- All user data is protected by the Swiss Federal Data Protection Act (DPA) and the Swiss Federal Data Protection Ordinance (DPO) which offers some of the strongest privacy protection in the world for both individuals and entities. Only a court order from the Cantonal Court of Geneva or the Swiss Federal Supreme Court can compel us to release the extremely limited user information we have.
ProtonMail's segregated authentication and decryption system means logging into a ProtonMail account that requires two passwords. The first password is used to authenticate the user and retrieve the correct account. After that, encrypted data is sent to the user. The second password is a decryption password which is never sent to us. It is used to decrypt the user’s data in the browser so we never have access to the decrypted data, or the decryption password. For this reason, we are also unable to do password recovery. If you forget your decryption password, we cannot recover your data.
Messages are stored on ProtonMail servers in encrypted format. They are also transmitted in encrypted format between our server and users’ browsers. Messages between ProtonMail users are transmitted in encrypted form completely within our secured server network. Because they never leave our secured environment, there is no possibility to intercept the encrypted messages enroute.
Unlike competing services, we do not log user activity. We do not save any metadata such as the IPs used to connect to accounts, or the times certain accounts are accessed. We utilize Google Analytics on only our homepage, but we have no ability to match that data with specific user accounts.
We support sending encrypted communication to non-ProtonMail users via symmetric encryption. When you send an encrypted message to a non-ProtonMail user, they receive a link which loads the encrypted message onto their browser which they can decrypt using a decryption passphrase that you have shared with them. You can also send unencrypted messages to Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and others, just like regular email.
Do you have any experience with ProtonMail?
I received an encrypted email from mk and after following the link to proton mail received the following correspondence from him: So, needless to say, I don't find it all that compelling.steve's mom
Yes, not extensively, but from what I have seen, I am impressed. The UI is similar to gmail, if not a bit cleaner. I'll likely start using it more and more and see how it works out. It would be great if it could replace gmail for me. I sent thenewgreen an important encrypted email with it.