Legit point and agreed with everything, however wait until an email address of yours reaches the database of lead generation websites and you will see that you will never be able to keep count of the violations. Newsletter lists add your email in automatically and people sell you stuff without the unsubscribe button in the email, so no way to block them... I understand your concern but dealing with far worse

Funnily, Proton was supposed to be the anti-Google, wasn't it? Maybe some of "Proton's not in the US, so not subject to scary NSA warrant canaries"

Except... Gmail has handled spam pretty well? And at least if you do get Spam they actually tell you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712

not to say this "should" be the solution, but does Proton not offer easy email filtering & automation (e.g. skip inbox, delete)?

I ask because I haven't yet bothered to implement it on a from-scratch email server I stood up a couple weeks ago (just kidding; I wanted to brag about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC test passes from Gmail with both inbound and outbound encryption). I can say from this experimentation and using Google's Postmaster tool, though, that emails being reported as spam by users is *very* serious; Google's threshold is 0.3%; if just 0.3% of users report your email as spam, it's considered a policy violation and your emails are likely to go to spam or have delivery refused outright. idk what Proton's policies are. (edit: by extension, this means enforcing authorization of users is very serious; if someone abuses the service as an open relay, your whole domain is toast)

Proton’s take on marketing is the main thing making me anxious of commitment to their ecosystem.

Other than that I’m a happy paying customer.

I got the same email on the same date. Unsubscribe told me it was from the 'important announcements' list - I fail to see how this could possibly fall into that category.

I guess I can't have important announcements from Proton in the future if it's polluted with these low value messages.

Kudos to Proton for how they handled it. Granted the email was wrong, and I'm sure they'll fix that process. But most companies don't even bother to write back when you bring something like this to their attention, much less issue an apology.

This is a user-facing bug borne of engagement-driven development and a lack of user empathy. When a user opts out of a category, he should not receive cross posts. They ought to have had checks for this. The user did well to bring attention to it.

Trust is maybe the most valuable commodity for a VPN provider… And I have the feeling Proton is gambling it away.

It made me move to Mullvad.

Despite the fact that in terms of performance Proton is slightly better. (underscoring just *how* crucial ‘trust’ is)