ProtonMail

I tried login to my Proton account, and got a message that it was disabled.
No warning, no nothing. I have very important email documents, receipts, contacts and copies of bank transactions, all lost! $#*! you Proton mail. Shame on you for treating your customers like that.

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.

Request # *******
==============

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Monday, 05 April 2024:

Here the official message from their Proton Mail Abuse Team:

"We can see that your account was reported and disabled due to unsolicited and spammy messaging.

These actions are not allowed on our service and are strictly against our terms.

Please explain your actions and provide us with details about the purpose of your account, so our team can reassess this case and assist you further." -

No forewarning, strikes, etc., nothing, my entire account access was suspended immediately.

No word about who reported, which message(s), when, frequency, etc., nothing.

Not innocent until proven guilty, not able to face the accuser, no due process. -

I did not sent any group, list, etc. type of e-mails.

I only sent individual e-mails to persons, organizations, etc. that I am directly engaged with and/or transacting with.

I am using webmail since over 30 years, and 4 years ago switched to a paid and supposedly more private & secure Proton Mail account.

None of my e-mail accounts have ever been suspended. -

I am a professional & international traveler, and literally my private & work life depends on this e-mail address; incl. Work, travel, visa, finance, etc.

I am devastated and stranded.

Help please.

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Saturday, 06 April 2024:

In a follow-up e-mail marked as urgent I asked Proton Mail to restore viewing access to my account so that I can at least continue monitoring my inbox while transitioning my work & private affairs to an alternative e-mail provider.

I also asked them if they could please assist me to defend myself against this fraudulent or erroneous spam reporting.

No response.

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Sunday, 07 April 2024:

Still no response from Proton and/or at least e-mail viewing access to vital personal e-mail data.

Proton's apparent list of priorities:

1. Somebody somewhere filing a fraudulent or triggering an erroneous spam report about something.

2. Proton company concerned about their domain name reputation.

5. Proton customer loyal, paying, promoting and without any history of any issues over all the years.

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Monday, 08 April 2024:

Here the official response from their Proton Mail Abuse Team:

"Thank you for your explanation.

Note that we can't disclose how our anti-spam system works, for security reasons; in this particular case, we have proceeded with your request and have restored access to your account.

If you need additional assistance, do reach out." -

Given the above response from the Proton team I have bumped up the rating for this review from very negative to neutral. -

During the next couple of days I will also follow-up with them as to:

1. Why they cannot or do not want disclose what had just happened in my particular case, so that at least there is a learning curve for both sides, and so that such an unacceptable situation can be prevented in the future?

2. Whether there are currently any workarounds and/or solutions; e.g.

2.1 Using a custom personal domain name in my e-mail address in case the Proton team is very concerned about the cleanliness of their own proprietary domain names.

2.2 Using Proton and/or public tools which can (pre-)scan e-mails for potential spam violations.

2.3 Using Proton and/or public tools which can assist in the cleanup of spam blacklists.

2.4 etc.

3. Whether there is potential for future process improvements; e.g.

3.1. Including the Proton Mail customer into their own internal automated Proton anti-spam system workflow, similar to how companies like Facebook are organized in case of potential media copyright violations (e.g. Audio posted together with a video clip), so that there is an automated collaboration before an entire account is being shut down.

3.2. Etc.

For now, back to work, catching up with my e-mail inbox...;-)...

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 thinking I could review it and if I didn't like it, cancel it. After trying it for 30 minutes, it did not fill my needs so I canceled it. They refuse to refund me and instead gave me credit. Don't trust a company that will not refund your subscription, especially after using it for 30 minutes.

I have been waiting for a response from Protonmail for over 10 days now, for a question that may be solved fairly easily. This is the first time for me that this takes so long. Their initial response was almost a blanket mail, basically saying I needed to reinstall the app. I have wrote again two times and there has been NO answer. I'm surprised, and honestly bothered by it. I hope they respond.

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.

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...

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.

Read the recent reviews. One of the first customers now shut down by Proton due to refund request on paid upgrade suscription never activated. Got all the money back from Paypal and not looking back/.

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

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!

Non stop problems with protonmail. For starters my attorney was sending me documents and I could never open them with protonmail. I could forward the email to gmail and it would open with no problem but protonmail couldn't open them. When I open the software another window opens over it and I have to close that window to be able to see my emails. I have contacted customer service and they take literally weeks to respond and offer nothing useful except asking for screenshots which I provide. I am looking for another service at this time because all the privacy in the world amounts to nothing if you can't open attachments. I give it a big F.

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.

Protonmail makes it worthy paying for the extra features that come with premium membership over and beyond the free membership service.

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.

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.

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.

Bad experience. I have tried to log in to my email account and it will not work or accept my password. I am positive that I am using the correct password. I contacted their Customer Support to reset my account or any other advisable solution. The CS communications that I received back through another Email account just keeps repeating the same things over and over and over again. I have answered as many security questions as best as I can. They still give me the same run around and apparently don't even read the full context of my messages sent to them over this problem.

They will ask the same repetitive questions over and over and over. One of the questions they ask - what is the exact date that you last logged in? A lot of us can't remember a specific date with so many online accounts that most people have now. Many of us for security reasons do not store our browsing history dates or logons in a browser history. In my case, the Proton email which I rarely used, was last logged into more than several months ago. No way I am going to remember all of that. I supplied all other information correctly that they requested along with my concerns that the account might have been compromised - yet they still responded back with the same generic Blah Blah over and over again.

I know it was not wise of me to provide a recovery email at the time I created the account several years ago. I get all that, however, the Proton CS is not helpful at all and apparently could care less if the account got compromised. Too much hacking and potential security breaches now in this time we are living in. Proton should either reset it or if needed eliminate the account altogether. My biggest concern and the primary request for the reset was for the potential of being compromised and specifically identity theft. The account was strictly used only for credit reports or consumer reports.

Bottom line is, if you need to contact them over login problems or requesting a reset, forget about any real CS solution. This experience has really left a bad impression with me, not so much over Proton email, but the lack of any real Customer Service. For this reason I wouldn't recommend them for any Email service - free or paid.

I am not impressed with their customer support, lack of action and definitely no concern on their part.

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.

My experience with ProtonMail started off very well. I liked feeling that my email was more secure, although I wasn't sure if it really was more secure based on other things I've read. Regardless, things were fine until a few weeks in when my 2FA was no longer sending codes to my cell phone when I tried to login into my account.

So, I submitted a ticket to customer service which replied that I would receive a response in 1-2 days. Well, it's been 4 days, and there are very important emails I need to get to. I've contacted them a few more times and heard nothing. I have used many email providers, and this by far is the worst experience I've ever had. I am surprisingly disappointed with Protonmail and am changing to a new email provider.

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.

Absolutely terrible. Refuses to delete an account I've already said that I won't be using, due to its utter lack of user-friendliness and absence of very basic features.

Would you believe I've been in contact with "support," trying to understand how to delete emails, for SEVEN DAYS? They've only offered one single response to a ticket on any given day.

I partially completed an import from Gmail, and wanted to dump the inbox/imports, since even a small percentage of what was in Gmail used almost all of my storage.

They claim they can't dump the email on their end. And they refuse to just delete the account.

They claim that the only way to delete 18,000+ EMAILS in total is if *I* do it -- by deleting them FIFTY EMAILS AT A TIME, going PAGE BY PAGE:

***Yes, they expect me to delete 366 PAGES of emails one at a time -- EIGHTEEN THOUSAND individual messages!***

Who has time for this? How ridiculously inconvenient and unreasonable.

Further, I've consistently gotten different wrong answers from different "support" reps on the same issues on something as simple as what happens when email addresses are deleted. In my view, they don't even seem to care that I HAD a concern, and they certainly didn't go out of their way at all to actually help you.

Ex: The very first rep I was talking to about the issue, Borislav... I had to keep suggesting different options TO HIM to see if they'd work. He'd just tell me, (paraphrasing): "No, you can't do that. That won't work. No. Do this very time-consuming thing (described above). Sorry, out of luck."

Very lackadaisical and un-useful.

I completely wash my hands of ProtonMail. On Dec. 9,2020, I told them that I don't even want a free account any more. I requested a refund and complete cancellation, along with deletion of my data from their servers.

However, they demand that I "downgrade" the account to free... by deleting 18,000+ messages manually... *so that* they can delete the account.

How does this make sense? Why is my request so confusing?

THEY REFUSE TO DELETE MY DATA, saying that they "can't" unless I delete 18,000+ messages manually. That's complete and utter nonsense.

If I run a company, OF COURSE I/we can delete ANY user's data, even if I/we have to go to the database / server level to do it.

So they, and I quote (from their Terms), "reserve the right to suspend or delete accounts that are inactive for over three months"... but they will NOT delete your data if you REQUEST that they do?

I thought this company's foremost interest was the privacy of my data?

I was trying to get my family on ProtonMail. I'm so glad I encountered these inane issues *before* I got others entangled with them by referring clients to them and doing article write-ups. I'd hate for anyone else to go through this circular, time wasting nonsense.