If you’ve seen or heard of Proton Mail in the news recently you might just be wondering what exactly they are all about. Well, I’ll tell you. Proton Mail is an NSA-proof end-to-end encrypted email service built by scientists from MIT & CERN. You can read an in-depth review here. Yes this is all quite geeky I realize, but what they are building is essential to maintaining private communications in this day and age. And the best part is they are focusing on simplicity and usability. No encryption knowledge necessary.
So anyways, a few days ago they launched an Indiegogo campaign raising $115K to expand their infrastructure to support the overwhelming response they’ve received. And in the time it took me to write this post they’ve hit $119K.
Of course, not everyone is jumping up and down, throwing money at them. One commenter on Indiegogo pointed out a reasonably significant usability issue when sending Proton emails to non-Proton accounts (grammatical errors aside):
So basically If I want to send an encrypted email to my colleagues, what I’m really sending is a link to a web page where they can access through a password. I’m sorry to say but that is not an email. A much more simple and fastest way is to use a P2P encrypted service like Bitmessage
It’s a valid argument, but at this point I don’t see how they could implement it any other way. They do give you the option of not encrypting a particular email, in which case it passes directly into the users inbox. But then why the hell would we use Proton Mail in the first place? Haha.
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