Until recently protonmail was one of the few remaining webmails that didn’t require a phone number or other personal info for signup, but now they ask for an email address and block disposable domains so they are basically a joke of what they used to be. What options are left for when you need a persistent (not disposable) anonymous and free email address that you can use normally for sending emails and that isn’t blocked everywhere?
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I don’t think Proton saves the email they ask you to verify a code. They only do this to ensure a real human is making an account. But using a VPN easily bypasses this issue but if you want anonymous, you can try Disroot.
Best to use a VPN and not Tor.
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For an email just to register a service I just use Internxt temp mail or safenote temp mailbox. As soon as it’s registered just close the tab and it’s gone. So simple in use.
Unless proton have changed drastically I think that’s the only reason they require an email address
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They did change the process recently, from what I’ve seen.
They used to offer the “captcha” option. Out of the last 5 times I’ve tried to create an account, I’ve only seen the captcha option once. Take that anecdotal data for whatever its worth.
I don’t know what goes into determining whether they offer you the captcha or not. I’ve gotten the captcha option with my VPN on (which seems like the most likely “fake account” trigger) and I’ve gotten the “email only” option when VPN has been off. 
As for emails on sign up - Proton says in their privacy policy that they store a hashed version of the email you use to sign up, so they can prevent people re-using the same email many times. It’s possible for law enforcement to compel them to hash a specific email and see if that email is in their database and which account it is connected to.
I tried to use temp email services (like https://reusable.email/) and found it worked a week ago and was recently blocked. (Which makes me wonder if they are looking at the plain text version of the domains people are using to sign up to scan for things like this.) I think other temp email services are blocked too. When I try to use https://www.emailnator.com/, it also gets blocked.
Which means you just have to use a real email address, which sucks.
___
EDIT: Actually it’s fairly easy to just get an email address on another privacy focused mail service, then use that to verify. As others mention below, you can get an account quickly on Tuta.com or Mailum.com and then use that to verify your Proton account.
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Bots and spam are real issues that must be combatted. Even then.. I don’t think email is the solution. Isn’t this the reason why they made their own CAPTCHA?! It’s absurd to require an email address in order to sign up for one.
@Proton_Team What say you? Is your CAPTCHA no longer viable?
I’m glad to have made my account before this became an issue.
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I think that whatever steps Proton takes to prevent abuse, that they find effective, are reasonable. We can’t expect a company to give away free resources—literally free, because they are not selling your data—and then allow abuse on that system. CAPTCHAs and such can be solved by humans and then used for abuse. I am not sure what the best way to preserve privacy while preventing abuse is, and it is an extremely hard problem to solve. I am grateful for the free private email, even if it is not anonymous.
If you want anonymous emails, I would recommend a provider focused on that like cockli or maybe one listed at Monerica.
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Have you check :
Tuta
infomaniak
disroot
?
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If you want something truly anonymous I guess you could use cock.li, they even have a Tor website. Pissmail is similar and supports 2FA, it has “worse” looking domains than the former tho (depends on who you ask I guess lol).
Disroot is also pretty good, you’ll have to wait 48h to get approved but after that it’s all good.
None of these providers are secure, keep this in mind. The mailboxes aren’t encrypted, use them only when you need anonymous accounts and not for anything important/personal.
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The problem is that unless a workaround is found, any email you use to sign up with protonmail will itself require personal info like a phone number to create, defeating the point of using protonmail for me and (I imagine) a large % of users. At this point you may as well just use gmail, yahoo or whatever. It’s irrelevant whether they (claim to) delete your signup email address or not.
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I havnt tried those providers (thanks) but as it’s known that protonmail has a policy of blocking disposable webmail domains it’s cat and mouse how long they will stay unblocked if they aren’t already.
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The whole USP of proton was that it had strong anonymity protections (although in reality no better than any other webmail provider in the 00s) they hadn’t gone down the route of asking for a phone #. Asking for a non-disposable email address is effectively the same thing via a back door and undermines the entire purpose except for anyone who believes their marketing. Tbh I noticed the direction of travel a long time ago . At one point it was still possible to create an account from a Tor exit node without email verification , this disappeared a while ago. Then they introduced another stupid policy about needing external email verification if you wanted to use proton for signing up to a web forum, for example. The latest development with blanket email verification simply marks the point where any residual usefulness of their service has disappeared.
Thanks for the reminder about Tuta and Mailum. I had forgotten about Tuta, although their policy of no more than one account per person seems hostile to anonymity (I have violated this policy on occasions with no issues, but it makes me slightly wary about Tuta). Mailum is one I didn’t know about and will give them a try, hopefully this one doesnt have any unwelcome surprises if you choose the free option.
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Any pinky promise that they aren’t selling your data is worthless, whether or not it is actually true at a given time under a given set of circumstances. I am well aware of the arguments big data companies use to justify invasions of your privacy, the disappointment with Proton stems from the fact that they heavily promoted themselves as being opposed to this. Disappointing but ultimately not surprising.
Thanks for the link, it looks useful.
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I forgot about Tuta. I will certainly investigate the other ones listed.
Typical use case for something like this would be one off communications with businesses where I don’t need to divulge who I am. I think I came across cock.li and pissmail in similar research years ago, but there were some technical issues (maybe solved now) or I decided they sounded too obviously anti-authority (see also riseup) and could lead to problems/blocks.
cock.li is not reliable. It went offline for a couple of months last year.
Also, their base accounts is for receive email only.
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