this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Actually Infuriating
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I mean, what's the alternative here? The Swiss government, which they are subject to, issued a legal warrant. Any email provider you want to use will be subject to warrants. All of them.
They are technically incapable by design of complying with warrants for email data. In this case they were able to provide personally identifying payment data because the person paid for their account with... a credit card. They offer crypto payment options, and would not have been able to usefully comply had the person used that method.
Mailfence has no idea who I am.
Tuta never got any payment info outta me, though I do use them for official things tied to my actual id... but only those things, not other things.
???
The alternative is to use an alternative.
Fucking obviously not, this is far from the first time something like this happened.
They could, you know, design the services they offer such that they are actually incapable of complying with warrants, by design.
Payment info is the easiest, most direct way to identify a person, beyond uploading your actual government ID.
Maybe, maybe Proton should stop acting like that is not fucking obviously the case, maybe they should make it more clear that if your threat model includes, I dunno, a terroristic theocratic fascist government, their currently existing marketing is extremely misleading to tech-normies?
If you pay for mailfence with card, they know who you are.
Also, I'm pretty sure that proton do not have unencrypted email contents of their users. That's why they can't offer IMAP like everyone else does (you can't connect your email client directly to proton, you need an extra app).
Also, I think that proton's marketing is pretty in-line with what they actually offer. Protection from e.g. data breaches should be quite good and I think it's reasonable to primarily market to people who are not directly targeted by the US government.
Who pays for mailfence?
Why would you?
Then you're either an idiot or are somehow blissfully ignorant of everything related to Peter Thiel and Palantir.
The alternative is literally a single sentence: "That person paid by crypto, we have no payment details on file for them."
I get the sentiment, but no serious company is going to survive for very long lying to its government when it receives search warrants. This is not a realistic solution.