I wish they would go into more detail why this specific case could not be legally challenged. Their response sounds good otherwise (especially also that they recommend Tor for such cases), but this deliberate omission makes me think that the case was maybe not so clear cut after all.

The CEO of ProtonMail previously: https://threatpost.com/protonvpn-ceo-blasts-apple-myanmar/165022, and https://protonmail.com/blog/protesters-free-speech is pretty hypocritical now, but you can spot a pattern, that he only opposes the systems and governments the West opposes too. In that way, I consider him to be nothing more, than the willing tool of propaganda, for his own enrichement.

Just in case, perhaps one can get away with dynamic DNS sort of pseudo domain, not a full domain, so that you can access services you host at home, without having to know the IP. At any rate, whether pseudo DDNS or full DNS, the IP is fully recognizable.

The advantage of a VPS might be some protection against home blackouts and internet lost every now and then, depending where you live. However, self hosting poses several issues. Isolating your network (firewalls plus kernel hardening), hardening the servers,protect against common attacks such as denial of services, as well as infiltrating the services. All than not to mention dealing with spam and much more.

However, I'm tending towards the idea the we have to self host, now a days. Trusting providers is not wise. Granted email is not secure, neither private, however the same applies to other services. FB is even looking at ways to extract information from whatsapp without decrypting messages... Signal leaks quite some information about its users, and though the advertise themselves about not able to decrypt messages, they can and probably do share all metadata they grab.

I'd really like distributed mechanisms, to take over, and become mainstream, not just decentralized, because then there are no servers to depend upon, and the information is just shared among those whom the information was generated for, no trusting in servers, not even your own.

Email has not been designed with security in mind. Even if the content is encrypted, email still leaks a lot of metadata, including:

• To, From, Cc, Date and Subject.

Using PGP is not helping since it is a phased out - and obsolete - technology which has a lot of problems:

• The PGP Problem

• More PGP Problems

• Whonix article about PGP

If you need secure communication a good solution is E2EE which is enabled by default in signal and in element. Ideally, you should use e-mail to receive newsletter, sign in to sites and nothing more.

That being said, the whole situation about ProtonMail is quite overblown. As detailed in their transparency report, and privacy policy they MUST provide account's information like the IP address if the Swiss criminal investigation requires them. By default, they don't log the IP of the users.

Now, if this is a real concern for you, then you should not using their service. Otherwise, go for it. ProtonMail is still a valid choice.

Edit: However, it's important to understand that every time you visit a website, you automatically send a set of features to it , including your IP address. It's just how internet works. The whole "no log policy" is not something you can verify. You have to fully and blindly trust the provider whether it is located in a 5 Eyes country or in Iceland.

Edit: self hosting a email server it's actually really, really difficult. It's not something that a unskilled person could do.

"Private" and "Anonymous" are different things.

You can protect privacy with encryption, and I believe ProtonMail does work for that, but trying to protect anonymity is an entirely different beast. I'm not convienced it's possible at all in any way that's reliable (not just email but also even simple web browsing) unless there's a change in how routing works in the internet, or a new layer is developed (like I2P, but even that's not really a warranty).

If you selfhost the email on your own hardware, then the IP will be apparent to anyone. If you selfhost it on somebody else's hardware, they can be legally compelled to log your IP as happened here with proton. But if you aren't committing any crimes, selfhosting either way is probably more private than proton, since you are more confident in what software is running, while with proton you have to trust that the frontend being served is actually the e2e encrypted one

I personally use migadu. Don't know about how private it is but I is cheap and allows for loads of addresses and domains.

Have you considered disroot mail? It’s what I use and it’s awesome

~~Even if their were, proton company would have been legally required to trace their connection through proton VPN. Using tor would have been the better move.~~

EDIT: apparently swiss laws exempt VPNs from these sorts of legal issues.

I expect far better quality than Reddit here.

Yes, but we need people like you to provide that content. In short, don't expect other people to be that change; that change starts with you. Thanks for the resources and level-headed opinion. People in general who use any service provider for "privacy reasons" should only do so to keep the issuing company from scanning their messages and selling data about you. Email itself, regardless of how it's set up, will fail you if you're thinking it will keep you hidden.

This is not a question of ProtonMail vs Gmail.

What do you mean by this?
Presumably for a lot of people that is going to be the main, perhaps only, question.

Ey, thanks for the comment. Really good one. Really useful resource