Every time one of these threads come up I like to share my experience attempting to use protonmail for my business:
Protonmail charged us for every email account, whether or not they were active. When an employee left the company, we would disable their email address but we wanted to keep records of their email history. Of course, exporting email from protonmail is difficult to the point where you need an engineer to do it.
So I emailed protonmail saying "hey, do you think you could add a feature where email addresses can, say, be permanently disabled and then we don't pay for them any more?" They replied with a typical protonmail brush-off.
I was already frustrated with the service because their search is worse than a simple substring search and after a few years of using an email provider for professional use you sometimes have to find old conversations. So I canceled the account and closed the privacy.com card.
A year later I noticed that the (luckily closed) card was still being charged monthly, so I tried to log into the old account to see if there was a problem and the password (stored in a password manager) didn't work. I emailed them to let them know there was likely a bug and their support agent argued back and forth with me about it before finally demanding my credit card information (which I didn't have, the card was closed a year ago) to stop billing me. I just stopped responding at that point.
In my mind the fact that they are so hostile to their users is a big red flag. I think it's bad practice to trust people who indignantly dismiss reasonable questions from paying customers with private information.
I understand your frustration, but it sounds to me like your business case isn’t what Proton was created for.
IMHO, Proton is meant to keep conversations completely private between recipients. I’m more surprised that you can still access a former employee’s email at all.
They paid for the account in the name of their company, for company uses, with company money. If that's not account ownership then please define what is.
I’m not disagreeing. Just saying I would have expected Proton to side with the individual users of the account over who paid for it. Not saying I’m right, just that I’m surprised to hear that’s not the case.
That's not how Proton works. If you have an organization, you have complete control over all the accounts. I can reset passwords for any email address in my organization and read all their email if I were so inclined. He's not talking about individual accounts which are how you describe it.
For non-private subusers, you're right, but for private subusers, you can only read new emails after resetting the keys, you can't read existing emails. I.e. you can take control over the email address, but not access existing data.
Hmm. Longtime proton VPN user here, was considering finally leaving gmail for proton mail but maybe that’s not such a good idea. What would you recommend? This is for personal use not business.
I'm fairly happy with fastmail. Wanted to slowly move away from Gmail, tried proton mail, but it has weird ways to setup 3rd party apps iirc. Stepped over to fastmail and have had pretty much zero complaints. I am using a custom domain name, but I assume the experience is the same using @fastmail
Every time one of these threads come up I like to share my experience attempting to use protonmail for my business:
Protonmail charged us for every email account, whether or not they were active. When an employee left the company, we would disable their email address but we wanted to keep records of their email history. Of course, exporting email from protonmail is difficult to the point where you need an engineer to do it.
So I emailed protonmail saying "hey, do you think you could add a feature where email addresses can, say, be permanently disabled and then we don't pay for them any more?" They replied with a typical protonmail brush-off.
I was already frustrated with the service because their search is worse than a simple substring search and after a few years of using an email provider for professional use you sometimes have to find old conversations. So I canceled the account and closed the privacy.com card.
A year later I noticed that the (luckily closed) card was still being charged monthly, so I tried to log into the old account to see if there was a problem and the password (stored in a password manager) didn't work. I emailed them to let them know there was likely a bug and their support agent argued back and forth with me about it before finally demanding my credit card information (which I didn't have, the card was closed a year ago) to stop billing me. I just stopped responding at that point.
In my mind the fact that they are so hostile to their users is a big red flag. I think it's bad practice to trust people who indignantly dismiss reasonable questions from paying customers with private information.