A very similar quote is also attributed to Ivanka Trump
That’s why I’m thinking about it and haven’t made a decision yet, but even so: why did they scale inorganically so fast to the point they cannot maintain a good control environment?
What happened - happened, what does the good ending look like from here? The CEO stepping down or being removed due to external pressure? All the ‘rebels’ getting fired and the CEO cleaning up?
I honestly just wanted an email provider to do my emails, only reason I upgraded to Unlimited was to use more custom domains (3 in Proton and am forced to use 6 in SimpleLogin). I even contemplated upgrading to Visionary to support the company and use more custom domains and aliases, but couldn’t convince my family to make a switch 
I got roped into using Pass and Drive because it was there, but oversaw along the way that the Email offering is not as good as other options out there and they’re focusing on the wrong stuff that no one cares about like Wallet. This pressure from the memos to innovate confirms that.
The CEO is the main shareholder, so I don’t see him going anywhere. Most Proton users will also not be aware of this or care.
I think proton email is the best overall, but there’s other good options like Tuta. I have a thundermail beta account and may stay with them if they add PGP support and a lower price tier, otherwise I’ll go to Tuta who have stronger encryption than Proton and a good PWA.
And yeah, mailbox.org and posteo.de stay narrowly focused on email, are cheaper, and lack controversies, so they seem like a good choice. The security and usability will be a downgrade from Proton and Tuta though.
Pass can be replaced by vaultwarden, keepass, or bitwarden easily. Drive I only use for sharing documents and photos. For backups, it’s not too hard to set up a home system. Proton docs is the one I can’t see giving up.
We recommend tools based on being the best offering on privacy. I do not see how this would in anyway impact that right now.
Most code contain AI generated contributions at this point including all the major operating systems and programming languages.
We need to deal with the new reality find new ways to keep things secure, not swim against the stream. It won’t be a good strategy.
While I also not not like the way that Andy Yen seems to get across to his staff, this is internal politics of the company that as far as I can tell are not at impact to the quality of products in such way it is worth this discussion. I feel like we are discussing drama here to be honest, aside from how bad the communication of Proton’s CEO here was.
In fact I personally think it is a positive thing that Proton works with AI to defend against the new threats that are also caused by AI. I don’t like how AI has disrupted the world, but we have to live with it. AI doesn’t change any of the good and bad practices in software engineering, but it does massively increase timelines in both defense and offensive area. Knowing how to work with and against it, is important for the companies future existanceand your privacy.
Proton Lumo (with apertus) at the very least is one of the more promising AI offerings that is not from the USA.
I never fully got it when people keep saying a service should add pgp support. If user wants pgp, they generates keys, publishes them, and that’s it, pgp is supported. That works for Tuta, Thundermail, anything else. Thunderbird supports PGP natively, and for Tuta Mailvelope works as well.
It doesn’t cover the case where incoming mails are not encrypted, but that’s another story: tuta, posteo have better encryption anyway for such cases, idk about thundermail
Stalwart allows the user to upload their key and then all incoming mails or stored mails are automatically encrypted in a way the admin can’t access. They just need to add a UI for users to upload their key to the stalwart server.
Trust is also a factor, and when a company that is vocally anti-censorship in their marketing materials - applies censorship so liberally to their perceived benefit (as they have been systematically doing on the ProtonMail subreddit they control today) - it erodes that trust.
Between Proton’s (future?) enshifitication, Tuta’s awkward UX and Mailbox’s legacy issues (anti-spoofing measures, TOTP implementation) - the bar for email is so low that maybe other players need to be added to the recommendations that are lacking in other ways.
Not sure if I’d call whats currently going on censorship. That Proton snark subreddit showed up on my “Home” page (gee, thanks for that, Reddit), and even they were getting irritated by the endless flood of “I’m leaving” posts in their own sub lol. I can only imagine the sheer number of repetitive, low effort threads the moderators of the official subreddit have been dealing with the past few days.
Please think about how we use the word “censorship.” I can’t say “I want to see my photo on the main page of the Proton website, and if I don’t see it tomorrow, Proton supports censorship.”
It’s their community, with their mods and policy. And on Reddit there’s another community about Proton products, without any Proton mods.
I mean, you can trust anyone (I personally trust only @Linus_Sex_Tips), but you can’t put political labels on everything you don’t like.
Sigh. Man, you have no idea how often I see someone shout “censorship” when posts are delegated to a single thread.
It’s literally a thing forums have been doing since the beginning. Hell, this forum does it. It’s literally rule 2 and on the protonmail subreddit. "2 Avoid duplicate posts"
Also, don’t forget this is reddit. With reddit mods. You know, like this guy. No one pays reddit mods. They’re in it for the game!
Is there stuff to criticize? Totally! But don’t just forgot how the internet works because you want to get mad.
It’s worth noting while the comments weren’t exactly the most tactfully put, they were made within a closed environment to employees only as opposed to public through a corporate PR filter.
We also don’t have anything more than the screenshots, and maybe there is other information that is important to the story. For example we don’t have access to performance data on employees, or how much they get paid.
Maybe he’s annoyed because he can tell some employees are actually slacking off and not doing enough work for what they’re being paid? If that was true we wouldn’t know.
I think it’s also important to know that thoughtful use of AI, isn’t a bad thing, and it’s not something that is going away. Humans do make mistakes, and get lazy as well. The latter is particularly obvious if you’ve ever had to review unit tests for example.
Do you think Mozilla is too far gone for Thundermail to be included in the future?
Thundermail is based on Stalwart, there’s no particular encryption on it. I don’t see why would this be recommended at all. I’d rather self-host at this point.
How do you get over the issues regarding your emails getting bounced by the big players?
Ah. I see now that they have E2EE for their Send product, but not Mail.
Currently it’s on the thundermail roadmap, but is a low priority with no stated plans about when it will be implemented:
It says 2026 roadmap, but obviously we are approaching the end of 2026. We don’t know when they will get around to it. I can find no evidence they’ve started working on it or even that they have concrete plans about how it will work.