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Comment by protonmail | Hacker News Reader

Sorry if our answer wasn't clear. You can de-activate, but it must be manually requested through support.

You’re replies are very frustrating. It’s like you’re completely missing the point of the replies and focusing on very tiny, irrelevant details. Nobody is claiming that you can’t remove deactivated accounts. Only that you charge for them until you go through the rather annoying process of contacting customer support. And then you make some bad excuse that it’s in the name of security because somebody could potentially make and deactivate millions of accounts. Obviously there could be a middle ground of allowing someone to deactivate 5 accounts per month or something.

I suggest you either stop responding, or actually respond to the issues people have, and don’t make excuses that are paper thin.

This line of discussion from Protonmail is making me greatly reconsider closing my accounts (plural) there for VPN and mail service.

This is embarrassing at minimum, and show negative interaction with customers.

Their service is so useful to me. But man, I can't deny their customer interactions can be problematic (as evidenced.)

Is it that the developers 100% defer to a marketing rep without in-depth knowledge? Something else?

Same here, with their email AND vpn. Its been flawless so far, tech wise.

But yeah, they really need to control and focus their core message to a tech board. If you whiff that (which they did), there's a good chance in running off your core users. And that is generally considered a bad idea.

Completely agree.

> Obviously there could be a middle ground of allowing someone to deactivate 5 accounts per month or something.

A improvement like this is indeed in our feature backlog, and something we hope to implement in the future.

Wow this response chain is so layed on thick with half answers and marketing speak. I guess you can now "hope" that I won't cancel my protonmail subscription.

I very much assume they wouldn’t care (or not more than you do anyway).

This seems to be assuming bad faith, you've changed a complaint of a missing feature into a different request for a new feature (because contacting support is inconvenient), which are two different things. It would be best to not confuse the issue, and to focus on doing what you can to support the feature request, if that's what you're interested in having.

If you have to contact support to stop paying for an account you're not using, that's definitely a missing feature.

That seems like a misreading, the very toplevel post says that you can stop paying by deleting all the data. Then the response says you can also do that by contacting support. Did I miss something?

The way I'm reading it, you need support's help to delete everything, but I admit I'm not sure if that's the correct reading.

I don't know how anyone could look at protonmail's responses and not assume bad faith. They're obfuscating the issue so they can make technically correct but effectively useless excuses for crappy behaviour.

I'm not sure what you mean -- it makes sense to me that if you are paying for an email service, they would continue to charge you as long as you store and access those emails in their server, and they would have to take steps to prevent abuse from people who might try to store too much data. Can you be more specific about what the behavior is? Maybe you could show a good way that another email provider has solved this, and provide a helpful guide as to how they could implement that?

Can you name another corporate email provider that doesn't free up seats when users are deactivated? To my knowledge this is how all of Proton Mail's competitors charge for seats - at least all the ones I know of.

I haven't used many "corporate email providers", whatever that means, but I've used my fair share of "classic" email providers (standard mail stack + basic webmail) and most of them charge per inbox. If an address is deactivated, but the inbox is still present, it counts towards your quota (depending on your package, this might mean you're paying for it). If you want to reclaim it, the inbox with all its contents must be deleted. Since that is a highly destructive and usually non-reversible action, a few do require you to go through their support.

I personally don't like it and surely there's better ways of doing it, but it is definitely not unheard of.

I think it is unreasonable to think that protonmail should not charge you for deactivated accounts that still have data in them. If they still have data, then you should keep paying.

It's the same evasive maneuvers that are used on Reddit.

I would kindly suggest you stop wasting your time engaging them in their corp. troll techniques.

If you have additional questions hopefully other members can answer them here.

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