At minimum

> Worth keeping in mind that his post was reviewed and vetted by Proton management

yeah as soon as i read "i'm breaking my silence" i immediately though "yeah sure bro, sure".

if this is vetted and approved by management it's been most likely edited or distorted.

and i say this without even have read the post (I don't need to).

chances are this post is, at best, corporate damage control.

EDIT: i'm reading the post. yep, it's corporate damage control.

> "this is the last year that we hire engineers”

and then:

> It means we stop hiring engineers who just code, and hire instead product engineers

classic nonsensical corporate upper-management bullshit.

Absolutely. And the bigger problem is that if you can't work for a dirty company, you can't work (replace work with whatever other activity). It's much more productive to take a "one dirty hand can wash another" perspective instead of this "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" mentality we see so much of.

> I cannot relate to being emotionally invested in my employer to the extent that “feeling the need to break my silence” crosses my mind.

It seems likely to me that this is also true for the Proton employees. (Though FWIW, I've had a few employers that I would absolutely proactively defend, but they are not surprisingly the same set of employers I don't think would ever need such a defense, and none of them were large companies).

I haven't been paying attention to any of this drama because I don't use Proton mail and thus don't care, but one of the screenshots on the linked reddit post that they seem to believe is exonerating the company has what appears to be the CEO of the company (I assume "Andy" is Andy Yen based on the name and profile picture) telling an employee to get on reddit with their personal account and "set the record straight".

After seeing that, I don't know how anyone is supposed to assume that anything any Proton employee says in public is anything other than PR spin originating directly from the CEO, so I don't know what kind of value any of us is supposed to get from reading any such testimony.

[flagged]

This is a PR-style "refutation" that uses a lot of words to make it seem like it has addressed some issue. I'll just quote one of the reddit comments that is also exactly my reaction:

  if OP isn't some PR account (or andy's alt account) I will eat my hat. none of OP's responses deal with the actual complaints.

Been using fastmail since 2013 and before that hosting my own for about 15 years. I feel fastmail does a lot of things right, for example one near and dear to my heart is proper alias handling in the webmail interface. I think my only complaint is that they rolled out IMAP compatible 'notes/memo' for emails, but you can't use it unless you use the grouped conversation thingy which I don't like.

Also I get the vibe that the company treats their employees properly and not like disposable trash.

Though I'd be curious how they're using AI.

Fastmail is great, my one downside being that it charges per-account (to be clear, you can have unlimited aliases on that account), so if you want multiple accounts, e.x. for homelab stuff, your paying full price for each.

I also use purelymail for the above reason, and while it's barebones I've been quite happy with it.

I switched years back and have only wondered why I didn’t do it sooner.

Tuta is the obvious choice if you don’t mind using their client.

2FAS Pass

https://2fas.com/pass/

What was wrong with self-hosted? I self-host using KeepassXC. Yes you have to set up syncing across devices more or less yourself, but it’s just one file per password database, and an LLM can help automate that if you need the help. I can’t imagine switching to some cloud service for something so critical, especially now.

keepassxc

This is a niche in which I do t exactly think speed of development and new bling is particularly important.

Either thy drop encryption and just become Google Suite competitor, or they stick to the original differentiator. Looks like they want both and the customers for each are different targets.

Proton collaborates with spy agencies. They want it to have more of the users who aren't using Gmail.