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)
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No, Proton email addresses do not. I have ProtonMail addresses using my domain. If tomorrow I point to another email provider, Proton can do nothing about it.
Being paid feature vs free is not vendor lock-in.
You are spreading misinformation, either by misrepresenting the situation or by not understanding what “vendor” (an arguable term since apparently you are focusing on the free version) is lock-in means.
Thank you
I think OP is overblowing things, and is especially misguided in recommending gmail, but at the same time, they do have a valid point and I think you’re somewhat misrepresenting what they said.
For one, they specifically said that the proton domain email addresses are problematic (
protonmail.com,pm.me), and weren’t talking about custom domains that sit in front of Proton mail.For two, their point is valid. Auto-forwarding being paid, does create vendor lock-in and make it hard to switch away from Protonmail if you use the OOTB addresses. It’s something worth considering.
As you said, the recommendation should be to use a custom domain that sits in front of Protonmail rather than switching to Gmail, but paid auto-forwarding is a valid criticism.
their point is not the custom domain usage, who cares about that, for that you need a domain to begin with and its not that common to have a personal one. but that you can’t set up automatic forwarding without continuously paying. that makes switching considerably harder for the everyday people.
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Proton Mail Bridge requires a paid account.
All email services have vendor lock-in unless your using your own domain.
For what it is worth, I just moved my mail from my ISP to my own domain at a hosting service after 30 years. Took about 5 months to get everything changed but if I can do it anyone can.
Downside, using your own domain is probably less private but kind of depends.
I don’t support Proton for other reasons, but I’ll note that if anyone is having this problem you can use a half-measure of setting your other email address as a recovery email and enabling “daily email notifications”, which will email you once a day if there’s unread stuff in your Proton mailbox.
Can I ask what those other reasons are? (genuinely curious if I should switch away from them)
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.
my beef with proton mail is that i can’t use it on thunderbird and their android app doesn’t have notifications (at least without google spy services.)
I use it on Thunderbird. I just couldn’t grow to like thunderbird.
i couldn’t set it up and it went a little beyond my understanding why, but apparently it’s a paid feature. i don’t necessarily love thubderbird either, but it does its job for me
Thunderbird doesn’t have your private key to decrypt your Proton emails. The key lives in your browser and in theory there’s no way to securely provide that key to Thunderbird so it can do the decrypting. There’s a special application they built for business owners who want this functionality, but by nature it breaks Proton’s security because the email content is then stored in plaintext (or close enough) so it’s not “secure” in the same sense Proton webmail is.
You have to use the Proton Mail Bridge
That’s the “special application” I mentioned, but it seems to have been updated since I last looked at it so it now offers the same level of encryption as the webmail app.
I would prefer to see it freely available, but it doesn’t seem foundational to using the service in any scenario - free accounts have the webmail and mobile clients, which are arguably both more flexible (and maintainable) than the Bridge.
Yes I realized this too late, after I had already used the private email adresses from proton pass everywhere.
My solution ( while not completely private but better than using the same one everywhere) Is to use my own firstname.lastname@domainicontroll.com for thing already linked to personal info and then set up custom domain for proton pass hidden emails to @fuckgoogle.otherdomain.com
Then if proton ever goes to shit I can still go to another email provider and all I have to do is move the domains. Yes it isn’t free but there is no such thing as a free lunch, self hosting isn’t free either and I don’t have the mental bandwidth to self host an email server right now.
Nothing is preventing you from changing those email addresses to the one you now have on your own domain.
The ignorance from OP is not vendor lock-in.
Uh, yes there is, by the inherent nature of how addresses (i.e. public identifiers) work.
An IP address, email address, physical address, etc, is a mechanism to have a string of text, become a unique identifier for something, so that you can just share that piece of text to refer to it.
Once you give out that piece of text, you no longer have control of it. I can give it to someone and then someone else could ask them about it, and they pass it on, and now I have no idea who has this unique identifier that represents me anywhere out there in the world. I can ask the first person to update their records but I have no guarantee that they’ll do it successfully or that they’ll remember every single person who they gave it out to you update.
In those circumstances, it’s problematic if an identity provider insists that you always have to pay for its services in perpetuity, just to have communication from your old identity forwarded.
Yes there is it’s called procrastination
How do you expect anything to be completely free?
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A better question would be, why do domains cost so much.
Domains cost like $1 if you’re flexible. Email hosting is what costs money.
Reminder of this:
https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-mail-server-because-mail-is-hard/
And that mailu.io (and other similar projects) makes self-hosting email almost trivial 😁 (at least for people that can run a pre-configured
docker-compose.ymland buy their domain etc)Thank you for raising this point.
Are there even other privacy-respecting email providers that are fit for the job? I’m genuinely curious.
Mailbox.org is a good pick to consider IMO. You can read some comparisons on PrivacyGuides, which I also recommend as a starting point for these sorts of topics. The mailbox.org web UI is not great, but it allows IMAP/SMTP access, so I use Thunderbird on both desktop and Android in order to interact with my inbox. My inbox is auto-encrypted with PGP using their Mailbox Guard thing, so my emails are all encrypted garbage on the web UI anyway. Mailbox.org only allows paid-for accounts, but considering the annoying stuff that Proton and Tuta do to their free accounts I’d rather just be honest about the service I’m getting. It allows auto-forwarding directly in the web UI, but given that you can hook up to it with IMAP anyway, it’s not like you couldn’t just do it yourself.
(Also, as another comment said I also recommend DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection for email aliasing if you need it.)
DuckDuckGo will give you free forwarding with a duck.com address. It also strips all trackers. I love it.
This is pretty cool and definitely has use, but IIUC this is strictly a free forwarding address, right? I don’t think it tries to compete with Proton Mail or Tuta Mail.
Correct, that’s all it is. But if a live person is asking me for an email, and I don’t want to break out my phone to generate something complicated and hard for them to understand, this works great. (They have enough trouble understanding “duck.com,” even though after the first few instances of utter confusion, I now say, “@duck.com, like the bird, quack, quack.” And they still get extremely confused.
Agreed.
