ProtonMailReviews 48

As a technical product it's good but they run a dishonest promotion and getting an account cancelled and some support is mixed. The product doesn't work well with existing email programs but I gave it a try anyway because of the "30 Day Money-Back Guarantee" listed on all their plans on the website. I didn't like the lack of integration and wanted to cancel. When I finally found and contacted support to cancel they offered a reduced refund. I asked about the 30 day Money-Back and sent them a screenshot but they replied:
"Please be advised that, as per our ToS:
You may cancel your subscription within 30 days of the initial purchase and receive a refund for any unused portion of the service period. Here, any unused portion of the service period refers to the prorated remaining full days of the subscription period. Refunds will be processed within 30 days of the request."
SO THERE IS NO MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE, and if you forget to cancel by the 30th day you won't get any of your one year subscription back. This is a policy worth of a scam company, not a decent software company. Although my money loss was small I'm very disappointed and wouldn't trust them in the future.

The worst email support ever! There's no phone number to call, so your only option is to open an online support ticket.

I lost my password, and I've been locked out of my account for days. I opened a support ticket right away and finally got a response after three days!

I replied to their request for information this morning. It's now ten hours later, and I'm still waiting for a reply. WTF? Am I supposed to wait another three days?

This is outrageous and totally unacceptable! You shouldn't offer a service if you can't handle your customer load.

Do yourself a favor and find a different email provider. I wish I did. It would've saved me a lot of undo stress and frustration.

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.

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

I signed up for a free account at the urging of a lawyer. "The cops hate it and the baddies* love it! It's completely unhackable!" This is not true. It is totally hackable and it certainly is not free. It is also slow, confusing, and the service is flaky.
Do not recommend.
*This was the sales pitch, not a reflection of my needing a secure email account.

If you forget your password, and use your recovery email to reset your access, then get access, you can't see or read your emails unless you can remember your old password, which is a circular loop function that means you will never see your emails again. The workaround for these lame idiots appears to be some encryption key that you were supposed to download to your system, so that you can upload that to unlock your emails, which makes your own computer system the very thing that can be used to hack your Proton security system. I deleted it, not worth the trouble, and I will never recommend it to anyone, ever.

Be very careful not to buy one of proton's plans and then let it set dormant, because they will fill your space with messages from proton - and then if you don't renew your paid subscription, they will charge you an exorbitant fee to cancel and move to a free subscription.

I purchased a year subscription for their password manager thinking I could review it, and if I didn't like it, I could cancel it. After trying it for less than 30 minutes, it wasn't user friendly especially if you are not a computer guru so it did not fill my needs and tried to cancel it. They refused to refund me, and instead locked me out of my account that I now can NO longer access because of my dispute. Don't trust a company that will not refund your subscription, especially after trying it for less than 30 minutes. I'm a senior citizen, and a disabled veteran, and they stole my money by also overcharged me using Euro $$ not US currency. I have contacted Paypal,and filed a dispute to see if they can return my money. Users BEWARE of this Fraudulent Scam email service!

I had signed up for a few email accounts for my Lineage 2 game. They suspended those accounts saying I violated their TOS. I looked at their TOS, point by point, and not one single violation. I asked them what point in TOS did I violate and they would not tell me. So I lost my game accounts, at least for now, because of this nonsense. I never misused or abused those accounts and it was only so I could sign onto my Lineage 2 game. Just doesn't make sense and their support was terrible. I would stay as far away from ProtonMail if I were you, unless you don't mind just losing your accounts at any moment, for any reason...basically because they said so. Sad.

I've been using them for about a year. My big issue is that their customer service is basically non-existent. I have a couple of issues that I can't get resolved. Either they don't respond or send me the same instructions that aren't working in my account. I hate to think if I got blocked from my account somehow all my emails would be gone because there's no customer support to reach out to. I guess I'll be looking for another mail service.

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 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.

I've been blocked from accessing my proton email, I've tried 100s of times, I contacted proton support over 100s of times, no response, proton was my main email that I use for almost every thing.
It's completely unacceptable, unprofessional, unethical and totally scams, and fraud.
Please don't use this mafias's service, use another USA based services.
Proton ruined my life, I've lost all my documents in ProtonMail.
I hope Switzerland will punish these criminals.

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.

Im sick of proton "services"! Instead of helping when you reach out to support, they deny there's any issue and divert by asking you a million technical questions because they think they may throw you off, but their not remembering if you're using proton you're probably tech savy to say the least.

VPN stinks because it's not stealth and gets blocked by everybody

Calendar stinks because it's bare bones and doesn't even have search which makes it useless

Email stinks because you can't use it with your own domain successfully.

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.

This is the worst email service. I migrated my personal email to proton mail and I was initially thinking of getting the paid version. After 2 days, my account was suspended. Apparently, their anti-abuse flagged my account. I tried to write to support but they are either non-responsive or they do not read my messages and just copy and paste default questions and basic answers about not able to overturn the account suspension. My support request is *******.

I read their entire terms of service. I did not violate any rules. This is my one and only account with Proton mail. I did not spam anyone. I did not sent any junk emails or bulk emails. In those 2 days, I already had correspondence that are sensitive in nature as well as time sensitive. Since they suspended my account, I can't access anything so all my email conversations are dead...

Please make sure to back up all data and contacts because you can get suspended at any time. In fact, just don't even migrate your email over to them.

Why do my SENT emails also end up in my TO:? Why does one have to pay to get an answer? Why does one have to write more than necessary to put in a complaint? Why do I have to deal with the following:
(Uploading a proof of purchase (e.g. Photo of receipt or confirmation email) as well before an answer.)
I get the impression it is to make having a question impossible to receive an answer!

I paid a 2 year subscription to upgrade my email account, which auto-renews in January 2023. I am not certain I want to pay for the upgrade in January, but don't want to forget to cancel the subscription, so I attempt to cancel it now in August 2022. It wouldn't let me delete my credit card from the account because it said it was tied to a subscription and told me I had to cancel the subscription first. I canceled the subscription so I could delete the credit card in my account, but protonmail immediately downgraded my account and robbed me of the remaining months I paid for. What should have happened is it simply didn't renew the subscription but my remaining months I already paid for stayed. As a result it gave me an account credit, which essentially is theft unless I give it to them by upgrading the account. They did not refund my money and they stole my months I paid for. I will be figuring out which government authority to report this theft to.