Tell HN: Protonmail is no longer private, sharing user info with US authorities

Also parent post about "requiring a phone number" or "giving them another email" is incorrect, you can choose to supply one if you want.

Not everyone on the internet has a requirement on being anonymous, so it makes perfect sense.

On a side note, you can fill out a captcha and remain anonymous, also they also have a v3 .onion unlike a lot of providers: https://protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleegetolb73fuirgj7r4o4vfu7...

If we don't protect that foundation, only the people whose supporters are doing the threatening will eventually hold public office.

Even less than that, apparently.

>On the basis of data from ProtonMail, which was sent to the USA by way of legal assistance, it emerged that the defendant had used several user accounts at ProtonMail.

This outright goes out off it's way to avoid saying that the Swiss lawfully requested data from ProtonMail under Swiss law and passed it along to US law enforcement, most likely as a result of a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty [1]. The sentence attempts to make it sound like ProtonMail directly supplied the USA with data.

>According to the corresponding affidavit, this email service was ProtonMail. The relevant emails end accordingly with "Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email".

This makes it sound like ProtonMail passed along the emails. ProtonMail themselves say they did not. Instead the emails were obtained from other email services that had received the emails.

You yourself write

>ProtonMail cooperates with authorities by putting probes on specific accounts

The term "putting probes" would suggest to me they installed some kind of additional surveillance for specific accounts. There is nothing to suggest ProtonMail put/puts "probes" on users. All they did, they say, was query their existing customer database, and all they really did deliver to the US (or rather the Swiss, who then passed it on to the US) was "This account was created on this date", but nothing else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_legal_assistance_treaty

IMHO the best is to use a mail service with your domain and local / remote / something backups. You need to lose 2/3 to be really impacted.

It is extremely unrealistic to operate your own self-hosted emails. There are all kinds of problems with this direction.

One is that it is very difficult to even find an app to do this. Then you have to set it up, which is very difficult.

You have to always be updating your self-hosting, as it is a very much a security nightmare.

Then you have to worry about blacklisting. Companies like Google or Yahoo might blacklist your self-hosted mail server for various reasons, like you are not up do date or listed with trusted email provider associations, and a whole bunch of other things - so basically, you cannot send or receive emails from the most popular email systems, so good luck with that. And then you have to somehow try to get unblocked from them, and welcome to that nightmare, right? It could take weeks and you won't be getting emails.

Nobody should self-host unless they are crazy expert at it, and who even has the time to do that?'

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Here is what some people write about self-hosting:

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The key to reliable delivery from your server is to go through a relay like Mailgun. You can accept email directly, that's not blocked, but sending out needs to go through a relay. So your stack will look something like dovecot, postifx, and spamassassin, maybe raindrop for the UI." So right - need dovecot, postifx, spamassasin and raindrop. What a nosebleed to learn all that.

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Sender reputation and RBLs.

Summary: Large providers spend a lot of effort fighting spam, and that includes tracking where email comes from and blacklisting untrusted sources. They use a combination of publicly available blacklists (the RBLs) and also their own secret algorithmic sauce and assign you (where "you" == your MTA's IP address and also your domain) a reputation score. If your score is too low, your email gets rejected and your recipients will never see it. There is often a complex process to try to get your email un-blacklisted—it means arguing with individual RBL maintainers, or begging Microsoft to please let your email through.

Sender reputation is also affected by whether or not you're implementing a whole suite of other technologies in addition to SMTP—most importantly SPF and DKIM, and probably DMARC at this point as well.

tl;dr - if you're writing your own smtp implementation, you almost certainly won't be able to email anyone at a major email provider.

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The base protocol is simple, but the flexibility of configuration expected by real-world users is quite challenging and the scar tissue of dealing with broken or semi-broken clients and servers (e.g Microsoft Outlook) builds up over time. Virtual domains, rewriting rules, forwarding rules, see Postfix's wide variety of configuration options, lookup tables (and table backends) for just a small taste of the complexity.

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A good starting point is being able to receive mail. Running an SMTP server that listens to the internet but only relays mail for your specific domain is fairly easy, and should work out of the box. That means, if you own example.com, and set up the correct MX record, and listen on port 25, people can send you emails immediately. Actually, even without an MX record, if you just have a standard A record, that is enough. In a pinch, I've done it. Perhaps it has gotten harder in the last few years.

Tools like Docker and Ansible are great for setting things up quickly and reliably, but if you really want to understand, there are plenty of tutorials on setting up an MTA on Linux, or FreeBSD.

And, if you want a simple "dropbox", there are modules for php and nodejs that will run a simple SMTP server that you can hook into. It can be useful for embedded devices. A long time ago I worked on an interactive installation where anyone was able to interact with by simple sending an email. The server portion was about 10 lines, after including the server module:

It's also worth mentioning they no longer use recaptcha like that link infers. I signed up just then https://i.imgur.com/JcStn1t.png and I wasn't required to use a phone number or email address.

Second, even if the request were approved, under Swiss law, it is not permissible to break end-to-end encryption. Swiss law enforcement is not allowed to make such a request.

Third, all requests eventually have to be disclosed, although the disclosure may come from Swiss authorities. This also a requirement of Swiss law.

Fourth, if a request were somehow approved, as the origin is China, our legal team would also scrutinize it closely, and if found to be suspect, would also fight the request.