Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”
In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
Vote on making him step down
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Get rid of Andy Proton
I commented before from the summary. Read as much of the 404 story as I can now.
It’s bad. If I didn’t trust 404 Media, I might think this was a hit piece. But 404 does good work and I trust their journalists. I should really subscribe!
Social media is prone to instant lynch mobs, one of its worst aspects. I do not intend to rage quit. But I WILL re-evaluate in 3 months. Just marked my calendar. They need to very publicly reverse course, AND restore my trust. I believe in giving ppl and co’s a chance to learn from mistakes, or nobody ever gets wiser. But I need to see that happen, or me and my $ are out.
I also no longer trust Andy’s judgement. The Proton engineers are saying the right things. Again I trust 404’s homework, or I would be much more skeptical of all of this.
Ugh.
I’ve heard Andy interviewed. Couple times. He came across as personable and likable. But that takes a backseat if he’s gonna steer his company off a cliff and I have to stop trusting their products. Even smart people can make dumb choices. Esp when no one is empowered to push back. It can get pathological, when the CEO starts to believe they walk on water.
Frankly I think the Proton Foundation needs to sit Andy down and have a heart to heart.
Ah, yes, once again the old adage “When they show you they are, believe them” has proved it never fails.
A happy Proton paying customer, I bailed within a week when Andy made his pro GOP/trump comments some time back.
Folks said I over reacted. I handed them that adage. It was right.
Protons top “loser” engineers will find themselves welcomed elsewhere. What a disaster Proton has become under Yen.
goodbye proton vpn, hello airvpn
Andy Yen sounds like an asshole.
I still need to move away from Gmail, but it’s probably not going to be to Proton.
He sounds like my manager. For him AI is a silver bullet for every problem.
guess its time to host my own email
I’m on a 2 year family plan in proton that has to be around 1 year in. Now, in the last few months I’ve been upping my game in self-hosting, even for our family business (moved from Zoho Workplace to a VPS with Nextcloud and MXroute for email, with mandatory PGP for internal emailing and all files in next loud encrypted, and it’s been great, but it does come with some extra work for me).
I spent the last 2 days deploying stalwart in the same VPS with a domain I wasn’t using to test it as a potential email server to self-host when Proton’s subscription ends. It seems to be working well, I even got it to e2ee between that and my Proton email (
can’t get Tuta to accept a single email from it though, still need to tinker a bit it seems). Using SMTP2Go for outbound emails (free gives me 1,000 emails sent every month, ans I know my 6 family users together don’t send even 500 emails in a month combined) to avoid the VPS IP address from being blacklisted if something goes wrong.I urge everyone to try it. It is not as easy to implement as they try to make it in YouTube videos, specially if you try to use as many security and privacy features as possible, but it is the easiest email server I have ever tried to implement, and I believe it is absolutely feasible for personal stuff (not too sure about business, so I’ll stick to MXroute for that for now).
If you have an unused domain (maybe a used one that you don’t rely on for emailing) and some space in your homelab or in a VPS, Stalwart + SMTP2Go is a fun and potentially productive project to give a shot.
Edit: I just went into my Tuta account and the emails are there. Seems it was an impatience issue more than it was technical 😁
I have six months left on my protonmail. Started the move to mailbox.org yesterday. Signed up for oscura and need to set up my vaultwarden
Thanks for sharing! Good post, totally worth the read.
And I know which company to stay away from, and will solidly recommend this to others as well.
Proton is legit, they said.
It seems like they offer a good product, but by my reading they are still on the venture capital.
I’d rather let them enshitify a couple of times before making a commitment with anything private.
I’d like to thank Andy for introducing me to Proton’s competitor Tuta.
I’ve literally registered with them yesterday. Seems nice so far, worth exploring further.
He certainly clarified for me whether to pay for Proton or not. It’s not.
I just cancelled my subscription and quoted him as the reason.
same here and i will forever be thankful for it :p
Tuta, funnily enough, makes it very hard to send encrypted mail to people who aren’t also using tuta. Maybe also look at Mailbox.org and Posteo. They have a lot less marketing/hype/fearmongering compared to tuta and Proton, but have similar features regarding encryption and security, with less walled-garden like restrictions.
I just took mailbox.org for a spin and wasn’t impressed, I have to say. No apps, which I can live with, I guess. There was an option for installing the various functions as apps - but apparently Firefox isn’t compatible. So sadly it’s a no from me, I need a bit more functionality from a paid service.
I don’t want/need an app, and would say that there are more than enough mail clients on all platforms.
If you want one, though, I can see why this is a no-go.
I can give +1 for posteo. I have my posteo adress some years allready.
Do you have experience with the office software or cloud drive from Mailbox.org? Proton’s spreadsheet app can’t even handle my modest flashlight collection and their Drive won’t mount as a drive on my Linux machine.
For something like a personal flashlight collection, you might try LibreOffice Calc. Esp since you mentioned using your Linux machine. I use librecalc for random things kinda like what you described. It works great, and your files stay local.
No, I just let them run the mailserver, both the mail clients and all other Web applications we need are hosted by us.
I’m currently in the market for a new VPN provider. I’d like to thank Andy for pointing me towards IVPN.
IVPN has been working well for me. Heard AirVPN is good if you need port forwarding too.
Goddammit… I just switched to Proton. I really don’t know if I can handle switching again so soon.
