Proton Mail

FREE email account locked after years of use I teach IT and wanted to have a look at Proton Wallet to be able to advise my customers. I ticked the FREE Plan - and got charged $195.48. Naturally I disputed this - so they locked my FREE email account which I had been using for years. This is now day three of no email access, account is still locked,… Read more

even though the payment dispute via Paypal has been closed, which Proton demanded as a re-requisite for unlocking my FREE email account.

Info for prospective and existing Proton users. Earlier this year I ended 4 months of hell with Proton mail over a wrongly blocked account. It ended not with them admitting wrong, though they were. No apologising for the needless hassle or the continual lies they were caught telling. It ended after me and many others sent them months of… Read more

complaints about scores of accounts being blocked on mass due to inactivity despite proving the accounts were still active. Management are aware and encourage and participated in the same poor conduct. This occurred after an April 2024 announcement that everyone who does not log in over the next 2 years to April 2026 would be blocked, then by late 2024 they blocked them all anyway.

Quietly and without notification or acceptance of wrong doing Proton unblocked them all in late march/early April 2025. They then continued the game playing for 3 weeks after they had already unblocked them as they simply didn’t tell anyone.

It was strange behaviour from the outset for a company that relies solely on trust to succeed. It exposed the serious extent of the lying, unethical and unscrupulous behavior they knowingly engaged in to refuse to fix a problem they've needlessly and wrongly caused to many to begin with. For months they actively engaged in bullying the victim to go away and when this fails try to bully you into a host of unrelated security based questions most if not all have no hope of being able to answer and that’s why they do it. It what was a deliberate tactic to distract from taking responsibility from what they know they have done. In the end it was just some sort of pointless abusive power play that achieved nothing for them or their customers and simply shattered the reputation of a company that’s all about trust and integrity.

So now that it’s over why does this matter to you?

If you were one of the many wrongfully blocked and gave up trying to get it back, try to log in again as from April 2025 it should, at least for now, work again.

For new users, be warned. When proton works, it works, but my experience proved that the moment something goes wrong and even if it is 100% the fault of Proton, your completely on your own and given your likely only using it because of privacy and sensitivity this should act as a huge red flag. They can’t be trusted so be careful what, when and how you use it and if it is for matters that need to be kept you cannot trust them and so must keep an active back up making using them for anything important likely not worth the hassle.

P.S They claim full privacy but can and do read the full subject lines, dates and from addresses of all emails sent and received. During the above process I had this confirmed and it was surprise to me, so may be worth keeping in mind.

On being recommended as an email program no one from this company advised that it would not operate on Microsoft / Windows platform??? Funds were debited so had to chase up a refund.

A company that relies on trust to succeed fails to be trustworthy. Old inactivity process "never enforced" New Inactivity process starts April 2025 for new users, 2026 for existing. (announced April 2024) A grace period of 2 years from the announcement to access your account to ensure it is not blocked. All is fine all is open, except rather then… Read more

adhere to there own repeated and clear statements that to this day Proton have still not changed, corrected, removed or properly explained Proton immediately & without warning or explanation on mass blocked an untold number of accounts.

Worse is Protons refusal to in anyway admit what they had done was wrong thing and repeatedly ignore their own statements when you send them back to them. Even worse again was there repeated refusal to do the 2 second task to unblock them.

When a company so reliant on trust is so willing to break it, it must act as a red flag. Because its not possible to be worse then google I maintain a free account but I will now never pay for it and nor should you. Proton cannot be trusted at its own word, when it gets it wrong it refuses to take responsibility, Proton simply cant be trusted to be as private as it claims. User beware.

I moved to Proton mail recently because of the high level of security and privacy it offers. However I am bitterly disappointed by the very basic level of new mail composition. It is just a little more than a simple text editor. Given the high subscription price, it is a far cry version compared with the editing and composition facilities offered by free competitors like Gmail, Ms Outlok etc.

I signed up as a Proton Business customer a few years ago. The contract is finally expiring mid 2025. I might stay as a VPN only customer. Everything else has been moved to another provider. Proton Mail, Calendar and Drive was the reason why I signed up as a business customer. Mail is unusable in no/low reception areas, so I'd often manually… Read more

export emails. Filtering and rules worked most of the time. Searching emails is slow and sometimes results were missing. Searching exported emails with 3rd party software yielded better results. Calendar is garbage and I never saw improvements. I needed to use other products to coordinate international events/tasks/meetings/availabilities... Proton Drive is unreliable and clunky, so I used an alternative for file synchronization between devices and sharing files with 3rd parties. Proton Pass works, but I didn't get any value from using it. Convenient creation of credentials or aliases worked well. I've yet to meet someone that uses Proton Wallet. I didn't try it because of stagnant development of existing products I wanted to use. Same goes for other bloat like the Scribe AI writing assistant or Docs. None of the Linux apps were refined and felt mostly like vaporware. The Android apps were OK, but mostly useless when offline or in areas with limited connectivity. The VPN has been rock solid and I have been very happy with its performance.

ProtonMail support – I've been using PM for 2-3 years and no problems. On the couple of occasions I've needed a bit of online support it has been quick and bang on. Highly recommend them.

A Let Down – Was alright and much used until my whole account began to malfunction. There were issues sending emails (they sent blank or half written), disappeared while being composed, and problems which made using email on my mobile impossible. As I was paying for an upgraded account I would not have expected things to get this bad!! Support were not super… Read more

helpful expecting me to resolve these issues myself. Ended up scrapping the whole account with many groups and years of accumulated correspondence. A let down.

Ambitious and consumer-first product with room to improve – I have not used this for a business, so I can't speak to that side But from a personal standpoint, it's a fantastic mail service. It's not perfect, but a privacy-first mail service in this age is a pretty ambitious feat. There are quirks or bugs, but I'll take that over Google/Apple scraping my emails as part of bulk collection. The pricing I… Read more

think is very fair and we should remember that if the product is free then WE are the product. I like their newly introduced Duo plan, and I think this has solved the awkward financial spot for younger couples.

The complaints I've heard are typically bugs or false-positives regarding security, but these can be ironed out over time. You cannot iron out the unquenchable thirst for data collection that fortune 500 companies have for people everywhere. That, unfortunately, will never go away.

Protonmail ripoff merchants – Protonmail spouts free email up to a GB which is nothing in these days. So be it. However, if you get to the 1GB level, no matter how many emails you delete from there, your usage remains at 1GB. This forces you to go to the paid version as the email address is now well embedded in your day to day emails. Ripoff merchants

One of the best! – I have a free Proton e-mail account, and I am very satisfied with the service. After updating from The Messaging Company, I have not received any spam e-mails, because the service blocks all of the trackers. In my opinion, it is one of the best and safest e-mail providers.

Proton - find another provider! – Proton have more than 1,000,000 subscribers and they provide paid services. They charge me about USD$7.99 a month and I have been using them for almost 1.5yrs. Do your math and they have a considerable turnover. 48 hours ago I contacted them as my business email had not been working for several days. After 24 hours I received an email from them… Read more

stating they do not follow up old problems and if I still needed their help I had to send them another email. It's now almost 5 days without business email. Unbelievable, what a joke...High time Proton spent some of their profit hiring more staff the cheapskates. Will find another provider - good rythmes proton you slackers.

Problem finally solved but took too long. Have increased star rating from 1 to 3.

Proton is bad news – I signed up for Proton Mail when I joined and paid for Proton VPN, which Proton Mail is a part of. I had so much trouble with Proton VPN - randomly disconnecting every 24-48 hours without warning and they couldn't fix the problem. After a month of it they said the problem was at my end. Who wants a VPN that randomly disconnects? What's the point… Read more

of that? They refused to give me a refund or any money back. Terrible customer service and I advise everyone to steer clear of them, even the free bits.

Solid and secure – No issues. Paid version has unlimited number of aliases. Constantly improving the features. Has 2FA login and encryption for sent emails if required . VPN is also excellent. Drive is OK but not brilliant at searching for photos.

Bad experience! – After using ProtonMail for a couple of years they decided to block my account. No useful help was offered so I had no choice but to delete my account. Someone called Ana Marija seemed to be trying to help but with no understanding of what a blocked account meant.

Avoid Proton Mail – Opened an account with Proton Mail. Immediately on billing my PayPal the Proton account was locked throwing up an error. Clearly a Proton Mail account system fault. After several emails to customer support the reply is they “can’t assist me” and won’t even respond to a refund request. All the replies feel bot driven. Luckily PayPal came to the rescue with a refund. Lesson - avoid Proton Mail.

Do Not Trust Them – We were overcharged almost $500 for email services because of an accounting glitch by Proton Mail. We tried to cancel the bank credit card and PayPal transactions and Proton Mail locked the email account. We have now lost access to all our instagram customers and images because we cannot access the account without the proton email address. Proton… Read more

Mail are holding our email account to ransom and unless we pay again, on top of the $500 we have already had stolen from us we cannot access our business customers. Proton mail have refused to respond to any requests to resolve this issue. We have escalated with Paypal and are challenging the credit card charges but we have no guarantee that we will ever see the money again and even after taking our $500 for email services Proton Mail have locked us out of our account. You would have to be completely out of your mind to put yourself at risk like this with an overseas company who are incapable of basic customer service and who refuse to communicate even when the fault is theirs.

Watch out for automatic billing and customer support – I had not been using the service and forgotten I had an active account. There was no reminder email that the service was due to renew, it just renewed. I noticed an annual renewal charge on my credit card and within 4 days of the charged logged in to cancel the service. I then contacted support and requested a refund as of wasn’t using the service… Read more

and could not afford to pay for something I was not using.

After waiting over 2 weeks for a response I lodged a chargeback request with my credit card provider. They responded to my credit card provider after ignoring my support request. In their response to support the charge and not provide a refund they cited that I had accessed the account after the renewal therefore I was actively using the account.

What a joke. I only accessed the account to try to close the account and to contact customer support.

Beware with the auto renewal and customer support of this company. They will just refer you to their terms of service and will not issue you a refund the moment your account renews for another 12 months period.

To make the matter more annoying, even though the 12 month charge remains and they refuse to refund it, they have also locked my out of the account so I cannot utilise the service.

I contacted them about getting access and they advised the account is now locked because the. Refit card company had contacted them (on my behalf and instigation) - in essence they are using the “your credit card is compromised so we’re only looking out for you” justification.

If this was the way businesses conducted them self face to face they would not be in business.

Internet companies hide behind the lack of personal interaction.

Be warned when dealing with this company. There are plenty of other services available to use so consider all options before making your choice.

Proton mail: the free man's email choice – I recently opened a Proton Mail email account and, thus far, I am entirely satisfied with it. I have persevered with Optus Webmail for years, but it is a poor service; plus its security is, I believe, suspect. Hence the setting up of the Proton Mail alternative. And, I should add, Proton Mail is secure, and an account can be opened without having to declare volumes of personal details. So far, so good.