Recovering SL aliases

Thanks to Proton Pass alias sync “feature” all of my SL aliases are lost. It synced every alias and created hundreds of extra items, and to cleanup my password manager, I deleted everything in Proton Pass, but that lovely piece of app deleted my SL aliases too.

Now, like a week ago I took an export of my SL aliases to a csv file, but SL is not importing a single alias. I tried both on Brave and Firefox but it didn’t import anything.

What shall I do?

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I am super new to Pass (and I think its a step down from Bitwarden in terms of UX) but why didn’t you just filter to show all Alias’ and then move those into a seperate vault in pass?

If your aliases are deleted off your SL account, I am not sure there is much you can do. According to SL

When an alias is deleted, it’s put into a global trash and we make sure that it can’t be reused. All historic information on the alias (the account that creates the alias, alias contacts, etc) are deleted to respect your privacy.
This applies to all aliases created with SimpleLogin domains.
You can however restore an alias created with your own domain.

Because there were hundreds of aliases came via this sync and now it deleted everything. In an ideal scenario, it should have only imported to its database and aligned with existing logins but it created extra empty hundreds of logins. And it didn’t give a single warning regarding deleting aliases on SL.

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Thats awful and I would definitely send a complaint to Proton and SL support but, I am not sure there is much you can do about deleted aliases sadly.

Many of my aliases were created within my custom domains thankfully but nearly all of my social media accounts were created with SL premium domains. It doesn’t make any sense if I can’t import the aliases which I created via exporting from SL itself.

Did you check your trash in Proton Pass?

Yes, I already emptied it :frowning:

Considering I am screwed big time, what is your opinion about Addy.io? While I am trying to recover my accounts, I have to find alternative to SL, which should be also secure and have an actual working backup / restore mechanism unlike SL.

Sorry but this was very clearly communicated. I a. sorry you have not understood but this aint the fault of proton. It clearly states what happens when you delete and before syncing you also get a clear warning and option to choose which vault you want to use. RTFM. Anyway feel sorry for you, this must be quite a lot of trouble.

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Where did they mention this? I found this Reddit post but no official documentation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonPass/comments/1g5xrdl/syncing_aliases_between_proton_pass_and/
Also there is no ability to disable sync. Whatever you create in SL comes automatically into Proton Pass.

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This was mentioned when starting the sync. It tells you that there is a difference between disabling alias and removing.

Also the app clearly asks you to confirm permanent deletion.

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That is the entire point. There is no difference between them.

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I made exactly the same mistake and it was impossible to re-import the aliases, what you need to do is like me, connect to each site and change your email address if you can and/or otherwise send emails to the sites’ support so that they can do it for you if possible.

To get LinkedIn to change my email address I had to send the front/back of my driving licence and my identity card and I had to delete my Discord account and start a new one. :slightly_smiling_face:

Thank you so much Proton, I’ve been trying to get my accounts back up and running for over a week now and I’m far from finished.

One good thing is, SL allowed me to recover deleted aliases from my custom domains but I couldn’t find a way to recover aliases created on SL domains. I am waiting for support to reply.

Edit. Not even custom domain aliases are recoved. Everything is lost.

In their FAQ it is stated that it is impossible to recover aliases with SL domain names, that customised domain names can be recovered.

Proton Pass quality doesnt seem to be at par with its mail and VPN suite. its a new product and seem to lack significant polish.

I changed my Proton Pass password within the app (of course I didn’t write it down or print it) then changed the proton password account. It logged me out of all my Proton accounts except for the open browser instance i used to change the password. I contacted support but due to timezone difference I really didn’t get an immediate reply. I just restored access with SMS account recovery.

The expectation is it wont log me out of my mobile instance because its supposed to be protected more than the desktop.

Same thing happened to me, I got Proton Unlimited from the Black Friday deal, and was testing Proton Pass, didn’t really like it and deleted the Proton Pass vault, just to be met with all my alises gone for good…

Contacted their support, maybe there’s any hope, but for now just got a generic message

Proton Pass for iOS just updated today, and update is only for warning people when deleting an alias. Is that a coincidence?

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Here is the official reply from SL support team.

Kindly note that only aliases created with your verified custom domains can be imported from a CSV file.
 
Importing other aliases is not supported because the system cannot verify that the email aliases belong to the account trying to import aliases.
 
We are unable to recover the aliases as well since they are automatically put into a global Trash, as mentioned previously.
 
Also, it is not possible to disable the syncing between Simple Login and Pass, however we added your vote to this feature request.

well, I couldn’t even import aliases from my custom domains, and wasted nearly a day fixing everything. If you are using Facebook with SL domain and can’t change it because FB needs to use a browser which is trusted and used for a long time, install FB app to your phone and change there. Not sure why but email change from browsers are failing.

It is also not possible to cut the sync between SL and Proton Pass. Once you started it, there is no going back.

Another thing, they are blacklisting deleted alias for “security” reasons, but it is possible to recover Proton Mail aliases and use them if you contact support. It looks like SL team doesn’t care about the customers and it is normal for them for a customer to lose all of the aliases.

They are trying so hard to make me not renew my subs, which they are mostly succeed.

On the good side, I moved all of my aliases to my custom domains, so even if SL or Proton decides to delete them, I can recreate them again with a day’s work. I have around a year to find a better provider it seems.

In the SL app you can unlink your SL account with the Proton account, this should cut the sync.