Proton
Empowering you to choose a better internet where privacy is the default. Protect yourself online with Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive. Proton Pass and SimpleLogin.
Proton Mail is the world's largest secure email provider. Swiss, end-to-end encrypted, private, and free.
Proton VPN is the world’s only open-source, publicly audited, unlimited and free VPN. Swiss-based, no-ads, and no-logs.
Proton Calendar is the world's first end-to-end encrypted calendar that allows you to keep your life private.
Proton Drive is a free end-to-end encrypted cloud storage that allows you to securely backup and share your files. It's open source, publicly audited, and Swiss-based.
Proton Pass Proton Pass is a free and open-source password manager which brings a higher level of security with rigorous end-to-end encryption of all data (including usernames, URLs, notes, and more) and email alias support.
SimpleLogin lets you send and receive emails anonymously via easily-generated unique email aliases.
view the rest of the comments
So serious question. Is proton worth it and easy to work with?
I've been using their Unlimited plan for over a year. ~$8 a month for half a TB of cloud storage, automatic photo backup on mobile, fantastic web email and mobile email client, and a great VPN that allows for port forwarding and P2P-optimized servers.
Totally worth it for me. Great feature set, especially on their email. Everything runs smoothly on my systems. I run Linux on everything and their web client has always been really clean and responsive. Their mobile client too. I use GrapheneOS and haven't noticed any issues with their email or VPN app so far.
Made switching from Outlook & Gmail super easy. I don't miss those trash services at all, especially not Outlook lol.
Outlook with Gmail is what I currently use. So, trying to move away from that.
I use them for email. They're exactly like any regular email except with the potential for encryption.
So real talk, what is the benefit to using proton over gmail? I am relatively well versed in the issues of Google and privacy, but im just wondering if there is anything more to it's benefit outside of the general privacy issues, which is obviously already a big draw away from Gmail.
I'm the wrong person to ask. I wouldn't know if there's anything fancy you can do with emails that makes one host better than another. I use them for the privacy. I send emails, sometimes to multiple people, sometimes with attachments. That's as fancy as I get.
Privacy is also practically not better than google, microsoft or apple unless you never send an e-mail to an adress from there. But since propably about 90% are hosted on either of them it does not really matter. Best to not use e-mails at all for any sensitive data about you.
It’s not solely about the emails you send but the emails you receive.
If your email provider is google for example then all the emails you receive, like shopping, newsletters, whatever are used to create an advertising profile of you. That is one of the few things you have and should take control of with a privacy respecting provider.
I used proton mail for a long time on a paid plan with a bunch of aliases, but dumped it eventually, now I just have a free email acct with them.
I pay for their VPN.
I dont use proton drive despite the cool name. 5gb isn't enough for me to care, and I dont care enough to pay for cloud storage at this point in my life.
Give it a try and see. I'm currently looking at moving from them, I shifted everything google workspace to proton in Nov and my main issue has been with Drive the whole time. The email is ok, but as it's all encrypted the search is next to useless.
What's your issue with Drive?
Also, you can enable better search, it's just gonna take a while at first to download and decrypt your content in your browser to be able to search it
I've just had ongoing problems since the start. I had ~100gb from Google Drive and it hasn't been able to sync it all, the software constantly gets stuck (like it says it's syncing, but if I close it and reopen it says "last synced 2 days ago", etc), when I check on mobile some files are there and others aren't. At one point they even gave me some custom script to run, I can't remember what it did now.
It probably works well for a lot of people but in my experience it isn't ready yet, and unfortunately it will get compared to Google Drive which it isn't at the same level as yet.
free plan is definitely not worth switching to;
You short think of it as a primarily paid service with a free trial, not a "free, but with paid subscription for extra stuff" type of deal
they even go as far as to attach an ad with a referral link to all of your outbound mail on the free tier (btw hiding the fact that this happens is kinda scummy but whatever; if you're curious, it's all the way at the bottom of the settings menu, and locked unless you pay up)
also, it defaults to
proton.me, but some large websites ~~including ph~~ don't accept these,protonmail.comaddresses are a lot more reliable