I think I know the answer, bit maybe I’m missing something
Since proton only sends and receives encrypted emails to other proton accounts, that means that when you get or send an email to someone else, they have to send / receive unencrypted and there is no way for us to verify what they are doing. Right?
Also if most accounts are google Microsoft, they still get 90% of my emails. By switching to proton I think I’ve gained nothing, while losing convenience , added another trust point, and having two different companies have my data instead of just one
Proton drive, calendar and VPN I think are fine
Sorry for the poor syntax. I’m at work working on email related things, and this topic kept distracting me. I might correct it later
i’m not trying to argue “weird non-existent edge cases”. all i’ve ever used email for is for formal communications wit govenrments, companies, special cases like my landlady. that is also true for everyone i know. i believe if this wasn’t a general thing, then people wouldn’t me using messenger apps, they would just b eusing email. but that is not what hapens. i don’t know your case, but for me using email is non optional. i can’t “just use signal”. i need an email for my government, i need an email because i need a github account, i need an email for any site i want to use, including lemmy. i just want to be able to do it privately. i’m just trying to determine if protonmail is actually private or just one big “trust me bro. we wont read you unencrypted messages as they enter or leave”
OK. Well, respectfully, I think it would be beneficial to find out more about how encryption, email servers, and encrypted messaging works. I think you’re quite confused about the details here, and just getting a sense of the parts will help you in the long run. People use email differently - I don’t use FB, so my main means of communication with family that is not Signal messages is email.
By “just use signal” I mean for sharing a password for a password protected email. Which you should only be sending to people you know already and can coordinate with. You’re not sending password protected emails to random people or the government because it’s not necessary for the reasons I explained earlier. If someone needs an encrypted message from ANYONE they will provide the method. Otherwise, they don’t want encrypted messages and can’t be trusted with data that should be encrypted.
Proton is secure, and I know because I had an old account I wanted to get access to and lost access to the recovery email, but had one on the same domain. I spent about a week doing back and forth emails with some guy who was trying to ask me to verify aspects of the account, which was my spam shield and dummy social media account and I hadn’t used it for about a year. All he could see, when pressed, was header info: sender/receiver, date, time, ip address, sending agent. All things that are needed to route the message. It ended up being me able to confirm IP address and sending agent and access (I sent an email to my recovery address from an IP in this range on this date, last logged in on on this date, etc.). It was a pain for both of us.
OK. Let’s leave this topic here, because we are talking about different things and have different concerns. It seems I know all I need to know about the topics you described, because I started this thread asking to check if there is something I’m missing, but none of the answers have mentioned anything that I didn’t know. Proton emails are encrypted at rest, and use LTS while sending and receiving. But none of this guarantees that they are not scanning / profiling me because they do have access to the plaintext emails while they enter and while they leave. I wasn’t looking for alternatives. I was just checking if it was actually worth the switch considering there are no privacy guarantees.