Data and cyber security have become two of the hottest topics in today’s news.
With email providers some of the keenest parties to allay your fears and attract more customers.
Extra measures like two step verification and randomly generated passwords are just
two of the solutions for this everyday problem
But some web surfers have chosen to go a step further by signing up to Protonmail, an email
service founded in 2013 by a group of scientists that’s become the world’s number one private
email option.
But how is the service able to be so secure?
How do you access ProtonMail?
And how did a once niche email service take on the likes of Google, Yahoo and Outlook
to reach a user base of over 50 million.
Here’s How It Happened
ProtonMail’s founders first met in Geneva, Switzerland at CERN, the European Organisation
for Nuclear Research, the home of the world’s largest particle physics laboratory.
Their goal was to provide the internet with its most secure email service yet, and their
timing couldn’t have been better in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks of the NSA
surveillance programs.
With the help of a crowdfunding campaign that hit more than five times its initial goal
of $100,000, ProtonMail’s public Beta was launched in 2014, proving to be a huge success.
With perks like priority access available in return for pledges as small as $17, and
even lifetime access to ProtonMail+ for anyone generous enough to donate a thousand dollars
or more. The service was off to a flying start, with
signups briefly suspended just three days after launch due to unexpectedly high demand
and the Proton servers becoming overwhelmed.
Their selling point was the encryption of emails within your web browser, meaning their
contents were already hidden before reaching ProtonMail’s servers, making them completely
secure, even in the event of a cyber attack.
Not only this, but access to your emails required two separate passwords, one to access the
account and then a second to decrypt data once inside your browser.
This is the code that can’t even be seen by Proton itself, and so if you forget your
decryption password, your emails would be lost forever.
Users were also attracted by the company’s registration within the nation of Switzerland,
a country known for its fairly unique privacy laws covered by the Swiss Federal Act, such as
a company’s right to choose whether to share their system with the government, be that
Swiss, American or any other.
Servers themselves are located in hyper secure data centres, similar to those you might have
seen in banks from some famous spy movies.
But ProtonMail’s success didn’t stop there.
The company continued to receive more funds that helped launch the full public web client
in 2016, along with its iOS and Android apps for mobile devices.
In January 2017 it was announced that ProtonMail was home to more than 2 million users, and
that a Tor hidden service was available.
This allowed users to add several more layers of security when accessing their emails, a
process you can hear more about in our video on Tor Browser.
That year also saw Proton release its own Virtual Private Network to help users hide
their location and access services that are normally restricted in their region, ProtonVPN.
Although there are paid versions of the software, the free version in particular has been praised
for its relatively fast connection speed and choice of 3 different locations.
ProtonVPN has since become open source, to enable anybody to view the software’s source
code and currently operates over a thousand servers in more than 50 different countries.
Meanwhile the original ProtonMail has continued to go from strength to strength.
It’s estimated the service now has over 50 million active users worldwide
There are some fairly standard features on their free accounts, and a few more perks
for paying subscribers, like more storage and custom domains.
Several more layers of security have also been added in recent years, including messages
that self-destruct when their preset timer runs out and the option to make emails password
protected when sending to recipients not using ProtonMail.
And the company’s refusal to roll over for governing bodies has landed ProtonMail in
a few sticky spots, having been banned in countries like Russia and Belarus for refusing
to cooperate when requested to do so.
Throw in ProtonDrive for cloud storage and ProtonCalendar for scheduling plans and the
entire ecosystem is looking both secure and comprehensive.
So if you’re thinking of adding that extra layer of privacy when communicating online, maybe
ProtonMail could be for you.
And that’s how it happened.
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