ProtonMail
Secure email based in Switzerland.
Summary
Our users have written 40 comments and reviews about ProtonMail, and it has gotten 604 likes
- Developed by Proton Technologies AG
- Open Source and Freemium product.
- Subscription that costs between $0 and $30.
- Average rating of 3.5
- 77 alternatives listed
Popular alternatives
View allTop ProtonMail apps, plugins, extensions and add-ons
View allRecent user activities on ProtonMail
- StagnantPentagon thinks Tutanota is an alternative to ProtonMail
- 1q2w3e liked ProtonMail1q
- StagnantPentagon liked ProtonMail
Besides the fact that it is far away from the NSA, the encryption it provides is top notch. The GUI is extremely lovely, simple, and modern. I love it. I am slowly migrating from Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail to this. You should too.
Secure email with a great interface. When I started getting into privacy I was worried I would have to make a lot of tradeoffs with convenience, usability, aesthetics... Glad I didn't have to. I upgraded not because I needed the space but I love the service and the mission.
I try as much than I can't to avoid big corp like GAFAM and at the same time looking for open source and great product. I leave in Switzerland, which is a great country for individual privacy. Just for you info, Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of PGP, move from US to Switzerland to be more able protect his privacy.
I have few account with ProtonMail but, never use them on my smart device simply because I don't have Google Play on these device and when I download the ProtonMail APK it won't let's me login because it don't recognize my "GooglePlay" Account, which I think it's just wack to propose an alternative, claiming being secure and working for the privacy than forcing their user to have a Google Account after all.
Since than; I decide to go with Tutanota, which are in Germany, which still great for privacy and even if I still have to download the APK than install it, at least they don't force me to being authenticated by Google to use their App. O their also cheaper and the support is nicer.
Funny fact; en 2017; ProtonMail was victim of severals DDOS, which insane when you think about it because they are hosted at the CERN.
Tutanota have several major advantages over Protonmail:
Fewer DDoS attacks,
they developed search of encrypted email text via a local index file. Basically this means you can search the text of your emails, which is not possible in Protonmail unless you first download your email via their Bridge app,
Yubikey support (this is a limited advantage as they only support Yubikeys in Chrome (Google = yuck!) and Opera (based on Chrome and not open source). Support for Yubikey puts them ahead of Protonmail for 2-factor authentication (and therefore security) but it does not go far enough. Competitors (E.g. Fastmail (not encrypted) offer Yubikey support for all browsers).
Whichever plan you are paying for, you can always ask for more storage. In Protonmail, their Professional plan requires you to add users if you want to go beyond 5GB of storage -- a ridiculous requirement. Protonmail have not through through through their pricing strategy. I am a small business owner and I need something like 8GB for me as the only user, but I also need catch-all addresses. That means I either pay for the Professional package and don't get the storage, or I pay for Visionary, and pay through the nose for what should be stanard.
In the future, Protonmail's muscle, popularity, exposure and expertise will mean that they will win. They will become - in fact, they already have become - the default service for encrypted emailing. But they are also chronically distracted by mission creep. They have developed VPNs and ways of accessing email via the .onion network... and that's all fine. For example, charity workers in privacy-hostile environments, and human rights campaigners and journalists will be better off because of Protonmail, for sure. But if the mission is to move people from services like Gmail, Protonmail aren't doing nearly enough. Where is the search? Where is the calendaring? Where is the search by multiple labels?
Reply written over 3 years ago
The disclosure of collected data and thus the obvious lie regarding privacy protection is good example for a lot of self procplaimed "secure" software projects.
Whenever you are using something not completely open source and under your own control - be very careful whom you trust. What's next? Sending copies of mails to other initerested parties?
How can we be sure what is really going on behind the scenes. How strange that to every critical review there's some quick 5 star review following up - telling you how good and decent everything is. And of course this completely independed reviewer is not connected to the software itself whatsoever....
Public mail services are by definition compromised. Period.
ProtonMail logged IP address of French activist after order by Swiss authorities.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-address-of-french-activist-after-order-by-swiss-authorities/
"Your data, your rules"
Everyone beware! ProtonMail is not safe anymore, please read here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28427259
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/pil6xi/climate_activist_arrested_after_protonmail/
Works really well and it is privacy focused.