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Comment by zxzax | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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