I was about ready to move all my email over to Fastmail before this happened. But not now.
Though that’s not to say that we should accept these laws as they apply to email services lying down. Any reason to refuse to use the services of Australian companies when foreign services of similar quality exist gives those Australian companies all the more reason to press the government to reform these laws on the grounds that they’re losing valuable business for negligible gain to national interest. If the government doesn’t listen to individual constituents, it might listen to companies which are hurting in their back pockets.
Like others have said, you really should never count on email being a private medium. I switched mainly to remove my email from Google's sources of data collection on me: this is the level of privacy that is important to me. If I wanted to hide from state sponsored actors I wouldn't be using email at all.
A nice side effect of moving to Fastmail is being able to use their amazing Web UI, which is so much faster and more responsive than Gmail's super bloated interface.
And I agree about the web UI. I usually read and compose my email inside Emacs, but their web interface is very nice when necessary.
Isn't that one of the pros of Protonmail? All the data is encrypted and decrypted on the client. There is no way to have mail apps access the data without a piece of software that handles the encryption.
In other words ProtonMail is not actually end-to-end encrypted which makes it snake oil.
It’s interesting that this point has to be explained on HN time and time again, as HN’s audience should understand end to end encryption.
I'd love to have a privacy-respecting mail hoster, but the ProtonMail bridge program is too unattractive to make the switch.
(Which is not to say that IMAP itself isn't a mess, but MUAs have gotten it to work, and we'd like for whatever other protocol we move to instead to also be an open standard.)