Both auto-forwarding and auto-reply are paid features, which makes cancelling & switching much more difficult. Gmail is a breeze comparatively. I highly recommend against using their addresses (e.g. protonmail.com, proton.me, pm.me)
Email forwarding is available for everyone with a paid Proton Mail plan.
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if you’re not actually promoting gmail, you ought to make that explicitly clear.
by pointing out something bad about proton and praising gmail’s version of that, it looks like you’re doing nothing other than recommending gmail in a privacy community.
everyone already knows gmail has high usability and convenience and zero (financial) cost. using it as an example in this community is redundant and ineffective. better to use another e2ee email service as an example.
No, Proton email addresses do not. I have ProtonMail addresses using my domain. If tomorrow I point to another email provider, Proton can do nothing about it.
Being paid feature vs free is not vendor lock-in.
You are spreading misinformation, either by misrepresenting the situation or by not understanding what “vendor” (an arguable term since apparently you are focusing on the free version) is lock-in means.
I have Proton Mail addresses using my domain.
Those are your addresses then not Proton’s. Hence why switching is easy and is irrelevant to my complaint which is specific to the domains listed
Wikipedia says…
In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.
If I want to switch away I have to pay every month in perpetuity to deliver emails to my new provider. In other words, I’ll always have to be a customer
Because you wouldn’t be actually switching so that’s not lock-in, that’s just you expecting free stuff forever.
Anyway, I understand your point. I also want free stuff and I also want all my free stuff to be exactly what I need. My criticism is more than you selecting a provider, not paying for it, know what the problem is then complain it’s not what you need despite knowing it in advance. What also was problematic for me is that your title is not correct.
Finally, maybe you are technically right (which I do not believe) but you can see from the total number of downvotes to your post and the upvotes on my comments that, at least in this community, your interpretation is being quite criticized.
To end on a pragmatic note : please PLEASE do get funding (it does not have to be your own money) for Proton to provide forwarding for free for all email addresses. I’m sure nobody on this community would complain about that, I surely won’t!
PS: if you are into lock-in and tech, consider reading “Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy” by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian - ISBN 087584863X - Harvard Business Press 1998 and if it’s a bit too much here are my notes on it https://fabien.benetou.fr/ReadingNotes/InformationRules written 15 years ago.
My criticism is more than you selecting a provider, not paying for it, know what the problem is then complain it’s not what you need despite knowing it in advance.
I was a paying customer. I was not aware of this functionality being paid. If I had been aware, I wouldn’t have used Proton addresses. Now I’m facing the consequences after switching. Others have commented being in the same position,
you can see from the total number of downvotes to your post and the upvotes on my comments
If you think I care, you’re wrong. The point of this post is to remind and inform, not argue over technical definitions. If it helps one person then it’s served its purpose
I think OP is overblowing things, and is especially misguided in recommending gmail, but at the same time, they do have a valid point and I think you’re somewhat misrepresenting what they said.
For one, they specifically said that the proton domain email addresses are problematic (
protonmail.com,pm.me), and weren’t talking about custom domains that sit in front of Proton mail.For two, their point is valid. Auto-forwarding being paid, does create vendor lock-in and make it hard to switch away from Protonmail if you use the OOTB addresses. It’s something worth considering.
As you said, the recommendation should be to use a custom domain that sits in front of Protonmail rather than switching to Gmail, but paid auto-forwarding is a valid criticism.
I don’t think the OP is saying to switch to gmail. They’re saying if you think switching from gmail is hard, just wait until you have to pay to forward all of your email if you need to move away from Proton mail if they end up being as bad as Google. They’re saying use something else that’s neither gmail nor proton mail.
if you think switching from gmail is hard, just wait until
I actually did switch from GMail so… I feel like I’m a relatively good place to talk about precisely this problem.
It also was very easy because I used my own domain back then. I switched from GMail to Proton and nobody noticed. I didn’t have to change 1 single account or warn 1 single person.
OP is not talking about switch email providers in general but rather a very specific case which is indeed problematic but is not IMHO related to lock-in.
Not lock-in in the traditional sense where you’re locked to a particular technology, but effectively lock-in by making a commonly used feature for migration not available for free. This wasn’t discussing uncommon cases like having your own domain in front of a free email service since that’s not then fully free.
The most common use of free email services is to use the service’s domain and if you need to switch, then needing to change your email at tons of different places. I am still stuck on gmail for a couple of accounts because changing the email with those services means creating an entirely new account and thus losing all history, etc. Example is the Shop app. Without forwarding I’d end up having to keep the gmail app on my phone to get notification of new emails which is problematic since those apps come with additional tracking services which is the whole reason for migrating from gmail.
The details might be technically correct but then the title is rage bait.
their point is not the custom domain usage, who cares about that, for that you need a domain to begin with and its not that common to have a personal one. but that you can’t set up automatic forwarding without continuously paying. that makes switching considerably harder for the everyday people.
Then they should change their title to say free email addresses only.
A while ago i bought a custom domain from namecheap but i don’t seem to feel safe using it for banking, would you recommend using it for my bank instead of a protonmail email alias?
Maybe I’m missing something, do you often communicate via email to your bank?
I know I do not. Pretty much never ever. That being said if I were to have to, rather than via their website or phone call, I can update that data on my bank account. I’m sure I must go through few (security) hoops to do it but I doubt it takes me more than 5min. In such case… I would put whatever email and I need to switch because I don’t want to pay for that domain anymore then I would just update my contact information there.
TL;DR: I also use my own domain name for banking but in my case I’d argue it doesn’t matter much.
I have selfhosted my mail on my own domain, on a server in my closet, for about 4 years. In that time I never switched over realy important things, like government etc, out of fear of missing an email and not knowing. That was the only reason not to switch for me. I’ve had to move a few times in a short peroid and my career started taking more of my time, so I have less time to manage the server, thus I started looking around. Now I settled on proton, I don’t use any of their domains, only my own, and I’ve switched literally everything over, except for the recovery mail for my domain registrar login. Since proton hosts professionally, I trust them not to drop mails without telling me, and I don’t realy see a reason not to switch over. If I ever want to move provider, or start selfhosting again, I’ll setup the new provider, update the dns for my domain and done.
If you have some specific questions about my setup or choices, let me know, although I’m probably not able to reply in the next 12ish hours.
Thank you
my beef with proton mail is that i can’t use it on thunderbird and their android app doesn’t have notifications (at least without google spy services.)
I use it on Thunderbird. I just couldn’t grow to like thunderbird.
i couldn’t set it up and it went a little beyond my understanding why, but apparently it’s a paid feature. i don’t necessarily love thubderbird either, but it does its job for me
Thunderbird doesn’t have your private key to decrypt your Proton emails. The key lives in your browser and in theory there’s no way to securely provide that key to Thunderbird so it can do the decrypting. There’s a special application they built for business owners who want this functionality,
but by nature it breaks Proton’s security because the email content is then stored in plaintext (or close enough) so it’s not “secure” in the same sense Proton webmail is. (edit: maybe it got updates since I last looked, because the Bridge is now as secure as the webmail)You have to use the Proton Mail Bridge
That’s the “special application” I mentioned, but it seems to have been updated since I last looked at it so it now offers the same level of encryption as the webmail app.
I would prefer to see it freely available, but it doesn’t seem foundational to using the service in any scenario - free accounts have the webmail and mobile clients, which are arguably both more flexible (and maintainable) than the Bridge.
To get notifications using the Android app on a de-googled phone, you can use the app ‘You Have Mail’ available on F-Droid. It was developed to solve the issue you described.
All email services have vendor lock-in unless your using your own domain.
For what it is worth, I just moved my mail from my ISP to my own domain at a hosting service after 30 years. Took about 5 months to get everything changed but if I can do it anyone can.
Downside, using your own domain is probably less private but kind of depends.
I mostly use my custom domain on protonmail for reasons like this.
Yes I realized this too late, after I had already used the private email adresses from proton pass everywhere.
My solution ( while not completely private but better than using the same one everywhere) Is to use my own [email protected] for thing already linked to personal info and then set up custom domain for proton pass hidden emails to @fuckgoogle.otherdomain.com
Then if proton ever goes to shit I can still go to another email provider and all I have to do is move the domains. Yes it isn’t free but there is no such thing as a free lunch, self hosting isn’t free either and I don’t have the mental bandwidth to self host an email server right now.
Nothing is preventing you from changing those email addresses to the one you now have on your own domain.
The ignorance from OP is not vendor lock-in.
Yes there is it’s called procrastination
Uh, yes there is, by the inherent nature of how addresses (i.e. public identifiers) work.
An IP address, email address, physical address, etc, is a mechanism to have a string of text, become a unique identifier for something, so that you can just share that piece of text to refer to it.
Once you give out that piece of text, you no longer have control of it. I can give it to someone and then someone else could ask them about it, and they pass it on, and now I have no idea who has this unique identifier that represents me anywhere out there in the world. I can ask the first person to update their records but I have no guarantee that they’ll do it successfully or that they’ll remember every single person who they gave it out to you update.
By the very nature of being an identity provider, you are inherently offering your users something that they should be able to fully own in perpetuity. In those circumstances, it’s problematic if an identity provider insists that you always have to pay for its services, just to have communication from your old identity forwarded.
I don’t support Proton for other reasons, but I’ll note that if anyone is having this problem you can use a half-measure of setting your other email address as a recovery email and enabling “daily email notifications”, which will email you once a day if there’s unread stuff in your Proton mailbox.
Thank you, that’s a great callout
Can I ask what those other reasons are? (genuinely curious if I should switch away from them)
The straw that broke the camel’s back for me is the CEO’s icky tweet about how great Republicans are for your privacy and how they stand up for the little guys (what), which they doubled down on using the official Reddit Proton account. There’s already been a ton of discussion about this on the internet if you care to look for more angles on it.
But before that I’d already grown quite leery of them for their trend of endlessly starting new services before the old ones are polished, along with trying to push everyone into their walled garden and endlessly using naggy popups in the UI about it. Worst of all, they have a clear trend of not giving a damn about Linux support, sometimes giving up on certain features for their Linux clients or releasing the clients way after the Windows/Mac versions. For a “privacy company”, not putting Linux as a first-class citizen is really just unacceptable, and they’ve been around for long enough that it’s clearly a trend and not a fluke. To me, Proton just feels like a wannabe version of Apple. Its continued actions give me the feeling that it exists to serve itself, not its users.
Thanks for the extensive response! You make some really good points and I was unaware of the political ick. Not sure if it’s enough to make me leave them because they do seem to at least handle the privacy aspect of their services correctly (for now at least), but those do seem like good areas that I’m going to watch more closely about them from now on.
How do you expect anything to be completely free?
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Point seems to be that people are switching from gmail to proton for free email, but it’s going to be even more difficult if Proton becomes like Google turned out since you’ll have to pay to get all the email to your new address while you are transitioning to whatever is next. Instead go to that next thing now before you get “locked in” by having all of your important emails going there. With gmail at least you can forward the emails for free from the places you forget to change your email with at first.
A better question would be, why do domains cost so much.
Domains cost like $1 if you’re flexible. Email hosting is what costs money.
Reminder of this:
https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-mail-server-because-mail-is-hard/
And that mailu.io (and other similar projects) makes self-hosting email almost trivial 😁 (at least for people that can run a pre-configured
docker-compose.ymland buy their domain etc)Thank you for raising this point.
Are there even other privacy-respecting email providers that are fit for the job? I’m genuinely curious.
EDIT: I absolute hate doing this, but I want to understand: Why is this getting downvoted?
Mailbox.org is a good pick to consider IMO. You can read some comparisons on PrivacyGuides, which I also recommend as a starting point for these sorts of topics. The mailbox.org web UI is not great, but it allows IMAP/SMTP access, so I use Thunderbird on both desktop and Android in order to interact with my inbox. My inbox is auto-encrypted with PGP using their Mailbox Guard thing, so my emails are all encrypted garbage on the web UI anyway. Mailbox.org only allows paid-for accounts, but considering the annoying stuff that Proton and Tuta do to their free accounts I’d rather just be honest about the service I’m getting. It allows auto-forwarding directly in the web UI, but given that you can hook up to it with IMAP anyway, it’s not like you couldn’t just do it yourself.
(Also, as another comment said I also recommend DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection for email aliasing if you need it.)
Thank you! Great answer!
For some reason, perhaps because I’m an absolute shill/sucker for free services, I always forget about mailbox.org. Thank you for bringing it to my attention and talking about its features!
Though, if I understand correctly, we basically don’t have a privacy-respecting email provider that offers auto-forward and auto-reply functionality in its free plan/tier:
- Proton Mail requires a paid plan for auto-forwarding/replying and its free plan doesn’t support IMAP. BUT?!, crucially, IIUC, the issue can already be circumvented with a custom domain that sits in front of Proton Mail. Which, isn’t entirely free, but 1$ for the domain ain’t bad.
- Tuta Mail doesn’t even offer the functionality AFAIK nor does it support IMAP. Furthermore, I don’t know if the custom domain trick works for this one.
- Finally, mailbox.org doesn’t even have a free plan. Though, at 1 euro/month, it’s at least very competitively priced.
DuckDuckGo will give you free forwarding with a duck.com address. It also strips all trackers. I love it.
This is pretty cool and definitely has use, but IIUC this is strictly a free forwarding address, right? I don’t think it tries to compete with Proton Mail or Tuta Mail.
Correct, that’s all it is. But if a live person is asking me for an email, and I don’t want to break out my phone to generate something complicated and hard for them to understand, this works great. (They have enough trouble understanding “duck.com,” even though after the first few instances of utter confusion, I now say, “@duck.com, like the bird, quack, quack.” And they still get extremely confused.
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Proton Mail Bridge requires a paid account.
Agreed.
