Address Verification and Full PGP Support
I spoke on Mastodon recently about Protonmail - it&#x27;s a scam and I cannot recommend it to anyone. They own your email, they don&#x27;t support open protocols including SMTP and IMAP and the only way to export your emails is through a proprietary end-user application. They excuse this nonsense by saying that it&#x27;s necessary for encryption, which is blatantly false. Their security is also based on trusting ProtonMail, since they could easily siphon off plaintext at the SMTP level or secretly modify their JavaScript to exfiltrate your private keys from the web browser. Genuinely secure systems do not require you to trust their operators.<p>&gt;PGP, because it is built on top of email, is therefore also a federated encryption system. Unlike other encrypted communications systems, such as Signal or Telegram, PGP doesn’t belong to anybody, there is no single central server, and you aren’t forced to use one service over another. We believe encrypted communications should be open and not a walled garden. ProtonMail is now interoperable with practically ANY other past, present, or future email system that supports the OpenPGP standard, and our implementation of this standard is also itself open source.<p>This is rich. Why don&#x27;t you start with the far more fundamental and important standards of SMTP and IMAP, Protonmail? Why don&#x27;t you open source your desktop &amp; mobile applications or your bridge? What a joke.