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.
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.
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.
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.com addresses are a lot more reliable
Apparently you have to forward an email address to get the 1GB. I downloaded it and set it up. I was able to lie and say I moved the rest of the applications by just saying done.
Great incentive, very clever move by Proton. All stuff that’s a good idea anyway but it’s just way too easy to “get around to all that later.” Then it’s 2034 already and Google still has you leashed tight.
Very good - unless Proton Mail is their first email account. Forcing (or strongly encouraging) them to have a Google account first is counterproductive.
I’ve had ProtonVPN for 3 years now and I have 0 complaints.
It’s the only VPN I’ve ever used that doesn’t have less bandwidth on VPN than off. I regularly saturate my gigabit connection for hours at a time with 0 issues or throttling, and tunnel my torrent client’s traffic through it 24/7. It also allows me to watch 4k content on mobile data without throttling and circumvent my phone provider’s restrictions on hotspot/tethering that they want me to pay $30/month to remove.
The reason it works is because telecom providers use DNS-based throttling instead of deep packet inspection to selectively limit bandwidth to video sites. They have a massive list of all the popular streaming sites (YouTube, AppleTV, Netflix, etc.) and then throttle the sites in the list. When providers say “unlimited 480p video streaming” they actually have no clue what video quality you are watching. They just pick a bandwidth limitation that would only allow 480p video to play without buffering.
They could in theory use network traffic analysis to identify video websites which have bursty bandwidth patterns (due to the nature of video buffers), but this would be more difficult, more expensive, and extremely prone to false positives.
Write your data as base64 string and scroll it star wars intro style. Bam, unlimited storage on Google via YouTube once you write an ocr to base64 decoder.
im sure there are some image steganography techniques that could also apply to video. i’d be very surprised if there aren’t people hiding data in videos already.
My issue with them is that they make their lower tier plans too enticing. I’ve wanted to upgrade to pro for all the fancy gizmos but the basic mail plan is just too good a deal to upgrade.
Unlimited for seven or so years now, never regretted it in the slightest. I feel like they throw some bonus to you whenever they can - under promise, over deliver. I’ve been burned a lot by companies that became evil over time, hence I’m careful with praise but so far Proton has been one of the most pleasant customer experiences I had.
Their en-goodifying trend is concerning to be sure, it’s almost like they want users to value their service. It’s so confusing in today’s business world.
Honestly, I don’t even think it is a fair question. What about asking “when they reach enshittification” gives any options on the answer? They become shitty, like everything else.
The problem is a lack of context, you post an innocent question but people reading it can’t tell if it’s a troll or what. You’ve got to be careful about wording stuff online, but also just ignore the imaginary internet points.
Yea it can come off as sealioning but also it’s a bit of a daft question. If it gets enshittified then we move on to something that isn’t shit? What other answer do they expect from a tech forward community.
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