Proton Mail - Encrypted Email 4+

Never going back

Me and my family have been ride or die proton users. My dad put me on the company when he learnt about their ethos. We value our privacy and with Proton mail and Proton VPN, I don’t have to worry about any of my personal data being leaked. They’ve been making advancements over the years and it just keeps getting better. I also love that it can be used for personal and business use. As a business owner, I find it super easy to organise my important emails in folders and schedule emails. I’ve never had any issues with the service, never experienced any technical difficulties and if I ever did they have a operations webpage where you can see live updates of anything going wrong with a full history of previous issues.

Good security but lacking features and bug support for a paid service

Been using the paid service along with their VPN for quite a while now, but have got to the point where I am now looking to migrate over to another service. It’s all well and good having good security but that needs to be backed up with equally good functionality and support. The app is less than overwhelming and is missing basic functionality like swiping to mark as read etc. since iOS 15 there have been a few bugs and my push notifications haven’t worked so I am constantly having to remember to open up the app and refresh it manually to check my emails….inevitability I have missed emails that were fairly important (not good). Tried all their fixes like emptying the cache, which work temporarily but this is a known issue and in my case has not been fixed in well over a month. It would be different if i wasn’t paying for a premium service, but I am and a fair amount considering. I have already downgraded the VPN and expect will migrate the email over to another more practicable, reliable service soon. Very disappointing!

A good product let down by poor recovery protocols

Proton is a great champion of internet privacy and has some good app products supporting this objective. This is a solid, no frills, encrypted email service which does everything it is supposed to do. However, it seems to be aimed at a tech-savvy market. For example, the app doesn't warn you that, if you reset your password, it has the effect of decrypting all your emails (making them unreadable) unless you then use the old password to reactivate the encryption keys. This is a bit silly tbh because most people will only want to reset their password if they've forgotten the previous one. To avoid this fate, you have to write everything down at least once and make a record of it, which somewhat defeats the privacy objective. Because of this flaw, I wouldn't want to be overly reliant on Proton for email functionality.

The inbox screen display is a bit dour but is fit for purpose. If they could make the screen view visually more appealing, the product overall would be more attractive.

Developer Response ,

Hi. Thank you for your feedback - we've shared it with our team. Please note that when requesting a password reset, a warning is prompted to the user that all the messages will be encrypted. This is due to protect the user's data in case of a case of compromised account. Due to the nature of our encryption, we do not have access to your password and the only way to decrypt your messages is by providing your old password, uploading your recovery file if you've downloaded it previously, or providing your recovery phrase.

We'll share your feedback regarding the app's interface so our team can work on improving it. If you have any specific suggestions on what we can do to improve, feel free to contact us at https://proton.me/support/contact to let us know.