ProtonMail

The Best in Their Field

Vorteile:

What i like the most about this software is that it is easy to learn to use on your own.

Nachteile:

I cant think of anything that i dont like about it

Excellent product - secure and easy, but not limiting for hardcore users

Kommentare: I am delighted since I started using ProtonMail: the migration has been easy, although it took some time (but this is 100% due to a personal choice to rewrite almost from scratch my email setup and usage), and it simply worked out of the box. Not many bugs encountered as of now, no spam, no deliverability issues. The interface is clean and good looking, and it's a pleasure to work with. The help documents and guides are tailored more to the average user, and makes setting it up a breeze. I'm really satisfied and just subscribed for two years.

Vorteile:

ProtonMail does a great job of keeping email simple (as much as every other email provider you may have experience with) but at the same time with a lot of powerful tools, likeHTML signatures, SIEVE filters, email aliases, many security options (E2E encryption by default, but also Sentinel and session management), trackers blocking, and a privacy-by-default and privacy-by-design policy (some of these are premium features for paying customers).

Nachteile:

The only gripe I have with the Proton ecosystem is that its development is VERY slow, and announced features might take years before release. This is well known and, for me, perfectly acceptable in the end: security, privacy and releasing working features takes time, especially when you are supporting many platforms. Unfortunately there is not much feature parity among platforms.

Large storage drive

Kommentare: Protonmail is very cheap to use for email hosting

Vorteile:

ProtonMail is easy to create accounts and provides free storage drive for keeping data and files.

Nachteile:

Protonmail is very easy to deploy and implement.

Expensive, restrictive, poor support

Kommentare: I have been using Protonmail Business (their highest tier) for about a year. I wanted a reliable e-mail service I could use for my freelance work and a few of my personal websites that did not harvest all of my data. ProtonMail was more expensive than pretty much any other e-mail service, presumably because they force you to buy their password manager, VPN, drive, and calendar solutions. I did not need all of these solutions and never used them, nor did I want super-secure e-mail. Nevertheless, I signed up for a 2-year Business plan because of the good reviews, 15 custom domains, and the unlimited SimpleLogin addresses. The first surprise came when I tried to set up my e-mail client. Turns out that Protonmail does not offer SMTP/IMAP and there is no desktop app either (well, there is but it's in closed beta for ages). Using other clients requires installing and configuring protonmail-bridge (a sort of e-mail proxy).
This is an acceptable workaround for PCs, however, it is complicated and often impossible to configure for web servers, in particular virtualized or hosted setups. I tried a few community alternatives to protonmail-bridge but ended up having to restart the services daily because the bridge would randomly crash without any warning or error. Support was next to useless. Taking days or weeks to reply with boilerplate text that had nothing to do with my case. Eventually, I decided to migrate all business-critical mail away from Proton. MXRoute offers unlimited custom domains (and a lot of other cool things Proton does not) for a lifetime price that is equal to a yearly subscription to Proton, so I went with them. I decided to cancel my Proton subscription to avoid being charged for another 2 years. Worst of all was what happened when I tried to cancel: despite having paid for 2 years, as soon as I canceled my subscription, I INSTANTLY and WITHOUT WARNING lost access to all premium features for the remainder of the period (about 1 year). This means that all of the addresses I created for custom domains were deleted (luckily I had already migrated them). It also meant that all of my e-mail clients stopped receiving or sending mail because protonmail-bridge is not available for free-tier... Even Google lets you use the remainder of your subscription when canceling...
Even my SimpleLogin aliases are going to be disabled because - get this - since Protonmail bought SimpleLogin and bundled it with their product, aliases are disabled when you downgrade (instead of just restricting your ability to create more like SimpleLogin used to to). I begged support to convert my credit to a SimpleLogin or even a Proton subscription but they refused. My only option is to purchase a significantly more expensive monthly subscription for 5 months (instead of the 9 I had left). Maybe ProtonMail was at some point customer-oriented. But my experience with them has been the opposite: overpriced, restrictive, unfriendly money-grabbers. Which frankly leads me to question their privacy and security claims as well.

Vorteile:

zero-access encryption, unlimited SimpleLogin addresses, custom domains

Nachteile:

- They force you to purchase their Drive, Calendar, VPN and Password Manager which means even the cheapest plan is very expensive compared to competitors. - There is no desktop app and using other clients requires installing and configuring protonmail-bridge (an e-mail server proxy) - The custom domains are useless because they do not offer SMTP/IMAP servers and protonmail-bridge does not work on any sort of virtualized webserver setup -> understandable because of the E2E encryption. - Their support is slow to reply and usually replies with boilerplate text that is not helpful or relevant. - I deactivated my subscription with 1 year remaining and instantly lost access to *all* premium features without any warning.

My Go-To Choice for Moving Away from Gmail

Kommentare: A lot of the problem I'm solving has to do with 19 years of wrangling a Gmail inbox until it became a hot mess of unread emails from lists I didn't remember subscribing to. Now that I'm a more mature email consumer, I expect that the new digs at ProtonMail won't get that way. I'm instantly unsubscribing/spam-labeling mass mail that I didn't ask for instead of "letting it ride."ProtonMail has a simpler interface, simply because it has fewer features ... features which I seldom used in Gmail anyway. Sometimes less is more.I'm happy with it. It's not "free" like Gmail and some other offerings, but it's solid, it's simple, it's privacy-centric, and it offers the features I need.

Vorteile:

After nearly two decades using Gmail, I decided to make a change. I had operated a free ProtonMail account for some time, but since I was also using their VPN and password management products, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade to "Mail Plus" -- unlimited daily messages instead of the weak 150-message limit for a free account, 15Gb of space on their "Drive" storage utility, etc.So far, so good. For about $5 US a month (less if you pay annually or biennially), it's a simple email interface with strong encryption available to protect privacy. It does at least as good a job at catching spam as Gmail, maybe a little better. The paid upgrade comes with one custom domain (if you host your own site you can create MX records and use ProtonMail as the domain catch-all, etc. if you prefer to not just have your host forward stuff).Anyone who's been at the same Gmail address since 2004 likely -- like me -- has an overflowing inbox full of newsletters you may or may not have actually subscribed to or want anymore. I've been selectively -- VERY selectively -- moving subscriptions I want over to ProtonMail and drawing my Gmail inbox down toward the abandonment point.

Nachteile:

My one and only one criticism of ProtonMail is with their "Drive" product. In theory, it works like Google Drive or DropBox -- you can store data there and access it directly from your desktop. Unfortunately, at the moment it only offers a Windows desktop application for doing that, so Mac, ChromeOS, and Linux users (I'm that last niche) are out of luck. When and if they release a Linux app, I'll probably abandon DropBox.