"You could also store 1GB of data in exchange for letting us read your emails and build an Ad profile based on everything you do in Gmail – nearly 100 times what was available at the time, because no one else dared to do something similar and had no means to profit from this data."
Privacy-aware folks, it's time to move on if you haven't done already.
I've heard that this is why Amazon purchase confirmation emails no longer list all the items in your order, and now read "You ordered Truncated Product Name... and 5 other items!") -- they didn't want another major tech company getting so much insight into their business.
Google's dominance and ubiquitous surveillance is causing email email to evolve into something less useful for all of us.
Every email service has a computer "read" your emails. If it didn't then your inbox would be filled with spam.
If it's specifically the ads you don't like, then it's probably not news to anyone here that free search, email and social networking is funded by ads.
I for one am highly "privacy aware", and I've also found tremendous value in Google's search, email and docs.
I found Google's products to be far superior to those from Yahoo, Microsoft and others.
While I'd prefer Google's products to be both free of cost and free of ads, I trust Google more than the other guys and I'm happy with the tradeoff.
They also don't support sending plain-text email (a bit of an odd restriction, and it means most mailing lists will drop your emails -- making it unusable as a primary email service if you use mailing lists often).
In addition much of their "secure email" features are only super useful if all the recipients are using ProtonMail (they use PGP under the hood, but all the keys are managed by ProtonMail -- though encryption is done client-side). You can set up a symmetric encrypted email for non-ProtonMail users, but that basically gives the user a link and they have to enter a password you've given them over a different secure channel (making it little more than a nice interface to gpg --symmetric).
All-in-all while ProtonMail is nice, for my usage it wasn't workable. I ended up using Mailbox.org which is a more traditional email system (though they have a cool feature where you give them your PGP public key and they will encrypt all plaintext emails they receive so that they are all encrypted when stored both remotely and locally).
I have 15GB in gmail and proton only offers 5GB for a single user plan.
You can't use a regular email client with Proton without some proxy software. [1]
https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/third-party-em...
It doesn't have a calendar, so you can't send or accept meeting invites if that's something you need to do.
They keep saying they're going to open source the app when the next version comes out, but development seems super slow on that front, no major app updates in a couple of years.
They have a bridge app that lets you use outlook, thunderbird, etc. and it works great, but the Linux version has been in beta for about 2 years, and you have to email someone to get on the beta list.