New email service ProtonMail, promises to be the most secure email service you’ve ever used. Developed by employees Andy Yen, Jason Stockman and Wei Sun from CERN and MIT this certainly looks to be a promising and elegant looking email service.
ProtonMail was founded in summer 2013 at CERN by scientists who were drawn together by a shared vision of a more secure and private Internet. Early ProtonMail hackathons were held at the famous CERN Restaurant One. ProtonMail is developed both at CERN and MIT and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. We were semifinalists in 2014 MIT 100K startup launch competition and are advised by the MIT Venture Mentoring Service.
ProtonMail’s segregated authentication and decryption system means logging into a ProtonMail account that requires two passwords. The first password is used to authenticate the user and retrieve the correct account. After that, encrypted data is sent to the user. The second password is a decryption password which is never sent to us. It is used to decrypt the user’s data in the browser so we never have access to the decrypted data, or the decryption password. For this reason, we are also unable to do password recovery. If you forget your decryption password, we cannot recover your data.
While this looks promising the question is, will users be swayed to give this a go? Especially those users who have a lot already invested into services like Gmail and Google services.
There’s a lot to like about ProtonMail, I may have to personally look into it myself but admit switching will be difficult. So what do you think of ProtonMail? Is this worth a switch from your current email service? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Our social media links are now located to the left of your screen.
Source: ProtonMail Blog
Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
