I've been using Proton Mail and VPN for a while now, and I'm just wondering how everyone else feels about them. I have this kind of inherent alight distrust of them just because they seem like they offer a lot for free and kind of have a Big Tech vibe about them, but there's nothing for me to really substantiate that distrust with, its mostly just a feeling. That being said, I do use their services as mentioned and they work pretty well, even on the free teir. So aside from that one instance where they gave that guy's info to the feds, is there any reason not to trust them with my data?
I agree with you. Email is flawed and not appropriate for modern communication.
If you want the messages to be written in letter-like format, then you can write them that way. No need to make it chatty if you don't want to communicate that way.
Email shares far too much metadata and should be used just for account-updates, account-control (password reset, MFA, and so on), etc.
Otherwise I just push everyone to Signal, since it's normie-friendly and already using quantum-safe encryption.
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To the OP's question: yes, I trust Proton. They can't access my data if they wanted to. They're a lot better than competing companies.
Check out some of the steps they've been taking to improve OpenPGP and go down to "Upcoming improvements" to see their future plans: https://proton.me/blog/openpgp-crypto-refresh
And, remember, they are more than just an email company: https://proton.me/blog
https://piped.video/watch?v=iH626CXyNtE
Numbers 2 and 3 act like these are things that you can easily just stop