Why I Am Switching to Secure ProtonMail

I looked at protonmail about 6 months ago but decided its free service was too limited (no imap/pop3 access) and the paid service was too expensive. I ended up going for https://mailbox.org/en/ which is not free but much cheaper, and seems to offer a reasonable level of security, privacy and functionality.

On the other hand, I've been using my ProtonMail account for a little over a year and while my mailbox has gotten pretty out of hand I'm only using 87MB out of my 5GB (+500MB) storage limit. Your mileage may vary but I have all my emails funneling in :)

Proton Mail encrypts your mail at rest, and they do not store the decryption keys, so theoretically Proton Mail cannot read your normal emails unless they intercept and store them during sending or receiving. This is already a benefit whether your contacts use encrypted email or not.

There is a way to send an encrypted message to any other email address, but you have to share a password with them somehow, either by including a hint or by some other channel. It is essentially encrypting and storing the message on Proton Mail servers, and then giving the recipient a link to un-encrypt it (they must know the password to do this). I'm not sure if this process is zero-knowledge or not.

In addition all Proton Mail to Proton Mail emails are end-to-end encrypted.

These are not as good as if everybody used email encryption, and it was all end-to-end zero-knowledge, but it's better than the status-quo, in my opinion at least.

ProtonMail has significant quality of life issues that I wish they'd work on.