[Assist] Protonmail

[Brett Gilio]

Drew writes:

> Have FSF or Parabola formed an opinion about this web mail 
> service?  It's encryption is somewhat important to me because of 
> some part time confidential consulting work that I do and it 
> does purport to be open source and appears to be stable.
>
> https://protonmail.com/

The FSF considers protonmail to be "under review"
https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems

Proton mail is purported to be licensed under the FSF-approved MIT
license. However, there does seem to be some use of non-free 
Javascript.
I can not comment on whether this non-free Javascript is limiting, 
as I
do not know the details of whether they allow signups or their 
webclient
without it, or what their stance is on POP3/IMAP for desktop 
clients
/if/ their webmail does in fact require non-free Javascript.

(That being said, be careful with extensions like LibreJS or 
NoScript,
which while they do block selected Javascript there are some 
websites
that offer Javascript-disabled rendering if your browser tells it 
that
it does not support Javascript. (see about:config in IceCat, 
IceWeasel,
Firefox, etc.)

As far as their mobile applications are concerned, they are 
proprietary
though I do not know if those are written by third-parties who use 
a
protonmail API or if they are official.

Lastly, make sure to review Protonmails terms of service on data
collection. I am, again, not claiming any knowledge here but just 
want
to make sure you are thorough when choosing your service.

>
> I currently use Zoho mail which does a very nice job of email 
> and
> calendaring for my needs, and it does offer private branding 
> but, of
> course: (a) its security is uncertain; (b)  it is entirely
> proprietary; and (c)  Zoho is fully in the business of SaaS with 
> its
> suite of other apps aimed at small business and sole proprietors
> (which I don't use).

Reject Zoho. IIRC they have a large contract with Yahoo! for some 
of
their utilities, services, and possibly data storage. I could be
misspeaking here, so fact check me. I do most of my email work 
while
offline, so I am not checking this as I go.

---

I use https://posteo.de/ for my email. They do not offer much 
storage
space for mail, but it is more than enough if you aren't 
delivering
attachments all the time. And it is libre, but not gratis.

Finally, join us on IRC sometime. Freenode #parabola

-- 
Brett M. Gilio
Free Software Foundation, Member
https://parabola.nu | https://emacs.org