PayPal Freezes Secure Mail Service ProtonMail – Update

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PayPal has frozen the funds in the account of the secure mail service ProtonMail. The American payment service is said to doubt whether ProtonMail is legal and whether it has the authority to encrypt emails.

The developers say they are shocked that they can no longer use their PayPal funds, earlier this year PayPal promised to relax its policy towards crowdfunding projects. The payment service also recently froze the assets of the crowdfunding projects GlassUp and Diaspora.

Through ProtonMail’s IndieGogo campaign, the company had raised nearly $300,000 within two weeks. It is unknown how much of that amount was paid via PayPal. The developers have now disabled the option to support the project via PayPal.

According to its developers, ProtonMail is a free mail service that encrypts mails by default using secure implementations of aes, rsa and openpgp. Current versions of encryption software are too expensive and not user-friendly according to the developers; their project would change that. Mails are already encrypted before they are sent to the central mail server. In addition, the service also has options to retrieve sent e-mails and to give e-mails an expiration date. It is not clear when ProtonMail will be available.

Update July 2, 9.25: According to an update on the project’s blog, the developers can now access their PayPal account funds again.

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