Encrypted Email Service ProtonMail Now Open To All

There has been a greater push to adopt encryption following the disclosures by Edward Snowden. He blew the whistle on the government’s electronic spying programs and now most users are trying to shift to services that they believe have a better chance of protecting their privacy and data. ProtonMain is an encrypted email service that has been in invite-only beta for two years. Today the service has finally been opened to everybody who wants to sign up for it.

Not only has ProtonMail opened its service to everybody it has also launched new mobile apps which are encrypted end-to-end. This means that even the company itself can’t access user data so it can’t comply with requests to hand over data if and when that situation arises.

ProtonMail has been founded by scientists working at CERN and the MIT, so you can imagine that they know what they’re doing, and the fact that more than a million people signed up during the invite-only beta goes to show that they’re on to something here.

The service and its servers are located in Switzerland so there’s not much that authorities in the United States can do to shut this service down. As the encryption debacle between Apple and the FBI plays out in the public domain and gets ugly, it’s likely that ProtonMail will see an uptick in its numbers since many would want to move to a service where they can get a reasonable expectation of privacy against unwanted snooping by the government.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: Proton