Create an email account without phone number verification
Create an email account without phone number verification
Here's how to create a free email account without phone number verification (with secure encryption, hide-my-email-aliases, and more) using Proton Mail.
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Proton is such a hassle and implements security in a completely illogical manner. I honestly can't believe that people are content with such mediocrity.
Can you give an example? This is the first criticism of Proton I've heard
They can't. I've seen similar critiques popup and I'm certain it's a shill trying to move people away from proton. Why? To what end? No clue on either front.
Proton is the shiznit. They answer to no one except their customers. They are self funded with lots of help from us. They never took any money from the investment firms that would try to control how they do things usually to the detriment of quality, security, etc.
You are right that Proton is currently self-funded by its paying customers, but to be accurate, they have actually taken VC money before.
That still doesn't negate what I said and I specifically worded it the way I did for a reason. There is a difference between taking funds from an incubator that runs as a non profit and taking money from the vulture investors who demand a large chunk of the company and therefore control for the funds they inject.
They answer to government orders quite frequently, so stop pretending that they are above the law first of all... all it takes is one change to their served JS mail client and voila now they have your private key too which is already saved server-side. God, some people want to be had.
Where did I say anything about the law? You clearly have an agenda and you can fuck right off with that.
I'm blocking you now because I don't have time nor do I think you would understand me or anyone else explaining this, even at a 1st grade level.
Go ahead but I'm sure I can explain in much more technical depth than you... there is a reason I'm guessing you can't even figure out how to use GnuPG so you just rely on some hosted solution to claim they are keeping you safe.
You use Chromium, don't act elitist
So you think GrapheneOS is insecure? It uses Chromium for their browser engine, which was picked because it provided more security than Firefox.
Find me a company that's going to deny a court order for $5 a month.
Proton promises privacy and security. Not collusion in whatever illegal shit you're doing.
TIL that being privacy conscious and security aware means your involved in collusion and illegal shit. Maybe you should tell that to Proton VPN users who primarily use their service to seed copyrighted torrents in countries where it is illegal. Oh, but you don't care about them... just some rando who hurt your fee fees for being honest.
BTW I never said they should deny court orders. I was responding to someone who claimed that they answer no one except their customers. I claimed that even if they answer a court order, then hijacking your account and private key shouldn't be as simple as serving modified JS to their users.
I'd be down to hear you out but you gotta first provide proof/evidence backing up that claim
What are some better options?
Have you considered self hosting?
/s
After reading the adventures of https://io.mwl.io/@mwl trying to roll his own mail server, I’ll probably avoid that option.
What did you read? Can you share a link?
His #ryoms hashtag on Mastdon covers it. He plans to publish a whole book about it at some point.
Thanks!
Utilizing a good mail client with GnuPG/PGP support.
it's been just fine for me for years.
The fuck you smoking
Yeah well, they're still bad. I remember the days they used to store the user's private key on their servers for some reason: https://web.archive.org/web/20190718043517/https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/how-is-the-private-key-stored/ and also: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1121.pdf
When using TOR or a VPN, they also force you to verify your account with SMS.
They're not bad, you're just misinformed at a fundamental level.
Proton Mail is like Bitwarden, it encrypts data client side and stores the encrypted blob server side, which is exactly what they're doing with your private key. Otherwise, you'd have to carry it around on a USB or do some other voodoo to be able to read your emails.
That paper is god awful bad. They're basically saying things like "it can't be secure because they rely on the client code to be delivered by TLS and you could have a MITM that results in different client code being sent!" and "proton allows you to set passwords that are weak, thereby not looking out for your best interest!
Their conclusion can be summarized as "Proton can't provide a secure web mail application, because nobody can." Their suggested remedy is also actually a thing now because there is a Proton Mail desktop application.
The whole thing is pretty ridiculous in any case because someone would have to have control over your DNS server, you'd have to go to a phishing instance of proton instead of the real one, you'd be logged out because the cookies wouldn't be decryptable by their server, so you'd then finally have to login handing over your password.
If you use Proton VPN (or some other trustworthy DNS) that situation can happen. For most people it's an extremely unlikely situation. It's not a Proton problem though, it's a web technology problem.
For most people this situation will never happen (but it would be nice if someone would solve the problem).
When using TOR or a VPN, they also force you to verify your account with SMS.
People are going to abuse services that allow anonymous signups... Proton does not claim to be an anonymous email service, merely a private email service.
You mean that they store your private key "encrypted" and that it is encrypted by using served JS to the user? Do you know how many users would actually be technically capable of detecting an obfuscated modified JS that they randomly send should they become a target?