ProtonMail

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.

They are monitoring all your activity and after a while youare just become a message like this when logging on: This account has been suspended due to a potential policy violation. If you believe this is in error, please contact us at https://proton.me/support/abuse. After contacting: Please note that your account was found to be in connection with another account disabled for violations done to our Terms of Service. That means: "Big Brother watching you" They will close you email accont if you send a message to persons that violating their terms of service. All of my contacts, stored keys, loging options to services as second mail are gone. Not worth get mail service from this paranoiacs.

Shocking. Absolutely shocking service. As a customer since 2018 this will be the year I leave.
There could easily have been a solution but no one would bother to help. Disgraceful

Was paying for professional EMAIL and a few euro for VPN.
INSTEAD OF PUTTING ME ON THE CORRESPONDING personal plan which is unlimited I was moved Up to a business plan.
This is absolutely disgusting behaviour and could easily have been solved by removing the completely unnecessary VPN plus membership plan as it's no longer needed (as it's now part of the unlimited plan) I have been put on a plan costing €230 every two years.

This is not how a business should gouge their customers for extra money.
Unbelievably disappointed in a company I respected so much. I'll
Be exporting my mail and leaving asap.

Proton unlimited was everything I wanted. I subscribed for one month in order to try it. I was planning to replace Google with proton, but this is impossible. The result was that I would still have to use Google or Microsoft and proton. So what's the point? The main problem comes with contacts. You cannot use your contacts in anything else other than your protonmail. Whatsapp, signal messenger, messages, phone calls you have to use a different contact list. So this whole amazing package crumbles down... To something quite insignificant, secondary, replaceable... Basically irrelevant to my initial task.

However, the worst experience was that I could not stop my subscription and their support was not helpful. I subscribed on purpose for one month in order to avoid such a problem. However, there is auto renewal in place, they do not allow me to downgrade for some reason and the support is not helping either.

I can now also tell you the reason I cannot downgrade: it is because of the better proton drive. If you have quota - used megabytes - you first have to delete and then downgrade. After deleting everything in my proton drive, it's still shows quote used: 42 GB. The support knows this is a defect. They have told me so in the emails we exchanged. They know it is their fault I cannot stop my subscription. And they still provide no help, which obviously leads me to believe they use the very same cheap e-commerce tactics, US companies used 20 years ago...

Proton asks me WHEN the LAST email I EVER made was and needs precision answers... 6 months who can answer that with precision how about I'll show you id and prove the card used was mine. They have assisted in taking my money and not giving me the services o paid for... NEVER PAY FOR A PROTON EMAIL. THEY WILL RIPYOU OFF AND NOT RETURN IT

Protonmail has done so wrong that I am writing a review about it to save others from damages. Personally, I have had the worst customer service of my life for a paid account. Their responses weren't even to the specific questions, to the point I thought bots were responding. I should have run then. Almost did, but just put up with it in the interest of privacy and time.
Finally, like others, my account got blocked although I had made payments. They did not return my money and I am still waiting for my account to reopen. I sent multiple emails over days, but have yet to receive a reply. It's been such an extreme case, that I decided to do a little legwork and found so many people complaining about losing access to their email for some reason or other. This happens, but what doesn't happen is the extreme bad response you get, if any, from their customer service for paying customers. I am writing this to say buyer beware. I wish I had known before they caused me damages. After doing some research, I have now happily switched to another email provider. I won't mention the name in case anyone thinks I wrote this to plug someone else, but just do your homework and you'll find competitive options. Protonmail is not the only show in town, but it is one of the most poorly run email providers and certainly the only one that has received such extreme, bad reviews from paying customers.

PROTON USED OT BE GREAT! NOT ANYMORE!. OUR COMPANY STAFF HAS SEVERAL E MAIL ACCOUNTS, AND THEY CONSTANTLY GO DOWN AND WILL NOT ALLOW LOG IN! PLUS PHONEY FRADULENT SCAMMERS ARE TRYING TO CHARGE $ 1.0O FOR BULL$#*! HELP, JUST TO GET YOUR INFORMATION! DO NOT USE PROTON! THEY DO NOT RESPOND TO COMPLAINTS EITHER!

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 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.

I've had a free account with ProtonMail for years. Not particularly for the security features, but for the same reason I refuse to feed Google so they can read my emails and extract advertising data. Up until recently, I thought ProtonMail was fairy secure and private. However, they recently agreed to spy on an activist for the Swiss government. At the government's demands, ProtonMail logged a french activist's IP address and gave it to the authorities. You can read about it here... https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-address-of-french-activist-after-order-by-swiss-authorities/

When you need to communicate in complete privacy and under a gold plated secure environment, Proton Mail is the place to go. The free service is enough for almost anyone; however if you want huge storage, ProtonMail offers it at reasonable rates. Some time ago, whistle blower, Ed Snowden recommended ProtonMail after searching for the most perfect service. ProtonMail also got glowing recommendations from the likes of EFF.org and several others who relish privacy.

This is the only email service that never locked me out of my own account, never asked me to answer those sh! Tty captcha challenges and still kept my mails 101% secure and encrypted. PGP keys adds extra layer of protection.

I've had to email the team a few times and they're always been responsive. Their email service is quick and easy to use, I'm even starting to use their VPN service. All in all I dont have anything I can fault them with so far.

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.

I'm a new user and I signed up multiple accounts with Protonmail which is apparently not allowed, my fault for missing that bit and for not reading everything on the screen. But as soon as I got an email (sent by a bot) stating that my account is under watch for being one of the multiple accounts, I immediately went into salvage mode. I logged onto the platforms that I use Protonmail for and started changing emails and closing down the excessive protonmail accounts. But before I could finish it, all the protonmail accounts are suspended. This was within the 10 minutes when I was trying to close those accounts. No support that reach out to me personally to ask, nothing. The accounts were closed. I wrote in an inquiry about this more than 2 weeks ago now, no response.

Just awful. I get that I violated their policy but I was not aware of it and I acted on the information as soon as I'm aware of, they didn't give me enough time and they did not reach out to me at all to work out a solution together. I can't do anything with one of the platforms because my email is suspended, and I'm stucked here. It's stupidly unnecessary and it just shows where their priority lies, not the customers obviously.

So you've been warned, if you are planning on using the free service and are prepared to pay for this eventually, keep in mind that you're paying to a business that does very little to communicate with their users.

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.