Proton didn't just market 'Swiss privacy,' they built real engineering around non-retention—no logs, no trackers, nothing to subpoena. If Switzerland erodes that, the only defensible move for actual privacy builders is to exit and redeploy somewhere the law aligns with technical reality. Anything else is security theater.
If law passes, if Proton leaves, what matters most isn't their press release—it's the engineers voting with their code and hardware locales.
To be fair Protonmail has much more to offer than "just" privacy friendly legislation. The free web mail client is full-featured, time tested and has no ads. That in my opinion already puts it ahead among the main mail providers. Also it has the Proton bridge, VPN etc. etc. I'd say it really depends on the personal threat model and willingness to DIY. My main complaint with it is bad interoperability with gpg though. (I'm not sure how anything less is supposed to help with end-to-end privacy...)
Well yeah, I mean it has browser-based e2e encryption which is why search only applies to subjects/addresses. For more Proton bridge is needed. IIRC it's possible to also search the message bodies directly but it's quite slow.
If law passes, if Proton leaves, what matters most isn't their press release—it's the engineers voting with their code and hardware locales.