you might even lose control over your infrastructure people depend on.

And had the activist used an VPN to connect to his mailbox, the story would have probably ended there, especially if the VPN had been Proton itself - the injunction was only for the Mailbox, and VPNs are pretty much untouchable regarding surveillance in Switzerland.