I give OP his due, that was a fairly well researched and defended statement.
Normally where I am from and the corners of the internet I have lurked. I see a lot of “grievances” that are usually people who don’t want to pay, but feel entitled to still have access. If this was posted bit earlier, I think most would have agreed with you off the bat.
Proton I feel has tried desperately to expand itself to take on Google, which I think is great to get people out of the Google Suite Ecosystem. But at the expense of a disjointed service and policies, that you could very much argue (and I agree) should be fairly uniform across the board. Not different.
Although I do sympathize a little more with OP. I feel the lesson to learn for anyone here, is that if you are a subscription user to any services. Do not expect ownership.
If you set up your aliasing properly then you should know exactly who has who each alias - for me this is all kept in Pass.
If you know that you will no longer be subscribing then you will need to go through, one by one, and update the contact address with those peole/services to an address that you do have access to after the subscription expires.
Do not subscribe to any service without expecting the service provider to try to lock you in. It is in a business’ commercial interest to configure their service to make you dependent, and to increase the financial, logistical and emotional costs of unsubscribing as a form of deterrence and coercive brand loyalty, no matter how well regarded they are.
I thought Proton was above this. Boy, I was foolish.
I think this is a relevant, bigger issue that privacy-minded people should be aware of. I see a lot of advice to use email aliases in privacy tools overviews, but not a lot of thought has yet gone into what happens if you can no longer pay for the service - how do you backtrack and ‘undo’ all those logins? I’m guessing the only way in OP’s case is to pay for an extra month and change account user names one service at a time.
Despite some of the criticism towards OP here, and despite a narrow focus (Proton), I think it’s good OP has raised this issue. It needs to be considered in how we give privacy tools advice in general that the experience of paying for services is not the same as ZenByte says:
I would add it’s not just Proton, but all paid privacy services. The onus is not only on those companies to give honest warnings, but it might also be worth considering adding appropriate caveats to the advice we give others regarding privacy tools.
The alternative to continuing with the subscription is to switch provider. As someone who’s just done it, in my case switching from custom domain aliasing to addy.io, it’s not as bad as it seems.
I do agree with the point about warnings, maybe the first time a new user creates an alias a pop up could be shown explaining what happens if the subscription is terminated.
I utilize a free Proton Mail account in combination with a paid SimpleLogin subscription. Approximately 20 critical aliases are routed to Proton, while the remainder are directed to Gmail. This setup has operated seamlessly without any issues for several years.
I feel the need to reiterate that this is also what happens if you aren’t using aliases and a paid email subscription runs out- or google mistakenly bans you, or whatever.
I have to agree with @The_Learner’s point that they are targeting google suite users, though. Being painfully clear in that case would be ideal, whereas instead we get… whatever Proton is doing now with all their overlapping services and backends.
People should probably think more about if they need an alias too, rather than just sticking an alias on everything (eg, government sites like OP did, where they know your identity just as much as your friends/family), even if you aren’t sure you would be able to change it in time to prevent problems.
Switching emails is mostly not that bad, though. OP could have switched a lot of emails in the time they spent impressing us with their well researched statements. Though I do appreciate the lesson in the four types of proton aliases and the intersection with subscription expiration behavior.
I use aliases with Tuta, but only a handful: one for junk, one personal, one for work, etc. I’ve never seen the appeal of creating a separate email for every service or account, even though I understand it’s a good thing to do.
I do make one for everything myself, but with duckduckgo that isn’t any harder than reusing aliases. Plus there is no sub fee and I trust duckduckgo would at least try to give me time to switch over if they ended the service. The minor and only universal benefit is that a unique email will be leaked if the account with the alias gets hacked.
Almost all of these however are with accounts where either it would not be a big deal to lose them or there is an account recovery method in place through tech support. Losing all of the emails suddenly woukd merely be annoying and time consuming, otherwise I would not use an alias.
for sites which (annoyingly) use email address as login ID a dedicated email address adds a bit of extra security.
if a contact starts spamming or if you stop using it you can easily block it
you can block notifications by alias which is good for contacts which send a lot of spam but you don’t want to block. Or if you only want to get notified by your most important contacts.
for sites used only sometimes (eg agoda) you can leave them deactivated while you aren’t using them and avoid interim spam.
I have a feeling that the mods aren’t locking this thread to avoid complaints about being biased towards Proton or something. I think this thread should be locked. I read most of it and it is a bunch of privileged nothingburger complaints, not even about privacy. Just use it if you want to—it is great for most people. I like Proton fine and they let me have a bunch of free accounts.
Using multiple free accounts violates Proton’s Terms of Service and provisions more resources for yourself than you’re allowed to, which is an interesting position from which to call others “privileged”.
Free unlimited alias providers exist (e.g., Duck). However, there is unfortunately no seamless, easy way to switch from one alias provider to another. You have to replace each alias from each account manually, and it is a tedious, long process. I know this from personal experience. I’ve been using aliases for years, long before Proton Pass or Simple Login existed. The provider I used allows unlimited aliases in the free tier. But when Proton Pass launched, I wanted to switch.
I have over 600 aliases with my old alias provider. It’s been over 2 years, and I have yet to replace even a third of them with Proton Pass aliases. I’m lucky that my old provider is free. But if I was paying for it, I would definitely have had to make a more pragmatic plan.
I’m not convinced that there will ever be an easy way to replace one alias provider for another. If you are paying for one, and you can’t afford it anymore, you will have to plan in advance and get to work on switching to a free provider. But if you have a lot of aliases (100+), you may need more than a month.
This is also why I have never upgraded to Proton Unlimited. Every year I’m offered a discount for my first year, which I could probably afford, but precisely because I am not confident I could afford it at full price the year after, I don’t take the offer.
10GB after 1 year of Unlimited, 15GB after 1 year of Duo (2nd year overall).
I just checked, and my total storage available on Duo is 2063GB. Initially you get 2048GB, so it seems I lost the 10GB extra when I moved up to Duo, which apparently isn’t supposed to happen - I will email support to confirm.
It seems that these are the annual storage bonuses:
Terms of Use
Am I allowed to have multiple free Proton Mail accounts?
Generally, having multiple free accounts is not considered an acceptable use of our service, as it has often been misused and abused. However, if you have 2 or 3 accounts that you don’t use for bulk signups, creating free accounts for others, sending spam, and other prohibited activities listed in our Terms and Conditions, you have no reason to be worried.
Does your Duo subscription give you access to the whole Unlimited suite just for 2 people?
That is so lame on Proton’s part, especially when you didn’t downgrade but upgraded your subscription. IMO, the gift should be permanent regardless of if you stay subscribed or not. Otherwise, don’t call it a gift.
Are you 100% sure of that? Do you believe that because you didn’t downgrade your account?
Let me know what Proton says.
I can’t remember if it’s with Proton VPN Plus or Proton Unlimited, or both, but it is my understanding that when you pay for Proton VPN, you can connect up to 10 devices.
Do you get even more devices with Proton Duo? If so, how many?