I still think they’re a honeypot.
Proton Mail Now Also Lets You Hide Your Real Email Address
Proton Mail is one of the best alternatives to Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail out there, with end-to-end encryption, tracker blocking, and phishing protection among the features on offer. A free account gets you 1GB of storage and up to 150 messages per day.
The latest feature to be added to Proton Mail is the option to hide your email address: That's where you set up an email alias to provide when you buy something or sign up for a social media service, while keeping your actual email address private. It's something already available on other email clients (like Apple's), and you can get it set up in just a few minutes.
If you're on a paid Proton Mail plan, you can create as many email aliases as you like, while free account users get up to 10 of them.
I like to keep track of every e-mail alias I create, as it gives me a clue as to who has passed my mail address onto others who end up spamming me.
Note if you have your own e-mail domain name, you can often use a catch-all function which lets you create as many, and any, mail addresses you want to at no extra cost. An advantage of this method is, the addresses can follow you no matter what back-end mail provider you switch to in future.
See https://lifehacker.com/tech/how-to-set-up-email-aliases-proton-mail
#technology #spam #email
Discussion
I'm sure there are people who think whatever you use is a honeypot. What I never see is actual evidence.
Amazing how people can turn their laziness into a morality in their own minds. 😂
What's more amazing is when people make unsubstantiated claims and then gaslight others for calling it out.
Yes, always way too easy to just allege or speculate about something without any reason. I much prefer to go on actual reports that have been published. On some communities I manage I welcome opposing opinions, but they must either be stated as an opinion, or else they need some credible references to back them up and further the debate. Otherwise, the comments get removed. I'm always prepared to change my views if better / newer facts emerge, but it's really unfair to discredit someone else work without something concrete to back that up.
That's my base case until all the 'light KYC' goes away. Paying an LN invoice should be all the verification needed. Admitidly I have not tried in a while, but the last time I made a proton mail they need either an existing email or a phone number...
But why? As far as I know there is no evidence of that? I use my own PGP key in Proton anyway.
Maybe because of articles like this some have their doubts about the service.
That casts no doubt at all, and is exactly the same for any company around the world including Apple and others. If a legally binding court order is served on any company, they have to provide what they can provide.
The question is what they have, to provide e.g. in this case it was IP addresses, not the content of the mail. What most companies are trying to do, is to reduce what information they actually have.
What is way worse than this is legally binding acts like the US CLOUD Act where that extends into other countries, where it is done secretly, and especially where it is done without any due legal process (forget which company was still recently handing over private data at the mere request of police).
Still worse are companies like Facebook (from Cambridge Analytica) that are freely, or at profit, passing on user data, or having in their T&C for WhatsApp to freely pass all metadata upstream and out to advertisers.
ProtonMail could maybe do better to not log IP addresses (again it may depend on what their country's laws state) but they still sit at the top of the list of privacy respecting e-mail services.
I completely agree with you. In ProtonMail you also can set a separate password to encrypt the mailbox. I'm not sure if this is the equivalent of using a private PGP key. So you have the login and second layer for the mails. The law in Switzerland changed around two years ago but I don't know the details. I just remember that privacy advocates opposed it heavily but still went through.