Protonmail

ProtonMail is a privacy focused email client based in Switzerland which has partnered with non Swiss content delivery networks like Radware. ProtonMail offers cloud email, calendar, VPN, and cloud storage services. ProtonMail has a marketing focus on privacy over competitors like Google or Microsoft.

Protonmail has advertised itself as a private and secure service, as by their own words "No personal information is required to create your secure email account. By default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account. Your privacy comes first.", which was part of the advertising on their official website^[1] (www.protonmail.com, now www.proton.me). As it turned out, that statement was false. In 2021, a member of a French activist group had been using Protonmail to communicate with the group, and as an investigation was launched involving them, the email provider has quickly handed over the user's IP address and other data like the device they were using.^[2] After the news reached the public and sparked a controversy, claims about the lack of IP logging were swiftly removed from the website. The company tried to excuse their behavior by stating, that they do not have to comply with authorities such as EUROPOL, and although this may be true, in cases of investigations the bigger organizations from outside simply use the Swiss government as a middleman to get any request through that they wish. Protonmail is not anonymous and any information will be handed over when requested by the Swiss government, which does also cooperate with other investigative authorities, leading to essentially no protection in case of any such event.

Proton official response on the Proton subreddit

Proton announces partnership with Zoom, a non private messaging platform. How to add Zoom meetings to event invitations.

On 2022, Protonmail announced a policy which entails the deletion of inactive accounts, resulting in a major controversy. Many users have criticized the decisions and advocated for nuanced versions of inactive account policy, such as deleting only the email contents of any inactive Protonmail accounts instead of the accounts themselves, where the latter would reportedly result in major inconvenience for users who used the accounts as multiple factor authentications for important services such as banking. It has also been said that the harsh policy will adversely affect those who had good reasons to become inactive for a long time, such as hospitalization, prison incarceration, and being in totalitarian countries which have prolonged internet shutdowns. ^[3][4]

In response, Protonmail added an exemption where the inactive account policy would not apply to any accounts which had premium subscriptions at one point, although the exemption was revoked as of 2024. Protonmail accounts that were created before April 9, 2024 has a two year grace period before being subjected to the policy, as opposed to one year for newer accounts.^[5][6][7] In some cases users have reported success in recovering their inactive accounts after being locked under the policy.^[8]

As of 2025 many users continue to voice their concerns regarding the inactive account policy, while advocating for sensible measures such as deleting only the contents in the inactive accounts while sparing the accounts themselves.^[9][10]

The Proton team has stated on Reddit that the inactivity account policy aims to "manage their resources in a sustainable way", which can be translated into "reducing operating costs". In the comments, it was noted that retaining the accounts themselves indefinitely and only purging their contents would not noticably increase operating costs compared to deleting entire accounts, given that login information is all that would have to be retained. ProtonMail also does not allow registering email accounts with the same address as deleted email accounts to prevent impersonation, which only is possible because they keep the deleted email addresses in their records.^[11]

Until around 2023, there was no way for users without a paid subscription to create local backups of all of their emails at once (data lock-in). Paying users could use the Proton Mail Bridge to download their emails through the IMAP protocol using an external client such as Thunderbird or Outlook, where as free users were limited to downloading each email individually, making it impractical for backup purposes.^[12]

Since around 2023, Proton Technologies provides an export tool that anyone can use.^[13]