I ditched gmail for proton mail, but is the price of privacy worth it?

I have recently become more and more aware of my privacy online and how companies use my personal information for personal gain. And in my quest to find more privacy-friendly alternatives to regular online services, I decided to provide the Proton package with privacy-focused apps once. The Swiss company’s first product was Proton Mail all the way back in 2014, so it seemed appropriate to start there.

Proton Mail gives some big promises, from using robust end-to-end encryption to following strict data security standards. On the other hand, services such as Gmail provide zero privacy promises and can scan the contents of your inbox to show you targeted ads.

But even as someone who is willing to stomach the disadvantage of trenching Google elsewhere in my life and even using privacy centers Grapheneos on my phoneThe limitations I have experienced with the proton mail prevent me from recommending the wholeheartedly. I have actually already switched back to my reliable old Gmail account. Here’s the reason.

If you are looking for independent reviews of Proton Mail, you will find that many praise the service’s strong emphasis on privacy, activated by end-to-end encryption. Even Google’s search AI overview says confident that “Proton Mail’s encryption ensures that only the sender and recipient can read e -post messages.” However, this statement does not paint a complete image and is at best only a half -truth.

You understand, the promised end-to-end encryption applies only to email if both you and the person you send email use Proton Mail addresses. Think about it for a second. How many of the people you send e -mail regularly is also on the proton mail? For me, and I want to bet for most people, the answer is zero, or quite close to it. If you only care about someone who intercepts, all email suppliers already use basic encryption-in-transit. This means that ISP and other third parties cannot read your emails, but Google or your email provider can.

Simply put, when you send an email from your Proton mail address to someone else using Gmail or Yahoo or any other supplier, you lose the service’s largest sales point for end-to-end encryption. Google and Microsoft can simply read the content of your IE post at the other end, and there is nothing you can do to stop it -cards of passwords that protect each e -mail. E -post as a protocol was never originally designed to be completely encrypted, similar to SMS and telephone calls.

In its defense, the company behind the Proton Mail cannot read your inbox even when stored on their servers. This is thanks to the use of zero access encryption. Proton Mail servers simply store an encrypted volume of your account data. When you log in to your account in a browser, decrypt your password all e -mail messages solely on your device. This is a remarkable privacy plus compared to a typical e -mail service like Gmail, and Proton Mail deserves credit here. But at the moment your e -post lands on another company’s servers, you virtually lose all the supposed privacy benefits.

Proton Mail is often designated as being safer than the competition, but this is a bit of an error number as well. If you have a Google account with a strong password and two-factor authentication enabled, you already have an email inbox that is as secure as the Proton Mail can offer. The latter does not offer any extra security, so you should not switch to it for that reason alone.

Proton Mail’s encryption restrictions are not the company’s faults – that’s exactly what E -post works. However, my experience with Proton Mail’s Android app has left much to be desired in recent weeks. Although the Gmail and Outlook apps have no lack of minor irritations, they offer a complete e -post experience. I simply can’t say the same about the Proton Mail’s app.

One of the first things I noticed was the lack of sender images IE post list for a significant number of sender. The small visual signal that I have come to rely on quickly to scan the inbox or warning shade simply lacks in many cases. Even when present on the web version of Proton Mail, sender images are not supported in the Android app.

The Proton Mail Android app also offers absolutely no options to format text while preparing an e -mail. Do you want to grease a key point, course a sentence or make a ball list? Forget it. You are limited to pure text and numbers. according to Proton’s own user forumsThis feature has been absent since at least 2021.

Finally, a seemingly small but effective failure is inability to swipe between e -post messages. In Gmail, a simple swipe left or right you quickly navigate through the inbox. This gesture is absent in the Proton Mail app, and forces you to constantly return to the inbox to open the next message. It is a minor disadvantage, but adds up to a noticeably less fluid and effective e -post experience.

And if you want to use e -post clients like Outlook or Apple Mail who rely on standard protocols like IMAP and SMTP to access your E -post, you need Proton bridge. This is an app that runs on your local machine to decrypt and recruit e-mail so that traditional email clients can interact with your Proton mail account. However, this functionality is not available at free level and is locked behind a paid subscription. And it brings me to my final grip with the Proton Mail’s subscription model.

Although I could overlook most of the reservations I have mentioned so far if the proton mail was free, the reality is that you will end up paying for the service at some point. At the free level you only get 1 GB of storage. The long amount of free storage is intentional – unlike Gmail, Proton does not show ads in the mailbox. And although 1 GB of storage is absolutely usable if you hold a zero-inbox philosophy, it probably won’t be enough in the end. But to even achieve parity with Gmail’s 15 GB free storage, you have to pay $ 4.99 per month on the Proton Mail.

The service has a few more plans to choose from, including a monthly subscription level of $ 12.99 which also includes Proton VPN, 500 GB encrypted cloud storage, a password processing and unlimited E -postalias as an additional privacy function. This is a far more compelling package, but $ 120 annual fee is steep if you don’t need a VPN or cloud storage. I definitely see the value of IE postalias for privacy, but the standalone Proton Pass subscription offers that feature for just $ 4.99 monthly.

In the end, I was also not excited to find that Proton Mail would clean all data from free accounts after just one year inactivity. This is not a big deal for regular users, but those at free are more likely to simply use the encrypted e -mail service. And when an account is suspended, you can’t pick it up or create a new one with the same username. Google’s inactivity policy extends to two years, which is far more sensible for such a permanent action.

Finally, after a few weeks of trying out the Proton Mail, I found myself questions if it is worth paying for an e -mail subscription that only delivers marginal improvements in privacy while sacrificing key features elsewhere. The value proposition undoubtedly exists for a few selected who use their E -post for sensitive content.

When used properly, Proton Mail’s encryption has actually protected activists and dissidents from governments and persecution, but most of us use e -mail for transaction messages and little else. Practically all my personal communication takes place on signal or WhatsAppHow end-to-end encryption is always guaranteed, is there much to be gained from switching to proton post? I’m not so convinced, so I’m going to Gmail for the time being.