Matt Faulkner

Professional Goober

My ProtonMail Review

Over the last year, I have seen major improvements to the Proton platform. The 2022 UI-reskin was a welcome change that really modernized the platform. The mobile apps have been constantly improved. Not only performance but quality of life features as well. I cannot forget to mention hardware security key support that was implemented. ProtonMail is a solid platform I am trusting into the future for my email communications.

Interlude

I had first heard of ProtonMail from a co-worker when I was working at a Data Center. At the time I was not ready to de-Google-Fi my life. Now I am. You see, I take my online security and privacy rather seriously. I’m not so much private as I just hate that my personal and identifyable data gets sold and passed around with no regulation. Those ads inside your GMail are not random!!

At this point in my life, all my communications with my Wife is already exclusively on Signal. Signal allows end-to-end encryption for private communications between two devices. Its not decentralized but is a non-profit so it has its drawbacks as you would expect. However during my utilization of the platform I have not experienced anything worse than latency sending messages during peak hours.

Anyways, Intimate conversation don’t need to be shared with your Cellular Provider, their banking partners, and then all the random businesses with their fingers in the cookie jar. All trying to locate you, what you are saying, thinking, and feeling. Just to leverage that data to sell you something.

1-Year of the Ecosystem

I used the Free Tier for a week or so before I decided I would upgrade. My choice to upgrade was driven by the fact I had heard good things about their VPN services but it was billed seperately. Upgrading my plan enabled me to use the entire platform under one monthly payment. While writing this, I have been paying for Proton Unlimited for a year in January 2023. 2-Year Prepaid Plan purchased in October 2023.

Over the last year, I have become a heavy user of the Proton ecosystem. The only service I did not investigate is SimpleLogin.

ProtonMail has become my daily email platform of choice. I love being able to leverage multiple domains and various different alias for the exact same account. Internal ProtonMail to ProtonMail communications are entirely E2E encrypted and not stored on servers inside the US. This is a huge privacy bump. On top of the fact the platform does support generating PGP keys for external encryption as well!

I use the VPN service almost daily to seed my favorite Linux distributions. I love the Secure Core feature. Passing traffic first through Iceland or Switzerland before your final destination server. Not to mention the overall volume of P2P-allowed servers all over the world is awesome.

ProtonDrive has been stable and but at this time is my least used feature. I’ve primarily only been using it to store small things I want backed up somewhere that is not on my personal NAS or my public-read only S3 buckets. Either way, it has worked as expected this whole time. Granted, not much time has been spent inside it. :)

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