Both auto-forwarding and auto-reply are paid features, which makes cancelling & switching much more difficult. Gmail is a breeze comparatively. I highly recommend against using their addresses (e.g. protonmail.com, proton.me, pm.me)
Email forwarding is available for everyone with a paid Proton Mail plan.
(source)
The straw that broke the camel’s back for me is the CEO’s icky tweet about how great Republicans are for your privacy and how they stand up for the little guys (what), which they doubled down on using the official Reddit Proton account. There’s already been a ton of discussion about this on the internet if you care to look for more angles on it.
But before that I’d already grown quite leery of them for their trend of endlessly starting new services before the old ones are polished, along with trying to push everyone into their walled garden and endlessly using naggy popups in the UI about it. Worst of all, they have a clear trend of not giving a damn about Linux support, sometimes giving up on certain features for their Linux clients or releasing the clients way after the Windows/Mac versions. For a “privacy company”, not putting Linux as a first-class citizen is really just unacceptable, and they’ve been around for long enough that it’s clearly a trend and not a fluke. To me, Proton just feels like a wannabe version of Apple. Its continued actions give me the feeling that it exists to serve itself, not its users.
Thanks for the extensive response! You make some really good points and I was unaware of the political ick. Not sure if it’s enough to make me leave them because they do seem to at least handle the privacy aspect of their services correctly (for now at least), but those do seem like good areas that I’m going to watch more closely about them from now on.