Posted by neogodless 20 hours ago
If you use a custom domain and email clients rather than webmail, moving around becomes a lot easier. Another tip is to use a service like addy.io where you can create a new alias for every service, to help protect against spam.
Have its privacy claims ever been independently audited?
Despite having Proton since 2018, I've really gotten fed up with their service quality — they seem to half-ass most of their services and it's a real pita to use their ecosystem. People have been complaining for ages and nothing changes, so I've decided to take my business elsewhere.
Hopefully I don't get flamed for my decision; that's another annoying aspect about Proton. There's a vocal portion of the userbase that are zealots and really take you to task when they feel you are criticizing Proton in any way.
Are you leaving just because general annoyance or improved feature set or what? It’s a lot of work to migrate so I don’t want to be back here in 2 years swapping again.
What's worse is that I ported all my emails over to Proton, which meant my data usage was above the free tier, so I was essentially hostage to keep paying (even though my actual usage is on Proton is much below the free tier). While they do label the emails you import, it's useless because it gets intermingled if they are part of the same thread (for example, all my bills that switched over were tagged as imported even when I got a new bill; this was an issue for even direct email threads with other people). Furthermore, it's nearly impossible to bulk delete anything, you have to use their web interface (which is very limiting). If you try to delete using something like Thunderbird, the emails stay in All Mail, so it's not really deleted (thus keeps using your disk space, preventing you from moving to the free tier). It took me nearly a week to devise a way to properly delete the imported emails without accidentally deleting real emails. Using the web interface is SLOW. It was painful doing the deletes that way because Proton struggled to keep up with the deletes, it was glitching like crazy.
Needless to say, that was a shitty shitty experience, and I'm positive that's part of their approach to lock users into their platform.
I have integrations e.g. for scripts, external mailers and so on, so I don't want to pay something AND still have to setup something myself and maintain it. Fastmail has the concept of app passwords, which are username+password combos that you can scope to specific services (e.g. only sending emails, only accessing calendar, ...), which is perfect for my needs.
The encryption part wasn’t that valuable for me and ofc Proton doesn’t encrypt the metadata and unless they’re proton too it’s not E2E so I’m happy sticking with Signal for that sorta stuff and leaving email for talking to businesses.
To be fair though your emails are E2EE at rest in your inbox, so in the event of seizure or a subpoena they can’t hand over anything usable aside from metadata unlike fastmail who will hand everything over.
Somewhat unrelated criticism of Gmail - during the migration, I found out that there is no way to search for starred archived emails in Gmail. They don't show up in Starred, nor in any search with is:starred. Their star status also doesn't carry over when migrating.