However, as the company pointed out, it doesn’t collect information on accounts by default. “Why are you storing things” seems to be the most common complaint. This has, as expected, caused a bit of a privacy backlash. The reason? It handed a user's IP address and device information to the police. The ProtonMail situation: Nothing new under the sunĪ lot of people are quite angry with ProtonMail at the moment. Using our services for something illegal? Sorry, out you go. This seems to be a reasonable stance, unless you expected Hushmail to operate on the moon or some sort of abandoned platform in international waters. Though they fight and resist many requests for information, the knock at the door for bad antics will happen eventually. Not only are you breaking the Hushmail T&Cs, but you’re also breaking the law. The bottom line from Hushmail’s then CTO was essentially that if you were engaged in illegal activity? Forget it. “12 CDs worth of e-mails from three Hushmail accounts” related to alleged steroid dealer antics were turned over to law enforcement. US Law Enforcement made use of a US / Canada mutual assistance treaty and had a Canadian court serve up the necessary court order. In 2007, reality came knocking at the door in the form of articles with titles like “ Encrypted e-mail company Hushmail spills to feds”. At a bare minimum, anything handed over to law enforcement would surely be in encrypted form. If they’re in Canada, legal demands for data would take time, so the theory went. At least some of their popularity at the time was based on geographical location. They offered a similar service with the expectation of security and privacy for communications. You may have run into Hushmail in the olden times (1998 onwards). This is why services such as ProtonMail, Hushmail, PrivateMail and others are always in demand.

There is a niche out there for privacy-focused people who’ve always wanted mail services. It’s one of those mail services people turn to should they require reassurance that what they do is kept private. ProtonMail offers end-to-end encrypted mail services.

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