Add first blog post

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content/posts.md

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-This page is quite empty, huh? [Return home](/).

content/posts/why-i-switched-from-proton-mail.md

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+date = 2022-05-29T16:10:46+02:00
+title = "Why I Switched From Proton Mail"
+description = "This blog post explains why I chose to switch away from Proton Mail."
+slug = "email-provider-switch"
+authors = ["Sam Al-Sapti"]
+tags = ["centralization", "cryptography", "email", "pgp"]
+series = []
++++
+
+I wanted to write this blog post (and by the way, this is my first) to
+shed some light on my recent choice of email provider. You see, Proton
+Mail is a great email service, and I've used them for years. but it just
+doesn't fit my needs anymore. This is due to a number of reasons, but it
+is primarily due to some issues with external PGP handling (I'll talk
+more about this later on) and their recent change of direction.
+
+# Centralization and Proton's new direction
+
+One of the main reasons I chose to switch, is the new direction Proton
+is going.  Recently, they've revamped all of their products and their
+website, to make it more clear that both Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton
+Calendar and Proton Drive is under the same family/suite (notice how
+there's a space now in their product names, that's one of the changes).
+All of this is great for many reasons, now it actually feels like an
+alternative all-in-one solution to something like Google's, and I'm sure
+this will benefit them in the long run and appeal to more people. A lot
+of people like these kinds of ecosystems, because it usually increses
+ease of use and convenience. In fact, this change now allows Proton to
+more clearly integrate their products together. For example, you can now
+easily send large attachments via emails, by letting Proton Mail
+automatically upload the file to Proton Drive and send a share link in
+the email, instead of attaching it in the email itself. All of the
+changes are outlined in
+[this article](https://proton.me/news/updated-proton) by Proton's CEO,
+Andy Yen.
+
+Personally though, this does not appeal to me. I'm not a fan of
+ecosystems and having all my eggs in one basket, and I'm a huge fan of
+self-hosting.  You see, I'm a big proponent of decentralization. One
+aspect of decentralization is to not have everything in one place, when
+you don't control that place. For example, I wouldn't have both my
+email, calendar, contacts and cloud storage with Google, and neither
+would I with Proton. Instead, I self-host my cloud storage, calendar,
+contacts, to-do lists, and notes with the help of
+[Nextcloud](https://nextcloud.com) at home on a Raspberry Pi. This way,
+even though it's all in one place, I'm the one in control of the server
+hosting it and what happens with it.
+
+I can definitely see why Proton chose to go in this direction, and I
+fully support them. But they should also expect, and I'm sure they did,
+that some of their customers wouldn't want this change of direction. I
+have nothing against Proton as a company, but having my digital life
+centralized with one company is just not my cup of tea.
+
+# The way Proton Mail handles PGP
+
+Proton Mail offers zero-access encryption of your inbox, meaning all of
+your emails are ecrypted, and only you have access to read them after
+unlocking them with your password. Behind the scenes, this works by each
+customer having a PGP key pair stored on their servers, with the private
+key encrypted by the customer's password. This means that not even
+Proton themselves can read your emails, and this is great for privacy.
+
+PGP has been a standard for email encryption for many years, and it's
+widely used for sensitive communication via email. Proton has taken PGP
+and integrated it into their email service, automatically providing
+end-to-end encrypted emails between Proton Mail users (it also works
+with other email providers, but it requires some setup by the
+communicating parties). The thing is though, that you're not in control
+of the private PGP key when using Proton Mail's PGP integration. Even
+though it is encrypted on their servers, and only you can decrypt it, I
+want to be in control of my private key myself. This also relates to the
+centralization problem I described above. By using Proton Mail, I
+entrust my email security with a central entity.
+
+This one is more on the technical side of things. I've had some not so
+great experiences when trying to use my own PGP key on top of Proton
+Mail's encryption. For example, my signatures wouldn't be recognized by
+the recipient's email client due to the second layer of encryption that
+is Proton Mail's PGP integration. Because I want to use my own PGP key,
+that I'm in control of, this doesn't work for me.
+
+# Conclusion
+
+With all that said, I want to end this blog post by saying this: Don't
+go ahead and delete your Proton account solely based on what I'm saying.
+This is my own personal opinion. If you're someone who's not very
+technical and/or are satisfied with what Proton is offering, then stay.
+I'm not here to trash talk Proton and tell everyone to abandon them. I
+think Proton offers some great privacy preserving services, and their
+line of products is perfectly suitable for a lot of people, and their
+work is important in the privacy world. I'm just someone who's a bit
+more technical than the average person, and because of that, Proton Mail
+is just not a fit for me personally. For the average person, Proton is
+fantastic, and I can only recommend them if you're wondering which
+email, VPN, calendar or cloud storage provider to use.
+
+You might be asking, what am I using now then? I'm now a happy customer
+over at [mailbox.org](https://mailbox.org), and if you're like me, you
+should totally check them out. If not, go ahead and keep your Proton
+account (you have one, right?).