ProtonMail Now Supports Bitcoin Payments (opens in new tab)

It looks like ProtonMail released new account management features just a few weeks ago, including the capability for "organization admins to access the emails of other organization users" while still preserving end-to-end encryption.

Source: https://protonmail.com/blog/encrypted-email-for-organization...

I've been with them for over a year now as well and not a single issue. The interface is a bit cumbersome in some ways, it's a customized OpenXchange, so some mailbox.org-specific settings are done outside of the rest of the more general OpenXchange settings.

What you get with mailbox.org that you don't get with ProtonMail:

  * IMAP and SMTP
  * Support for hardware 2FA dongles like Yubikey
  * Ability to use your own GPG keys
  * Very capable mail filter config tool
  * Calendaring and contacts (with nice URLs so it's easy to use on Android via DAVdroid instead of Google's stuff)
  * File storage
  * Web-based spreadsheet, word processor and presentation tool

Their jurisdiction is Germany so you get whatever is left of EU privacy laws plus the Germany-specific ones.

Their service may be good enough but they are hardly investing enough into their product at the moment. mailbox.org is also not a core product of theirs. Just read through the forums (mostly in German); there are basic features/aspects missing you'd expect with a paid service nowadays like automated DKIM next to bug fixes needed around the web interface, which also can't compare to Fastmail's or Google's mail UI in terms of efficiency and usefulness – it's clunky: consequences of being fully dependent on foreign upstreams, I guess. Plus there's plenty of downtime. And that's for prices similar to Fastmail and GSuite when looking at similarly featured tiers (GSuite Basic – Fastmail professional – mailbox.org Mail XXL plan).

Why did you move out from fastmail? They are very clear about their privacy policy.

(Also who runs privacytools.io? Is he/she reputable?)

Why did you switch away from Fastmail? I'm there.

What made you switch to mailbox.org? Curious as am a fastmail user.

Their straightforwardness is nice, but I wonder how sustainable the business model is - every paid account has some message send/receive limits but there is no cap on storage. [1] They also say they've been profitable (on the same page), but I'm a bit wary of anything that says "unlimited". Nevertheless, thanks for pointing to this one. It looks very attractive for those who need to use multiple addresses/aliases/domains.

[1]: https://www.migadu.com/en/benefits.html#anchor_storage

Oh wow this is perfect, I've been wanting an email service that is priced exactly like this forever. Thank you so much for posting it!

I have a lot of email/domain combinations and most places charge per domain which makes it super expensive super quick.

How is their catchall support?

Last I checked into the status, they only planned to support it for business accounts and limited sending to only a few aliases.

> blacklists, and inquisition tactics from some of upper management

the memo is just a reference to an episode. i.e. "the memo ordeal"

'ideological echo chamber'

*perfect use of the feel word.

What makes you think ProtonMail employees couldn't do the same? Not a critique of PM (I'm a paying user myself), but this is not a reason to switch.

My only complaint with cloudron is that the auto-update mechanism requires a subscription. You can manually upgrade, but it's awkward and I broke it more than once while trying.

I expect that's not the point he was trying to make. I believe he/she was stating their surprise that bitcoin was not a payment option back then. "Seriously."

As amazing as it may sound to you, much of population of the world doesn't have a CC. And not everyone trusts or likes to support Paypal.

There's also no way to verify that a server is really running the same code that was open-sourced.

This is disingenuous. Bitcoin is very anti-anonymous. Tor is rather anonymous. Saying that perfect anonymity does not exist because there's always some bits leaking to an omniscient entity is not helpful.

ProtonMail should support Monero. For now, I pay using a group of Monero wallets I churn every few hours and xmr.to. I suppose Bitcoin is the least common denominator in that sense.

>We need to move beyond the obsession with anonymity and refocus the goal as being privacy.

You mean "we" == a dozen of first world countries? There is strong demand for anonymity all over the world.

No this is the incorrect answer. Mixers congest the network and cause many unneeded fees and they are NOT future proof and do NOT deliver suddenly-fungible bitcoins at the other end.

Use Monero, not ZCash, not DASH with a special type of transaction, use MONERO with genuine ring confidential transactions.

RingCT - https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0005.pdf

Monero vs ZCash vs Mixers - https://moneroforcash.com/monero-vs-dash-vs-zcash-vs-bitcoin...

In practice? The odds are pretty likely. Most people have poor opsec, and you can uniquely identify anyone with fewer than 33 bits of data.

I've used shapeshift for this for years.

Every time I get a bitcoin invoice, I shapeshift some Monero

I don't get why anyone would ever want a snapshot of their finances ever.

+1 Monero does not have the problems Bitcoin has regarding privacy and anonymity. I also would much rather see it supported than Bitcoin.

If you want to mask your identity wouldn't you be better off buying Visa gift cards with cash at a major store and then using them to purchase services online?

Pretty sure, it leaves a trail.

Protonmail fan and user here. Guys, honestly there are better ways to respond to customers and potential customers, without the patronizing tone. That can't possibly help.

This is a great example of how not to interact with customers.

Telling a customer who's been waiting on a feature for over a year to relax is just insulting.

I picked Fastmail due to their excellent support reputation, you all could learn from them!

And now I'm closing my account. Not the way to respond to a valid customer concern. Good to know this is how you treat customers on a premium service. I'll share it with other customers so they know.

I was a visionary paid member when that option became available, and I used the service heavily for a year (until the performance, particularly search and email-list-paging became unreasonably slow... as in multi-second delays).

While performance was going down, I noticed new features being announced. However, one key feature (exporting emails in bulk) was never done. I can assure you that is not rocket science, or rather is not a technical challenge that the brilliant minds who started PM could not overcome.

As for careers, I even made an effort to contact them. Whether I was up to par or not, I suspect my resume and two decades of experience were worthy of a reply, particularly given the quality of bug reporting I had provided during my use.

So honestly, the takeaway feeling was that the company was not well run or organized, which ultimately brings long-term reliability into question. And long-term reliability is very important to anyone doing real work and real business.

Maybe they should also be hiring some sort of customer interaction expert as well.

You're charging people for a service, you're in no position to treat anybody like that.

Translation: please don't be a dumbass.

Fastmail is also terribly expensive if someone wants multiple mailboxes (with separate user credentials) rather than aliases to a single mailbox. With what would cost me several hundred dollars on Fastmail, I can have that and more on Mailbox.org and Posteo.de (the latter without custom domain support).

The disappointment you've felt here is the same I felt with Fastmail. So I decided to move to Posteo instead and save money.

Care to elaborate?

I don't know a ton about Zcash or Monero, I only know that Zcash advertises and actually produces truly anonymous transactions (that the founders can unmask, or so I have read).

Is Monero anonymous as well? For every transaction? Or only specific ones (like Zcash).

The reason it will save them money is because there are no "chargebacks" or reverts with bitcoin.

You get $10 worth of bitcoin in your account and it's confirmed, you have $10 of bitcoin, and nobody can take it back.

That, plus the lack of a 3% fee (although there might be one for their bitcoin processor) means a good amount of savings for some.

Nobody does. And this is the problem with having no inflation. Every economy needs a slight inflation, otherwise people stop consuming, instead save all their money and it gets worse => deflation.

Bitcoin equals gold, nobody uses Bitcoin to consume anything. I don't know which human behavior you refer to.

Two reasons:

1) Because I need to buy things with dollars to a) not starve, freeze, etc. b) not get thrown in jail for tax evasion

and

2) because I'm not comfortable with that level of investment risk, and prefer a more diversified approach of mutual funds, bonds, and real estate.