My grievances with Proton

Off Topic
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Yes.

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What priority do you think proton should give the change you propose on their roadmap?

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I’m not in a position to determine what level of priority this should take. My point is simply that a change is warranted.

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I’m not sure how you’ve reached that conclusion and I don’t think there’s much chance it’s going to happen. It’s not very likely to be something that’s supported by the paying users…

I think the proton-free plan is overly generous already, i’ve been using it for 10 years. If you want to compare to Tuta, they also don’t support your aliases once you’ve downgraded to the free plan. In fact, in order to downgrade to the free plan you first have to manually deactivate each of your aliases. Something I’m in the process of doing right now.

The simplelogin offer is astonishing and my advice, since it matches your needs so much better than proton, is get it while you can.

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The reasoning has been exhaustively explained in this thread. You are welcome to re-read the discussion, but I will not be reiterating it.

Yes, I will consider it.

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Let us know how you get on!

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I’m 2nd year in and I got 15GB this year. I think I last year it was 10GB.

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10 to 15 GB every year sounds a like A LOT.

What type of Proton subcription do you have?

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On a certain level I get it since it’s human nature to be frustrated when you lose access to something. However, I think it’s ironic that, when proton offers something for free, the response on here is often that they are exploitative or scumbags for not giving even more for free. It does not follow logically or morally that being given something for free entitles one to receive even more.

I do think the interaction between proton pass aliases, hide my email aliases, simple login aliases under a proton linked (ie sign in with proton) account, simple login aliases on an account not linked to proton, main proton email, secondary proton domain emails, and merged proton accounts can be quite confusing.

Consolidating the aliases under one system in proton pass would help. I’m sure people would complain there too, as it could mean free aliases decreasing or subscription prices going up for people who now subscribe through simplelogin.io instead of proton.me. Regardless, I have to admit it’s currently easy to get confused about how things work as an end user.

Edit: What I’m trying to say here: I wonder how much less frustration there would be with Proton if the different services worked in consistent and predictable ways.

The real frustration for people may not be that X happened, but that they predicted Y and got X. Then assert they “should have” gotten Y and get mad at Proton when the real issue is that they were not able to easily understand how it works. This is a problem people usually don’t have with amazon, google, etc, for all their faults.

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I’m not entirely sure if someone already mentioned this since this is a long thread, but Proton changed its alias policy to match SimpleLogin some time ago, so now all the aliases you create in Proton Pass will continue to work, even if you stop paying. You just can’t create any new ones: Reddit - Please wait for verification

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I didn’t know that. The op isn’t using pass though, they are using the extra email addresses in mail plus with + aliasing.

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This is where I think proton are at fault, their aliasing service should be included with the mail plus package, instead you have to use their password manager.

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I think Proton is getting singled out unfairly. A large grievance on here is the subscription lock-in due to losing additional Proton domain alias email addresses if you downgrade your mail plus or proton unlimited subscription. (Proton Pass and SimpleLogin actually let you keep using your aliases after your subscription ends).

Should you feel entitled to keep using additional pm.me or protonmail.com email domains after you subscription ends? Well, it depends on your perspective.

It might sound harsh given you could have kept using additional proton email addresses if you used them with free accounts from the start. Though, this is against Proton’s terms of service. Proton also makes it difficult to juggle multiple free accounts (their mobile clients for example only let you sign into one free account at a time).

But I think the main issue here is that for a lot of Proton users, this is their first experience with paying for email, which means they have different expectations.

If you were to go with another paid email provider, they would also restrict your ability to receive email to their domain after you cancel your subscription. The only ones that let you keep using it are the ones that offer a permanent free tier. This is why it’s recommended to purchase your own custom domain if you go that route to avoid vendor lock-in.

Proton is actually MORE accommodating than other paid providers because they have a free tier and will at least let you hold onto your main proton email address after you downgrade to the free tier. And as mentioned, you get to also hold onto your Proton Pass and SimpleLogin aliases. Further, Proton also doesn’t reuse email domains after you cancel a subscription or delete your account (from what I remember) whereas other email providers do. So there’s less of a concern that if you don’t keep paying, a bad actor could get full access to your former email domain and use it for nefarious purposes.

But for free email users, they never had to worry that they would lose access to their gmail, outlook, Yahoo, etc email address by not paying. Your gmail address felt like yours until Google was no more, which isn’t likely to happen any time soon. They could lose it because of other reasons (like terms of service breaches, inactivity policies, forgetting login credentials, etc), but it has otherwise not been a pressing concern for most users.

Like many complaints against Proton, a lot of grievances could be avoided by clearer communication to highlight product shortcomings. I don’t know if many people would bother with their additional pm.me etc aliases if they understood they would permanently lose them if they cancel their subscription. They might choose to instead purchase a custom domain and/or use Proton Pass/SimpleLogin aliases instead.

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Proton is being “singled out” because this thread was about my own experience with Proton and my grievances with them. I have a grievance with them specifically because I used their service.

This is wrong. I bothered with @pm.me aliases because when your subscription ends, you can still receive emails sent to your @pm.me variant; just not send. At least, if you can receive an email by that alias, you can inform your contacts that you are using the free @proton.me address moving forward. You do not “lose” your @pm.me aliases in the same way as you lose your other Proton aliases.

Additional Proton addresses are entirely disabled; you can’t send nor receive emails. So any prospective contacts who send emails to those aliases will be sending emails into a black hole. You will not be informed if contact was attempted, nor can you redirect them to your free address, or another address for future contact.

The reason this caught me so off-guard is because it’s a break of pattern of everything else Proton has set. When your subscription ends, your @pm.me alias becomes receive only, your SimpleLogin aliases remain functional, but your Proton aliases just simply die. And the reason why I made this mistake is because I trusted Proton to not make me feel trapped.

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For clarification, I was referring to additional Proton emails you get when I referred to the additional pm.me. It gets confusing to identify what we’re talking about since there are multiple types of proton “aliases” (mail plus aliases, proton pass/SimpleLogin). You also get access to different domains for each additional email (protonmail.com, proton.me, pm.me, etc). I wasn’t referring specifically to pm.me domains, but rather, the additional proton email addresses you get with the paid tier of Proton Mail.

And yes, I understand why you feel betrayed. But as I mentioned, a similar policy exists among most paid-only email providers. Proton should do a better job communicating this, especially if they’re going to target existing Gmail etc users with their marketing. They should assume their target customers have no knowledge of these types of paid email shortcomings.

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I’m having the same issue. From my understanding, there is unfortunately no good exit strategy with aliases.

Either you use Proton, addy, duckduckgo, you’re essentially locked-in. I feel this is an issue with aliases in general, and not with Proton in this case.

Unfortunately, you can’t just export all your aliases to another service like you would with a password manager.

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Unlimited in year 1, Duo in year 2.

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I think some clarification is due because there is a lot of equivocation regarding the term “alias” so I want to make the terminology clearer.

The Proton email address system is convoluted. There are five types of email addresses within the Proton ecosystem detailed in their FAQ. Though their FAQ leaves some very important nuance, I will quote it here:

I will explain these types of addresses as I have understood them, because this might offer us the opportunity to review my thinking and clear up any possible misconceptions that have occurred throughout this thread. Whether my understanding justifies my conclusion is up to you to decide.

Since “Organization user addresses” are irrelevant here, I will not be covering them.

For illustrative purposes, through these examples assume that my Proton username is bob@proton.me. I will be using it throughout this post.

1. Plus addresses

These are what I have been referring to as +suffix aliases. This is the most basic type of “alias” that is provided by virtually every modern email service. Plus addresses serve as a way to sort your correspondence by allowing the sender to optionally send email to a determined subcategory. They are especially useful with filters. For example, you may subscribe to a newsletter with the alias bob+news@proton.me. You could configure your inbox to automatically sort all of the emails sent to this address into a “News” folder.

These aliases are infinite in theory, are technically zero-cost, and available in all plans. They technically do not “exist” in the sense of existing in a record, i.e., they are transient. They offer a practical utility, but they do not provide any sort of benefit in the privacy space, since the true email address of the recipient is trivially knowable to the sender. In this manner, participation in plus-addressing is entirely voluntary.

The limitations are succinctly expressed in SimpleLogin’s FAQ, as follows:

Email subaddressing, also known as the plus (+) trick, popularized by Gmail and supported by some email services, allows you to create new email addresses by appending “+” to your current email address. Says your email is name@proton.me, you can quickly create another address like name+facebook@proton.me for Facebook, name+groupon@proton.me for Groupon, etc.
Though practical, it has some downsides:

  • You cannot reply from the + address: your real email will appear as the sender.
  • The + trick is well-known and some websites don’t allow sign-ups with email addresses that contain +.
  • Using + trick doesn’t protect your privacy: one can easily remove the + part to have your real email. If your + address appears in the data breach, your real address is probably also in the hands of spammers. You could check whether your email is leaked using website like have i been pwned
  • By removing the + part, advertisers can link these + addresses together to have your browsing history.

Any Proton user can “have” as many plus-addresses as they wish. In fact, I would argue that you do not even “create” these addresses, and really, it’s your senders that create them for you. Plus-addresses are an ephemeral logistical construct.

When your subscription ends, nothing in regards to these aliases changes.

2. The SimpleLogin aliases

These are aliases offered by Proton’s SimpleLogin service, and they serve to compartmentalize your online identity. They are not “disposable”, as they are meant to be permanent aliases. From SimpleLogin’s own FAQ:

SimpleLogin alias are permanent as opposed to the temporary email addresses created on services like temp-mail.org.

SimpleLogin also doesn’t store the emails, they are stored in your mailbox.

SimpleLogin is simply a different product for a different need.

These aliases may look something like google.fasting85@passmail.net (following the pattern <servicename>.<random-word><numbers>@<aliasdomain>. They look nothing like Proton addresses, or like your Proton address, because they are designed for the express purpose of masking it.

SimpleLogin was designed to address what is essentially my threat model: defeating compiling cross-referenced data of a victim through the means of data breaches or data brokers. From SimpleLogin’s own FAQ:

An email alias is random and there’s no way to link 2 email aliases to the same person.

For email aliases created with a catch-all domain, they can only be linked together if the domain is known to have the catch-all option enabled. There’s no way to detect whether a domain has this option enabled or to know how many people are using a domain, a bad actor usually ignores these email addresses altogether.

Further:

If you use a different email alias for each website and one of your aliases starts receiving emails it isn’t supposed to receive, you can be sure that this alias is either leaked or sold.

For example, if your email alias for Facebook receives emails from LinkedIn, that means Facebook has sold your data to LinkedIn or they’ve had a data breach. Either way, you can just disable this alias. Your real email address stays hidden.

Data brokers, a $200 billion industry use your email address as the common denominator to match users between different datasets. Having thousands of email addresses make their job harder and your privacy better.

Given that SimpleLogin aliases are meant to be permanent, by their own statement, and also by practical necessity, the user expects, and rightfully so, that SimpleLogin aliases will be permanent. And they are: when your subscription expires, these aliases remain with the ability to both send and receive, by SimpleLogin’s own FAQ:

When your subscription ends, all aliases you created continue working normally, both on receiving and sending emails. Concretely:

  • All aliases/domains/directories/mailboxes you have created are kept and continue working normally.
  • You cannot create new aliases if you exceed the free plan limit, i.e. have more than 10 aliases.
  • As features like catch-all or directory allow you to create aliases on-the-fly, those aliases cannot be automatically created if you have more than 10 aliases.
  • You cannot add new domain, directory or mailbox.

For example, if you have 100 aliases by the time your subscription ends, these 100 aliases will continue receiving and sending emails normally. You cannot however create new aliases.

So when your subscription ends, your SimpleLogin aliases remain functional in perpetuity.

3. Additional Proton addresses (Proton aliases)

These are what I have been referring to as “Proton aliases”. This has been a source of much equivocation throughout this discussion, and justly so, because Proton’s addressing model is complex. From Proton’s FAQ:

If you subscribe to a Proton Mail paid plan, you can create additional email addresses, also known as aliases, which you can use instead of your free personal email addresses. And all Proton Mail users can create unlimited extra addresses, known as +aliases, by adding + after your username in one of your free personal email addresses.

If you have a paid plan, you can create at least 10 additional Proton aliases. For example, the paid user bob@proton.me can create the aliases banana@proton.me, apple@proton.me, and so on, and be able to send and receive emails through these aliases. As such, they can serve to both compartmentalize online identities and sort correspondence.

Unlike plus-addressing (+suffix aliases), participation in these aliases is not optional because the underlying, true Proton mailbox cannot be discovered by the sender. And unlike SimpleLogin aliases, Proton aliases are directly integrated with your Proton Mail mailbox, and function as a part of a traditional email alias system. These are the most important ways in which they differ from one another.

To clarify: An additional address does not come with an additional account, storage space, calendars, or anything beyond an additional label from which you can send and receive emails. In many ways, SimpleLogin aliases and Proton aliases are functionally identical.

These aliases, namely Proton aliases, are entirely disabled when your subscription ends. You cannot send, nor receive emails from these aliases.

4. The @pm.me aliases.

A @pm.me alias, in its most basic form, is a Proton alias (like I’ve explained in 3.), but ending with a @pm.me domain. It is a subset of Proton aliases, as in, every “@pm.me alias” is-a “Proton alias”. However, there is an exception.

When you first upgrade your Proton account, you are conferred a permanent @pm.me alias as a benefit for having upgraded your account. This alias is granted in the form of your primary address, (e.g. bob@proton.me gets bob@pm.me) and has many special properties. For clarity’s sake, I will call this alias the “special @pm.me alias”.

First, the special @pm.me alias exists in a Schrodinger’s Cat state of being a real Proton alias and not really a Proton alias. For starters, it is not a “true Proton alias” because it does not count towards your alias limit. It also differs from “true Proton aliases” because it cannot be disabled nor deleted. So if you are on a plan that only allows you to create up to X Proton aliases, the amount of Proton aliases you can truly have is [X + special @pm.me alias]. In the FAQ, this is what Proton calls “your short domain”.

When you activate your short domain:

  • Both addresses can be used to send and receive emails. For example, the user Eric Norbert can use both eric.norbert@protonmail.com and eric.norbert@pm.me.
  • Once activated, a short domain address (@pm.me) can’t be disabled or deleted.

Your short domain address doesn’t count toward your account address limit. However, additional addresses created with the @pm.me domain will count toward your limit.

Practically, this special @pm.me alias is not a privacy feature. It acts as a visual improvement over the longer name, for which Proton customers are encouraged to upgrade. Its benefits are purely aesthetic. From Proton’s own FAQ:

Short domain email addresses make it easier to type out your Proton Mail email address and share it with others.

Strangely, another special behavioral property that the “special @pm.me alias” has, is that when your subscription ends, it does not behave like a “true Proton alias” either, but also not like a SimpleLogin alias. Once your subscription ends, your “special @pm.me alias” will continue to be able to receive emails, but not send. From Proton’s FAQ:

If you downgrade from a paid plan to Proton Free, your short domain address will be converted to receive-only. You can still receive messages sent to your @pm.me address, but you won’t be able to send emails from it.

Relevant to this thread, we have four different types of aliases, discussed throughout this thread with varying levels of equivocation, and each behaves differently when your subscription expires.

To recap, there are four different types of subscription-expiry behavior:

  1. +suffix aliases remain fully operational across plans;
  2. SimpleLogin aliases remain fully operational across plans, but you cannot create new ones;
  3. Proton aliases are entirely disabled, being unable to send nor receive emails, EXCEPT:
  4. @pm.me aliases are entirely disabled as well, with the exception of the “special @pm.me alias”, which becomes receive-only.

These are four different subscription-expiry behaviors across functionally similar constructs. The fact that I did not expect Proton aliases to behave in their most unreasonable, personally damaging way, is entirely reasonable, given Proton’s track record of being a straightforward company.

Now, was I in the wrong for even making the assumption that Proton aliases would remain operational, or at least receive-only, when my subscription ended?

Specifically, Proton’s FAQ states that Proton aliases (additional addresses) are more suited for “permanent use”, much like the SimpleLogin FAQ states that SimpleLogin aliases are suited for permanent use:

If you need an address for more widespread and permanent usage, then an additional address is better. For example, you might have john.smith@proton.me for your personal email, while having acmeinc@proton.me for your small business.

Further, I will justify my thinking by saying that Proton never made it clear that this was an existing behavior. I have checked the FAQ pages and Terms of Service most directly relevant to alias behavior, and could not find any documentation of how additional Proton-domain addresses are handled when a subscription ends.

Terms of Service (last updated 31 March 2026): Terms of Service | Proton
FAQ: How to create and use an additional address (alias) | Proton
FAQ: Short domain (@pm.me) email addresses | Proton
FAQ: Types of email addresses and aliases | Proton

In truth, the situation is more nuanced than what was earlier insinuated, that I simply want things for free. In actuality, the only reason that I know, for sure, that Proton aliases are disabled when the subscription ends, is because I specifically inquired with Proton’s Customer Support regarding it.

With that, I stand by my position, that Proton’s alias system is designed as a subscription lock-in, with catastrophic consequences for the consumer. I do not want “free things”, much less do I feel “entitled” to these aliases. In reality, I actually just want to be able to not lose an entire open channel of contact with people and services that I rely on and rely on me, and the fact that Proton can leverage this ability, behind a smokescreen of pattern subversions, while having everyone else defend them for it, is frankly disturbing.

I invite @Proton_Team to review this thread and address this grievance.

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Aliases exit strategy
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Custom domain aliasing provides portability

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If having to change your aliases is catastrophic for you then you really should have put more thought into how you implemented them.

This is on you, not proton.

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