ProtonMail is an independent Email platform based in Switzerland designed with privacy and security as its key selling points.
It can be confusing exactly how far that level of privacy and security go though.
ProtonMail cannot legally comply with a court order from a foreign government unless the Swiss government approves it.
While this does happen occasionally, ProtonMail also pushes back on many cases that they object to.
Details of the cases that they did and did not provide information for can be found in theirtransparency report.
ProtonMail doesnt require any personal details to sign up, so your account is essentially anonymous.
This means that ProtonMail cant access or analyse your emails at all, or hand over that data.
This could potentially be used to identify you, or at least where you live.
Subject lines of emails, as well as the recipient and sender addresses, are not encrypted during transmission.
This is because no email standard, even the PGP encryption standard supports encrypting this data.
This could allow the third party to perform analysis of the content of the email.
Due to the nature of email, the emails you send can be traced back to your account.
If youre interested in a security and privacy focussed email provider, you cant really go wrong with ProtonMail.
