Proton Mail

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Proton Mail

Basic Information
Release Year	2014
Product Type	End-to-end encrypted Email service
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://proton.me/mail

Proton Mail is a privacy-focused email service based in Switzerland, which has partnered with non-Swiss content delivery networks, such as Radware. Proton Mail is part of the Proton suite of privacy-focused online services and software which includes Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, etc.

Consumer-impact summary

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

• User Freedom
• User Privacy
• Business Model
• Market Control

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Incidents

This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents related to this product. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the Proton Mail category.

False advertising and working with authorities (2021.09.06)

Main article: Proton Mail discloses activist IP address to police

Up to 2021, ProtonMail advertised itself as a private and secure service with the following under "Anonymous email":

"No personal information is required to create your secure email account. By default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account. Your privacy comes first."

This statement proved to be false, when in September 2021, a member of a French activist group had been using ProtonMail to communicate with other groups. As an investigation was launched involving them, the email provider handed over the user's IP address and other data, including the device they were using. The section was changed shortly after getting attention from news outlets and the general public.

Harsh inactive account policy

In 2022, ProtonMail announced a policy that entails the deletion of inactive accounts, resulting in major controversy. Many users have criticised the decisions and advocated for nuanced versions of inactive account policies, such as deleting only the email contents of any inactive ProtonMail accounts instead of the accounts themselves, as the latter would reportedly result in major inconvenience for users who used the accounts as multiple-factor authentications for important services, such as banking. It has also been said that the harsh policy will adversely affect those who had good reasons to become inactive for a long time, such as hospitalisation, prison incarceration, and being in totalitarian countries that have prolonged internet shutdowns.

In response, ProtonMail added an exemption, where the inactive account policy would not apply to any accounts that had premium subscriptions, although the exemption was revoked as of 2024.^{[citation needed - any official announcements?]} ProtonMail accounts created before April 9, 2024, have a two-year grace period before being subject to the policy, as opposed to one year for newer accounts. In some cases, users have reported success in recovering their inactive accounts after being locked under the policy.

As of 2025, many users continue to voice their concerns regarding the inactive account policy, advocating for sensible measures such as deleting only the contents of inactive accounts while sparing the accounts themselves.

The Proton team has stated on Reddit that the inactive account policy aims to "manage their resources in a sustainable way". In the comments, it was noted that retaining the accounts themselves indefinitely and only purging their contents would not noticeably increase operating costs compared to deleting entire accounts, given that login information is all that would have to be retained. ProtonMail also does not allow registering email accounts with the same address as deleted email accounts to prevent impersonation, which would be possible only because it retains the deleted email addresses in its records.

Data portability

Until around 2023, there was no way for users without a paid subscription to create local backups of all of their emails at once (an example of data lock-in). Paying users could utilise the Proton Mail Bridge to download their emails via the IMAP protocol using an external client, such as Thunderbird or Outlook. In contrast, free users were limited to downloading each email individually, making it impractical for backup purposes.

Since approximately 2023, Proton Technologies has offered an export tool that anyone can utilise.

See also

Link to relevant theme articles or companies with similar incidents.

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