Yes since version 1.0, it is quite good. I hope we can turn off these "AI" functionalities. I like my email chronology. I have my own filters to move emails etc... don't need or want an "AI" to do that for me.
We are in an hype fase. VC's pump money into it because it is the current hype, before this it was NFT's and crypto. The fase "AI" or a better name for it is LLM or GenAI will also pass. VC money will run out. There is no real business model yet that can support the enormous amounts of resources needed to train it and to run them.
Hardware is not fast enough yet.. it could be sustainable when it runs locally on my hardware. Till that time I see this as another hype we shouldn't pay a lot of attention to.
This and their AI thing they released a week orso ago, makes me considering another Email Provider. Not sure which one yet... They invested time, effort, and money in hype industries. No thanks. They could have used that time to make their core products (email, calendar, address book) better. My money went to the wrong things. :-(
I’m happy with Proton products personally but I see so many feature requests from users sitting for years on their core products. If anything I feel like the effort that goes into this instead could hurt Proton by branding them as “a crypto company”.
We most certainly are not a crypto company. We don't run a crypto exchange, didn't create a cryptocurrency, and don't speculate in crypto. We're an encryption company, but don't lump that in with crypto.
Care to explain how you ignored the results of your survey where most users wanted more email or calendar features and you decided to work on an AI assistant that more than 66% of your user base didn't ask for?
They clearly already had the features mostly done when they made the survey. I recall the questions being extremely leading to get people to say they would like to use a privacy first AI or whatever. After I took it I immediately told people it was clear they were about to announce some AI bloat.
One Bitcoin wallet among a suite of privacy offers doesn't mean they are turning into one and I disagree they are throwing most of their loyal users under the bus.
You ever heard of the word "enshittification"? I'm sure you have.
This is what they're on the road to. AI last week, crypto this week. Maybe NFT next week?
In all seriousness, this has the potential in killing their brand image as a viable alternative to Big Tech and considering there's not much email alternatives aside from self hosting (which is a nightmare in its own right), this is worrying.
The text of the blog post is interesting. Bitcoin does not offer privacy. But the post is written using bitcoin maximalist phrases, not just crypto in general.
I'm honestly glad I am not (no longer) seemingly the only one thinking this. When I read the reactions to Scribe, I was a bit surprised there wasn't much skepticism/concern about that.
While I applaud their transition to being a Non-Profit/Foundation, the "tech fad chasing" of the last weeks definitely concerns me about Proton, looking at the backlog of "common sense" additions and even the lack of proper Linux support.
While it will be fine for most users, I'm more leaning to skepticism regarding generative AI and (pushing) crypto by a corporation. The former being due to copyright abuse, with the latter being a weird thing to push for in the current age where usages of blockchain are met with skepticism instead of hope.
I'd recommend looking into Tuta (formerly known as Tutanota). They recently got interviewed by Techlore indicating they wanna release "Tuta Drive". Seems to become a proper replacement for Proton, if you don't care about VPNs, crypto wallets or Cloud password storage.
All in all, Proton's features can be replaced by other services. Mullvad's well known for their straight forward "gold standard" VPN. Crypto wallets can best be held locally. Password storage got Cloud (Bitwarden) or local (KeePass and its derivatives in clients) options. Only "hurting" missed feature is Proton Docs, which launched not too long ago and is also missing quite a few features. Self-hosting or getting a service to host NextCloud is an option, however, but that'll eat into costs.
Reminds me of Keybase before they were bought out. Shame too. Keybase was really good. I wish they had open sourced it when Zoom bought them out as a part of the buyout deal.
I had a big problem with them once I signed up and they shoved their ads down my inbox. Then they created a survey asking what their users would like to see in Proton, and while a majority voted for calendar and email features, they made the AI section biased: you either are interested in AI, never heard of it or won't use but are interested. They purposedly didn't include an option "heard of AI but won't use it" because they know most of their users don't like it.
And now they're launching an AI assistant. How ethical they are proving to be. The company that portrayed itself as privacy-first is showing its true face.
How would you "end to end encrypt" an email going from Super Secure Provider A to Outlook or Gmail? The encryption stops the millisecond it leaves Provider A's servers.
Correction: you can send links to a website where the recipient can see the text you wrote using a password.
Nothing about that is "email" anymore. The same method can be used to make "password protected SMS" for example. Just send a link to a website and a password. Encryption!
What we need is actual public key encryption/signing support on mail services, but that's not going to happen ever.
We also name all branches after our Jira tickets, and our merge commit into the main branch is always: `TICKET-XXX - TICKET SUMMARY`. When we close the ticket in Jira, we also link back to the merge commit.
The Merge commit also updates the ChangeLog with the `TICKET-XXX - TICKET SUMMARY`.
That makes it really easy to trace things, as you can:
- Look at the ChangeLog
- Do a `git log --first-parent`
- Look at a Jira Ticket and jump straight to the merge commit
We also have policies in that every commit to master must be a merge commit and associated with a Jira Ticket. Also, each branch is tied to one and only one Jira Ticket.
