Same difference, ads are poison and forcing them on the user, free or not, is very bad business.
I understand you feel that way. I think most of the alternative to large corporation email services require payment to remove the signature or customize it.
- Tuta: Free accounts include a default signature that can be changed*
- Mailbox.org: Offers paid plans starting at âŹ1/month, which allow signature customization
- Posteo: Paid service at $1/month; allows signature customization.
- Mailfence: Free accounts include a default signature; removal requires a paid plan
- Skiff mail: Free accounts include a default signature; removal requires a paid plan
- Startmail: Paid service; allows signature customization
This seems a pretty common industry practice for email services to include the signature customization for only paying customers. Some do not even offer a free tier
Corrected an error on Tuta
This is not an issue on Tuta, no. You can remove the signature for free.
You are correct, I missed this since I have not used it for some time.
Well, nothing is free and the freemium model is the only sustainable one (when there are high maintenance cost).
It is annoying but I donât think itâs a big annoyance and you can always remove it manually.
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I didnât even know about that. I found out about it by reading the article. Does that mean that Proton does not have access to emails sent to us from Gmail user? They donât make copies of that split seconds when they can read our emails?
IMO, that is irrelevant because Google has the power to do so, and that should be enough to alarm anyone who cares about privacy. Especially when you combine it with the fact that Google is an advertising company, and they have shared their usersâ data with authorities many times.
I somewhat disagree. I am going to speculate that, like OP, most of us rarely send emails to friends and family. We text them. Hence, as people who care about privacy, we should go through the trouble of password protecting emails we send to Gmail users, regardless of how inconvenient it is for them.
That said, one could argue that the experience of sending password protecting emails to Gmail users is subpar for both parties because, if my understanding is correct, and assuming the Gmail user replies through Proton, neither of them will have a long term record of those emails because they expire after 28 days. If the email is important long term, I can see why that would become an issue.
Agreed. That said, IMO, Proton should aim to be successful enough so that some of their free products have very rich features. Proton Mail would be a great start. There are freemium apps that I have used without upgrading for years precisely because I was very satisfied with the free features.
That feature is far from perfect. Iâve had many emails put in the wrong category. Some even go to SPAM when they are not SPAM.
I agree. But if you have to use WhatsApp, you should refuse to share your contacts, but also enable the self-destruct timer for all your chats. The max is 90 days. The EFF just recently published an article on how WhatsApp and other messaging apps handle chat backups. I highly recommend it, especially for people who have to use WhatsApp for work.
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Personally, I think Protonâs advertising in email signatures is useful to promote privacy. I didnât think it was scummy until I realized it cannot be removed unless you are a paid subscriber. This is news to me, and youâve definitely changed my mind on this, and Iâll explain why later.
Although Proton Bridge not being free sucks, I wouldnât describe most of the things youâve denounced as scummy.
That being said, there are things that Proton does that I find âscummyâ:
1) NOT ALLOWING MULTIPLE PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS UNDER THE SAME ACCOUNT.
If you pay for Proton Mail Plus and you want to pay for Proton Pass Plus, Proton will not allow you to do so with your Proton Mail Plus account. You either have to upgrade to Proton Unlimited (more expensive!) or create a completely separate 2nd Proton account for Proton Pass Plus (impractical!). This is what I had to do.
I wrote to Proton about it, and they told me this was their marketing strategy and that they have no plans to allow multiple subscriptions under the same account.
It makes no sense to me because in both scenarios, Proton makes more money than if I just paid for Proton Mail Plus. They just make less if I create a separate account for Proton Pass Plus instead of upgrading to Proton Unlimited.
Proton has been around for over a decade, and the fact that they are deliberately creating a subpar experience for those who only wish to pay for 2 Proton products shows their disregard for their poorest paying users.
2) FORCING PEOPLE TO WAIT 2 MINUTES TO SWITCH COUNTRIES ON THE FREE VERSION OF PROTON VPN.
In and of itself, you could argue that this is not scummy at all. What makes it dip its toes into scummy is the fact this is a limitation that Proton recently introduced. For years, they didnât have this limitation.
Does this limitation bother me all that much? No. 99.99% of the time I donât need to be connected to a specific country. And I also recognize that Proton made some major improvements on their free version.
What bothers me is that this limitation didnât exist before a couple of months ago. This is why not being able to change your email signature is scummy, because, as far as I can remember, that didnât use to be the case.
From my experience, I have never, ever, EVER, felt compelled to pay for a freemium app after the developers removed features that were free. Never. Evernote did that, and they never got a dime from me. Instead, Iâm paying for both Notesnook and Standard Notes.
TL;DR:
Introducing new limitations on the free versions of Proton VPN and Proton Mail is to me nothing short of enshittification and a dark pattern. You could argue itâs mild (for now), but itâs still that. On the other end of the spectrum, I believe it is undeniable that deliberately not allowing multiple subscriptions under the same Proton account to coerce users to upgrade to Unlimited qualifies as full-blown aggressive dark pattern and enshittification.
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This review reads like the employee was on a deadline and tried out Proton with no plans to stay.
That is possible and not unprecedented. Tuta actually details when this occurs in their yearly transparency report. I donât recall if Proton has ever been forced to this.
- All messages in your Proton Mail mailbox are stored with zero-access encryption. This means we cannot read any of your messages or hand them over to third parties. This includes messages sent to you by non-Proton Mail users, although keep in mind if an email is sent to you from Gmail, Gmail likely retains a copy of that message as well.
This is very unfortunate, I personally think flexible pricing would attract more business.
That being said, I personally donât need all services that offered by Proton Unlimited, but I grouped up several persons and joined Proton Family Plan instead.
I hear you on flexible pricing, but I want to clarify something. Iâm all for Proton bundling multiple products at a discount. For e.g., offering Proton Mail Plus and Proton Pass Plus together at a lower price than if you got them both individually. That being said, I do donât want to be forced to pay for a service I donât want or need.
For e.g., if Proton offers a bundled subscription for Proton Mail Plus, Proton Pass Plus, and Proton VPN plus, but the option to only get Proton Pass Plus and Proton Mail Plus is not possible, that is a no go for me.
Thatâs why I didnât use the term âbundled subscriptionâ in my original comment, because it can mean anything. And to me, itâs important that I am able to have Ă la carte experience, and pay only for the products I want. I do not want to be forced into paying for something I donât want.
I donât need all the services offered by Proton Unlimited either. And even if I did, I cannot afford it. Moreover, itâs not just about not being able to afford it. Many people in the privacy community donât want to put all their eggs in the Proton basket. Theyâd rather use a different VPN provider, for example. That makes sense to me too.
Thats exactly what I meant âflexible pricingâ, they should allow people to customize the own âservice package" , or like pay as ypu go pricing or eaxh ervice, instead of forcing people into just few offerings.
The reason i brought up Family Plan is that it is cheaper.
I hear you. Is getting the family plan that paying for 2 Proton Products individually for you? Donât you find what Proton is doing to be a crappy business practice?
It is clear that there are no technical preventing Proton from allowing multiple subscriptions under the same account. The reason they donât allow it is to coerce users into their most expensive individual plan.
More people need to call them out for it.
I donât either. I use e-mail to contact customer services or apply for jobs. For those purposes, I wouldnât expect anyone to comply with my request to set-up PGP. For friends and family, it would depend who it is, but we use E2EE messengers for that now.
There is no enshitification as those restrictions were always present.
Also, Proton is already very generous to allow unlimited bandwidth for their VPN for free.
What are you referring to specifically?
As far as Proton VPN is concerned, I know for a fact that you didnât have to wait 2 min to switch countries before. Iâve been using it for years, and noticed it immediately in the update.
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Donât know if anyone else shared this, but literally a week later, the same website posted the following article:
Survey shows users are ready to ditch Gmail for this ultra-private email service.
It is curious that they wonât even name Proton Mail in the title this time.
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I did opposite of what I was recommending to others before and I am ditching Proton and went for Fastmail. For cloud photo storage I am moving to Google One. Fastmail decision is questionable from privacy perspective but I am well aware that Google is a nightmare, but there are no alternatives, except for Apple iCloud Photos I think.
For photos and videos, I tried Ente, despite their outrageous pricing, I really gave them a chance, but they failed at my initial tests. No background upload support, no larger than 4 GB file support, no importing of place and location information, no importing of people, no proper duplicate management.
Proton Photos is just a file backup, you canât even search photos. It is the worst one at the moment.
For emails, you can remember me complaining about Proton Mail and SL a while back, and searching for alternatives. I am finally able to do what I was asking with aliases with Fastmail. They have issues too, donât get me wrong, especially non-encrypted mailbox is a big problem, but my mails are faster, and I have like 100 custom domain support, unlike Proton. I can directly send emails from my aliases, which is also a huge bonus.
For normal file storage, I will most likely use Google Drive, but along with Cryptomator.
For my notes, I have to stick with Onenote, because other apps couldnât support file attachments, pictures, PDF extracts, writings and tables on the screen like Onenote did. I tried Obsidian for it, but it didnât support those mandatory features that I needed.
For VPN, I already have Windscribe, maybe I will get Mullvad as backup.
For Password Manager, I am sticking to my good old 1Password.
I was a strong defender for Proton but after the issues that I encountered, and their lack of interest to acknowledge and solve them, I decided to stop paying for them. My family sub has like 7 months left but no matter.
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You can also send email from proton aliases as well, you just need to add the recipient as a contact of that alias. And then you can copy that âtailoredâ recipient email address and send email. Well, not convenient, but doable.
For drive I have zero experience with Proton as I rely on my Synology mainly.
How are we meant to take these âjournalistsâ seriously anymore⌠Iâm so glad forums like these exist for people who want to actually find out whatâs what and not clickbait articles to increase their revenues.