The encrypted mail storage adds no value for me because I pull all my mail from the server immediately anyway. It's just a big hassle to deal with that bridge. And when a mail comes in they have to handle it in plaintext (and also, the other party sees it which is 90% of the time microsoft or google or another bad actor). I just view email as a lost cause really.
The only thing I get from Proton is the VPN.
And of course the recent allegations that they hand over your metadata on >90% of requests. See https://x.com/DoingFedTime/status/2030108076531995016
Exclusively, or do they keep caches around? I am asking since everything is clear text in the webmail. I wonder if they handle the rare case of proton to proton (encrypted) mail differently from regular unencrypted mail. I assume they have to decrypt a master key stored on the server with your password, and then decrypt every encrypted email on the fly on the server, or they have to send the master key to the client side.
Now think that through when you have thousands of searchable e-mails, sorted arbitrarily. I won't say it is impossible, but I think that maintaining plain text indexes rather than encrypted ones are really tempting.
Mail is stored e2ee exculsively. The’ve been summoned to hand over mail many times, which they weren’t able to do. Quick search on Ecosia and find the articles.
They don’t have a master key or else the whole e2ee story is a fad, which it isn’t. The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Part of the password is used to decrypt the data.
Search is done client side. You have to download a big search index in order to have proper search. The iOS app doesn’t support downloading the index so search is limited there.
Please think and do some work before you reply.
You can store an encrypted master key (like Luks), download that key to the client and decrypt it there. Or you can have it in decrypted in server memory, but only during an interactive session with the user. But that quickly turns into a fad, as you pointed out, which was exactly my question.
> The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Please think and do some work before you reply.
I asked a simple question, so that at others could chime in about the exact details and limits. I don't understand why that was highly offensive to you, but I assume it is something like a Monday Mood.
As of today, there is no official Proton Drive client for Linux that I'm aware of. There is unofficial support via Rclone, but it is still beta and I try to avoid mounting via Rclone anyway. I recall that it wasn't a really convincing experience when I tried it with OneDrive.
Just fyi