Summary
Proton Mail, known for its privacy-first email services, faced backlash after CEO Andy Yen praised the Republican Party and its antitrust stance.
The company initially posted and deleted a statement supporting Yen’s comments, later claiming an “internal miscommunication” and reiterating its political neutrality.
Critics question Proton’s impartiality, particularly as it cooperates with Swiss authorities on legal data requests.
Privacy advocates warn that political alignments could undermine trust, especially for Proton’s users—journalists and activists wary of government surveillance under administrations like Trump’s.
Aside from the political stuff, I’m also concerned about proton from a technological standpoint. You can’t use a standard mail client with proton, you have to use their own. So, if they wanted to, they could push out a single malicious update which would render all of the end-to-end encryption stuff pointless. You could argue that using Thunderbird + GPG + Gmail is more secure/private.
Part of the reason is that the protocol that’s uses for retrieving emails (IMAP) is pretty old and doesn’t support end-to-end encryption. JMAP is supposed to be a modern replacement, but it’s not widespread yet, and also intentionally doesn’t support E2EE.
E2EE is hard, for example searching has to be done client side rather than having a search index on the server side (since the server is not able to decrypt the data to index it). I haven’t tried Proton but I’m curious as to how they solve this… I guess they’d sync the entire mailbox and index it locally, like what (non-mobile) Thunderbird does.
I really question the value of E2EE for emails, though. Communication between servers (e.g. someone on Gmail sending an email to a Proton user) uses TLS but is not, and will likely never be, end-to-end encrypted. Emails you send to other providers are also not likely to be encrypted on the other provider’s end.