Maybe not, but they also talk about the increasing volume of requests. This suggests to me and should obviously suggest to them, that the encryption they are using is not a problem for law enforcement agencies otherwise why would they keep on asking for it?
I can't imagine that they'd be so stupid as that But then, I prefer old-school GnuPG and email clients. POP not IMAP. No bloody HTML. No fetching of remote content.
Extending your post's reasoning in my mind: I use Proton with really strong key passphrases. Assuming you do likewise and also assuming their technology blocks all plain text from ANYONE but the individual account user (That is Proton's claim for which they will die as a company if it isn't so) you are safe. A response to the authorities where Proton hands over cyphertext scrambled at current GPG level is OK. They get to look compliant and yet their users are completely safe. If a member/user at Proton is using 123 as their password such ignorance is on them. I love this technology and cannot wait for full U2F later this year (they claim its coming). Again, as said before, I wish Proton would let me upload my locally generated 4K key. This would remove any doubt on my end, but I can live with what they offer minus that great option for wish I dream!
Right. ProtonMail (and our old friend CounterMail) do all encryption/decryption locally. So their servers store only cyphertext, and don't have your private key. Also, when communicating with other ProtonMail accounts, cyphertext is protected by HTTPS. So cyphertext and metadata aren't bouncing around third-party mail servers.
Coming back to the main question by OP, my concern is that will any of these be long lasting as financially strong Outlook or Gmail? Do enough people care to pay their monthly fee to keep these providers going and expanding? And will unscrupulous elements use their secure services to outnumber genuine users looking for safety and privacy to such an extent that law enforcement will create hurdles for these services?
That is a great set of questions. The "run of the mill" belief is that normal people don't have anything to hide, but that is beyond naive. We have the same frustrating circumstances with crypto-currency and cash, but amazingly cash/fiat never seems to be seen as the culprit and has always afforded the best avenues for nefarious activity. Sorry, back to point. I can't really do more than make a prediction on Proton's long term viability, but for now I'll use them as designed and support them doing MY part to keep them alive. In my case they will gain yet another paying account WHEN they finalize U2F, which they say is coming in 2018.
That's a feature, not a bug You can think of "unscrupulous elements" as honeypots for "law enforcement". If something gets pwned, it was already broken.
