The CERN development team has launched the ProtonMail secure anonymous mail service.

Several employees of the European Nuclear Research Laboratory (CERN) have developed the ProtonMail mail service, which claims to be one of the most secure — the entire contents of mailboxes are encrypted on the client side, and ProtonMail servers are located in Switzerland, which is famous for its personal protection laws data. The creators of the service claim that ProtonMail is able to surpass the recently closed Lavabit , which was used by Edward Snowden among others.

ProtonMail managed to take several prizes at start-up contests, and on May 15, open beta testing began. True, the number of people willing to try the service turned out to be so large that the servers could not bear the load and now the registration mode for invites was temporarily introduced. As soon as the project team increases its capacity, registration will again be open. ProtonMail is supposed to be monetized using the Freemium model. The creators promise that the minimum set of services will always be free.

ProtonMail messages are not stored in plain text on servers - they are encrypted on the client side. Two passwords are used for authorization - one to log in to the account and download encrypted data, the second to decrypt them. Recovering a password for decrypting letters is impossible; if it is lost, correspondence cannot be recovered - such is the inevitable price of increased security. Along with encrypted correspondence, ProtonMail mailbox can be used just like any other one, and you can send and receive both open and encrypted messages. When chatting between two ProtonMail clients, it is also possible to send messages with a limited lifetime that self-destruct after a specified time interval.
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In addition to technical means of protecting privacy and anonymity, ProtonMail uses the advantageous features of Swiss law. Switzerland is not only not subject to the laws of the United States, but is not part of the EU, and in order to oblige the company to issue customer data, you have to go a long and expensive way in Swiss courts. And even after that, access to the correspondence is impossible, since even the owners of the service themselves do not have encryption keys. To circumvent such situations in the laws of many countries there are rules that oblige a company to build bugs into its products at the request of the special services. However, in Switzerland this is possible only for Internet access providers, and for service providers there is no such standard.