ProtonMail

This is the only email service that never locked me out of my own account, never asked me to answer those sh! Tty captcha challenges and still kept my mails 101% secure and encrypted. PGP keys adds extra layer of protection.

I've had to email the team a few times and they're always been responsive. Their email service is quick and easy to use, I'm even starting to use their VPN service. All in all I dont have anything I can fault them with so far.

I took out a ProtonMail subscription as I wanted to have a more secure email for client communication. So far so good.

Where ProtonMail horribly fails is in their "service". Even with a paid subscription you can't communicate with tech support other than through email, and typically they send you an email that only an IT support person would understand.

So you have a tech problem, like the ProtonMail emails not downloading into ApppleMail on my MacBook Pro, you contact tech support and you only get an email you don't understand!

That would be fine or perhaps even great for a free program but not for a paid subscription.

I am currently looking again for another email provider since the lack of service it just not working for me.

Shocking. Absolutely shocking service. As a customer since 2018 this will be the year I leave.
There could easily have been a solution but no one would bother to help. Disgraceful

Was paying for professional EMAIL and a few euro for VPN.
INSTEAD OF PUTTING ME ON THE CORRESPONDING personal plan which is unlimited I was moved Up to a business plan.
This is absolutely disgusting behaviour and could easily have been solved by removing the completely unnecessary VPN plus membership plan as it's no longer needed (as it's now part of the unlimited plan) I have been put on a plan costing €230 every two years.

This is not how a business should gouge their customers for extra money.
Unbelievably disappointed in a company I respected so much. I'll
Be exporting my mail and leaving asap.

Proton unlimited was everything I wanted. I subscribed for one month in order to try it. I was planning to replace Google with proton, but this is impossible. The result was that I would still have to use Google or Microsoft and proton. So what's the point? The main problem comes with contacts. You cannot use your contacts in anything else other than your protonmail. Whatsapp, signal messenger, messages, phone calls you have to use a different contact list. So this whole amazing package crumbles down... To something quite insignificant, secondary, replaceable... Basically irrelevant to my initial task.

However, the worst experience was that I could not stop my subscription and their support was not helpful. I subscribed on purpose for one month in order to avoid such a problem. However, there is auto renewal in place, they do not allow me to downgrade for some reason and the support is not helping either.

I can now also tell you the reason I cannot downgrade: it is because of the better proton drive. If you have quota - used megabytes - you first have to delete and then downgrade. After deleting everything in my proton drive, it's still shows quote used: 42 GB. The support knows this is a defect. They have told me so in the emails we exchanged. They know it is their fault I cannot stop my subscription. And they still provide no help, which obviously leads me to believe they use the very same cheap e-commerce tactics, US companies used 20 years ago...

Protonmail has done so wrong that I am writing a review about it to save others from damages. Personally, I have had the worst customer service of my life for a paid account. Their responses weren't even to the specific questions, to the point I thought bots were responding. I should have run then. Almost did, but just put up with it in the interest of privacy and time.
Finally, like others, my account got blocked although I had made payments. They did not return my money and I am still waiting for my account to reopen. I sent multiple emails over days, but have yet to receive a reply. It's been such an extreme case, that I decided to do a little legwork and found so many people complaining about losing access to their email for some reason or other. This happens, but what doesn't happen is the extreme bad response you get, if any, from their customer service for paying customers. I am writing this to say buyer beware. I wish I had known before they caused me damages. After doing some research, I have now happily switched to another email provider. I won't mention the name in case anyone thinks I wrote this to plug someone else, but just do your homework and you'll find competitive options. Protonmail is not the only show in town, but it is one of the most poorly run email providers and certainly the only one that has received such extreme, bad reviews from paying customers.

I'm a new user and I signed up multiple accounts with Protonmail which is apparently not allowed, my fault for missing that bit and for not reading everything on the screen. But as soon as I got an email (sent by a bot) stating that my account is under watch for being one of the multiple accounts, I immediately went into salvage mode. I logged onto the platforms that I use Protonmail for and started changing emails and closing down the excessive protonmail accounts. But before I could finish it, all the protonmail accounts are suspended. This was within the 10 minutes when I was trying to close those accounts. No support that reach out to me personally to ask, nothing. The accounts were closed. I wrote in an inquiry about this more than 2 weeks ago now, no response.

Just awful. I get that I violated their policy but I was not aware of it and I acted on the information as soon as I'm aware of, they didn't give me enough time and they did not reach out to me at all to work out a solution together. I can't do anything with one of the platforms because my email is suspended, and I'm stucked here. It's stupidly unnecessary and it just shows where their priority lies, not the customers obviously.

So you've been warned, if you are planning on using the free service and are prepared to pay for this eventually, keep in mind that you're paying to a business that does very little to communicate with their users.

I WAS ABRITARILY KICKED OFF AFTER A FULL DAY MIGRATION PROCESS. THIS COULD HAVE BEEN DEVASTATING. I WOULD HAVE LOST ALL EMAILS FOR THE PAST 26 YEARS. DO NOT USE THIS SERVICE. THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING.

Yesterday I created a Protonmail account, then I upgraded it to Proton Unlimited.
I received few emails from proton (Welcome, Payment Receive, Unlimited greetings).
I AFK few minutes and when I came back to my proton account: "This account has been suspended due to a potential policy violation".
I haven't send a single email or do anything with my account but receiving the emails from proton itself! Haven't even have the time to use the VPN I paid for.

I contacted the support (*******), explaining there might be a mistake, thinking my account will be restore in few minutes.

However, after more than 12hours later, here is the answer I got:
"Please note that our system has detected your account to be in connection with accounts that are in clear violation of our terms and conditions, and our system blocks all direct connecting accounts to prevent potential further misuse of our service.
We apologize for not being able to assist with your request."

No assistance at all, I have no idea what they are talking about... But they clearly don't want to help, and just stole my money.

It is sad that protonmail which had a great reputation of being a freedom service, became just a lame scam...

I have been using Protonmail Business (their highest tier) for about a year. There are a few positives: zero-access encryption, unlimited SimpleLogin addresses, custom domains. However, the downsides outweigh the positives:
- They force you to purchase their Drive, Calendar, VPN and Password Manager which means even the cheapest plan is very expensive compared to competitors.
- There is no desktop app and using other clients requires installing and configuring protonmail-bridge (an e-mail server proxy)
- The custom domains are useless because they do not offer SMTP/IMAP servers and protonmail-bridge does not work on any sort of virtualized webserver setup -> understandable because of the E2E encryption.
- Their support is slow to reply and usually replies with boilerplate text that is not helpful or relevant.
- I deactivated my subscription with 1 year remaining and instantly lost access to *all* premium features without any warning.

PROTON USED OT BE GREAT! NOT ANYMORE!. OUR COMPANY STAFF HAS SEVERAL E MAIL ACCOUNTS, AND THEY CONSTANTLY GO DOWN AND WILL NOT ALLOW LOG IN! PLUS PHONEY FRADULENT SCAMMERS ARE TRYING TO CHARGE $ 1.0O FOR BULL$#*! HELP, JUST TO GET YOUR INFORMATION! DO NOT USE PROTON! THEY DO NOT RESPOND TO COMPLAINTS EITHER!

I literally get no spam email and I feel like I get complete privacy due to strict Swiss privacy laws.
I don't understand the negative reviews.
I don't ever want to go back to gmail.

Unbelievably bad. It does the following

Sends emails without warning, as you write them.
Sends emails then saves - in sent mail - an earlier draft of the email than the one you actually sent, confusing you entirely.
Actually sends an earlier draft of the email than the one you pressed send on, confusing your recipients and occasionally causing massive trouble - eg that angry email you were drafting, the one you decided to tone down, and then rewrote so it was really calm and sensible, well protonmail sends the early angry draft! That's one relationship/business deal ruined - thanks protonmail!

Tiny storage capacities even on the lowest cost paid service, so you have to upgrade to a really expensive service
Outages, conks out, stalls, freezes, can't do stuff, has weird moments when it isn't functioning like an email service etc

Just a really, really bad, cataclysmically bad email service that has genuinely caused me to lose business due to all these mess ups above. It's not just me - have heard similar stories from lots of people.

Really sad, because people pay a lot hoping it will be a really good efficient service. And it's terrible.

I opened a free account several years ago and because of good service I later upgraded it as well. For years I had no problems with Proton and my confidence in them remained very high. I only used my account to communicate with our bank and doctors' offices. Proton seemed the best solution to deal with sensitive (financial and medical) information. I didn't even use the Proton account with friends and co-workers. After talking with my wife, she also wanted an account. So, I paid for her account last month. In addition to that account, we are starting a new business to help homeless vets and others and decided to use Proton to host our business accounts. A lot of time, energy, and money went into having Proton host our business accounts. Within a few days of establishing the new accounts, no new emails were showing up. I sent a query to Proton support asking why we weren't receiving emails. After a number of email exchanges, they said my accounts (all of them) were permanently disabled. There was no warning. There was no notification of a pending shutdown. Most importantly, when asked why the accounts were disabled, the reply was it is "due to a series of violations done against out terms of service. We cannot allow our service to be used for malicious activities." I can say unequivocally that we have not used those accounts for any malicious activities. We very much support their policy and did not violate it. When asked to clarify what the activities were (we don't care who reported it), all we received was the canned, generic, very unhelpful quote above. Since I know we did not violate their terms of service, it makes me wonder about their true intent. Was it socially, politically, religiously, or even racially motivated? We don't know and Proton is either unwilling or afraid or both to give us any details. Even when the police pull someone over, they don't say the law was broken, give you a ticket, and leave. They tell you why. I cannot offer any kind of defense to show their evidence is wrong. Now our accounts (and the email history), money, and the email lifeline for our business are gone. I regret giving them our business and strongly recommend others avoid them.

Lost password picked another and despite being granted access, I can't read any old *or new* emails.

Can I make a negative number?! I canceled this TWICE and keep getting a bill through PayPal annually! Have NEVER used the service!

Bad experience. I have tried to log in to my email account and it will not work or accept my password. I am positive that I am using the correct password. I contacted their Customer Support to reset my account or any other advisable solution. The CS communications that I received back through another Email account just keeps repeating the same things over and over and over again. I have answered as many security questions as best as I can. They still give me the same run around and apparently don't even read the full context of my messages sent to them over this problem.

They will ask the same repetitive questions over and over and over. One of the questions they ask - what is the exact date that you last logged in? A lot of us can't remember a specific date with so many online accounts that most people have now. Many of us for security reasons do not store our browsing history dates or logons in a browser history. In my case, the Proton email which I rarely used, was last logged into more than several months ago. No way I am going to remember all of that. I supplied all other information correctly that they requested along with my concerns that the account might have been compromised - yet they still responded back with the same generic Blah Blah over and over again.

I know it was not wise of me to provide a recovery email at the time I created the account several years ago. I get all that, however, the Proton CS is not helpful at all and apparently could care less if the account got compromised. Too much hacking and potential security breaches now in this time we are living in. Proton should either reset it or if needed eliminate the account altogether. My biggest concern and the primary request for the reset was for the potential of being compromised and specifically identity theft. The account was strictly used only for credit reports or consumer reports.

Bottom line is, if you need to contact them over login problems or requesting a reset, forget about any real CS solution. This experience has really left a bad impression with me, not so much over Proton email, but the lack of any real Customer Service. For this reason I wouldn't recommend them for any Email service - free or paid.

I am not impressed with their customer support, lack of action and definitely no concern on their part.