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Old 11 Sep 2018, 06:38 AM   #172
pjwalsh
Essential Contributor
 
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 312
From the PM blog post above:

The beauty of email is that it is federated, meaning that anybody can implement it. It is not controlled by any single entity, it is not centralized, and there is not a single point of failure. While this does constrain email in many ways, it has also made email the most widespread and most successful communication system ever devised.

PGP, because it is built on top of email, is therefore also a federated encryption system. Unlike other encrypted communications systems, such as Signal or Telegram, PGP doesn’t belong to anybody, there is no single central server, and you aren’t forced to use one service over another. We believe encrypted communications should be open and not a walled garden. ProtonMail is now interoperable with practically ANY other past, present, or future email system that supports the OpenPGP standard, and our implementation of this standard is also itself open source.
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