ProtonMail, Calendar and Drive - A privacy focused alternative to Google?

hey guys this is nick and no white shirt today don't ask me why though if you follow the channel closely you know i like to talk about online privacy and while achieving complete privacy on the internet is virtually impossible there are some crucial steps that you can take to make sure that you leak as little data as possible and the first thing to do is securing your email i never took a formal look at protonmail so that's what we're going to talk about today so while i was perfectly happy talking about protonmail on my own they actually reached out to me and offered to sponsor this video i like what product mail is doing and so i said yes so this video is sponsored by prudentmail as always though this doesn't impact how i write my scripts and what i can say about the product as you will see in the video so to begin with what is protonmail as you might have guessed it's an email service and an encrypted one at that the company and its servers are located in switzerland their code is open source they don't display any ads in your email and they use end-to-end encryption to ensure that no one can intercept your email communications protonmail is free to use but your free account will limit you to 500 megabytes of storage and 150 emails per day which might not be enough for some of you their paid tier is 4 euros per month and that will let you 5 gigabytes of storage up to a thousand messages per day labels and folders to sort your emails setting up custom filters the use of your own email domain name and up to five email aliases now you can also opt to pay 24 euros per month which will up these quotas by a lot and also give you access to proton vpn but i'll talk about that in another video you also have enterprise plans available for companies now of course i know there are going to be comments about i can get a free email address with multiple gigabytes of storage so why should i pay and the answer is most free email services will either display ads in your webmail target you and sell your personal information to target you with ads or are not fully encrypted which means that they can be hacked or compelled by government organizations to give up all your email communications now being an encrypted email service protonmail is better used in a webmail you can just enter your credentials in any email client because that client doesn't know how to encrypt or decrypt according to protonmail's protocol you can still add your protonmail account to other clients on linux macos or windows through the protonmail bridge it's a simple app you can install on any os and that will give you the credentials you need to enter in any client that support smtp and imap i tested it with kmail and it works perfectly fine even though they only advertise support for thunderbird on linux now you might think that this makes all your email insecure but proton bridge is pretty clever and doesn't store any unencrypted message data when you configure your email account with it you basically tell the email program to check email from the bridge itself which acts as the imap smtp server so every time you click on an email in your desktop mail program the bridge downloads it from the proton servers as an encrypted message then it decrypts it locally and then passes that to the email client and it's the same thing when you send an email except in reverse now the proton bridge app is only available to paid customers which means that it's time to take a look at how the webmail works so the webmail is adaptive and will work on mobile as well as on desktop although you can download an ios or android app for more convenience no apps seem available on linux phones for the moment unfortunately and they do not have a linux desktop app either the webmail is pretty simple to use it doesn't try to revolutionize the way you handle email you get your sidebar with folders on the left your email list in the middle and your message pane on the right you can change this layout in the settings if you want though getting rid of the message panel choosing to display more emails with a denser layout and choosing between a small compose window gmail style or a full screen composer now the most important feature here is of course themes you can select between six different themes including dark ones and light ones customization never hurts personally i don't find really dark themes super legible so i stuck with the default but you will have the ability to pick one you like now having the ability to customize the css of the interface directly would be really cool but i guess you can't have everything settings wise you'll notice that all marketing emails are disabled out of the box and nicely tell you how often you can expect them to send you something if you're ever interested you can also enable two factor authentication on your account which i should really do by the way or you can opt for two password mode want to access the account and another one to actually decrypt your email for additional security speaking of which you get a nice dashboard with every device that has access to your account and logs of successful sign-ins if protonmail.com is too tedious for you to type when you give your email address to other people you can also use a shortened version which is just pm.me in terms of more company-oriented features protonmail supports email signatures including pasting html signatures if you want to do that or setting up an order reply if you're out of office protonmail also has an import assistant to get all your emails from gmail yahoo mail or another provider i tried it with my own email address that's hosted by my domain name provider and it worked beautifully in terms of how you can manage your emails you'll find the usual suspects here you can mark emails as read or unread move them to the trash or an archive folder or mark them as spam and if your plan supports it you can use folders and labels to sort your various emails and make sure you can find them afterwards personally i just lump everything into a single archive folder and i use search to find what i'm looking for but you don't have to be a terrible human being like me protonmail also gives you access to contacts so you can get this nice autofill when writing an email it will automatically create contacts from people you've sent emails to but it doesn't seem to be able to grab the email addresses from mails you've imported through the settings you can disable the auto import if you don't want it you can also create contact groups and use them to send email to all the addresses in that group you can also batch import your contacts with the csv file or through vcard contacts are encrypted as well and can be exported after they've been decrypted protonmail also has a calendar accessible to everyone including free protonmail users it can import events from ics files and you can create multiple calendars as you like they can also be shared outside of proton with two settings limited view or full view the former will only let others know if you're busy or not and the latter will give them all the details about your calendar events the calendar itself is pretty simple drag across a time period to create an event and fill in the details including start and end date and time name location the calendar you want to attach it to and a description you can mark events as taking the whole day and it supports recurring events if you click on the more options button which will also let you add participants and set reminders if you do use the webmail though don't forget to give access to desktop notifications to your web browser for product calendar or you will not get those reminders it's got a day a week and a month view and there is the nice touch of being able to see your calendar with another time zone which also removes my main excuse for being late to virtual meetings when i have work to do on the channel because time zones are hard man all in all the calendar is simple but it does its job nicely it can't be added to a desktop calendar program for now though and while there is an android app available the ios app isn't ready yet now for the paid users there is also proton drive which is a file storage service it's still in beta so i will not review it fully here but let's look at the features it already has it shares your storage space with the email account and you can just drag and drop files to upload them it's also fully end-to-end encrypted and you can send fully encrypted links to any file you like now proton drive is currently only accessible through the web app and you cannot sync a folder from your computer to your drive automatically but as i said it's just a beta for now so more features should be coming in the future so while protonmail is a really nice email service nowadays it's tricky to have one of these live in a vacuum users expect to have a kind of integrated communications platform with email calendar contacts file storage blame gmail for that they're the ones who started this trend proton is nicely positioned to answer this kind of demand while the complementary services like contacts calendar and drive can't yet match other older offerings in terms of pure features they have the added benefit of being very very secure thanks to full end-to-end encryption now personally i can move all the channel management features to protonmail it has enough features for me to be able to do it but if you're only looking for an email address for an email client then protomail is a great choice it's fast to load it's secure it has a free tier so you can try it out and if you're a paid customer you also can use whatever desktop client you want to use with it now less advanced users will probably be satisfied with the free tier and more advanced ones that need folders labels and aliases won't find the paid plans too expensive especially considering the strong encryption so if you're privacy conscious there is no reason not to give protonmail proton calendar or proton drive a try and see how you like them so thanks to protonmail for sponsoring this video and thank you guys for watching it if you liked it don't mistake to like subscribe and turn on notifications and if you didn't like it you can also dislike and tell me why in the comments if you'd like to see these videos outside of youtube i'm also on odyssey and if you want to help support the channel you can join my patreon subscribers or youtube members and you'll get access to a weekly patreon cast and the right to vote on the next topics i got so thank you guys for watching and i'll see you in the next one bye [Music] foreign

Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 66,632

Keywords: linux, elementary os, open source, distribution, linux distro, linux help, linux 2021, linux tutorial, protonmail review, protonmail privacy, protonmail nsa, protonmail security, protonmail encryption, protonmail vs google, protonamil vs gmail, protonmail google alternative, replace google with proton, protoncalendar, proton mail, proton calendar, proton drive, protondrive

Id: SlX0BaQNxJg

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021