this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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Can you elaborate? AFAIK, Protonmail only gives e2ee in 2 rare situations:
In all other scenarios (no e2ee), PM traffic and data-at-rest is just as exposed as conventional non-PM.
actually, i was talking out of my ass a little. i am not sure itself how things work, i was under the impression that proton can't access your clear text mails, once they are stored (of course, they can build backdoors that snoop when receiving mails, but we shall not assume this), similar to how mailbox.org allows you to have all incoming mails be immediately encrypted via your chosen pgp key, effectively having e2ee. i was under the impression proton did this automatically and stuff, i mean why else do you need to use their own apps for everything and to even use basic stuff like imap? but yeah i don't know their setup exactly.
PM’s apps perform the encryption on your own device because it’s your device that runs the apps. That is e2ee, but still only in the two scenarios I mention and even then it’s also vulnerable to targeted attack. PM could ship malcious j/s if it wanted (the likely case being to comply with a court order). It’s better if your own non-j/s FOSS MUA handles the crypto, which is actually easier if you don’t use PM.
If mailbox.org works the way anonaddy works, then that’s not e2ee. The msg payload is seen by the server that does the encryption, in the very least. The sender’s ESP would have already seen the msg.