They are an email provider. Providing true anonymity leads to spam abuse. Spam abuse leads to blacklisting. And blacklisting leads to bankruptcy. Not sure what people expect.
Transparency as the bare minimum? We are talking about a service that you expect to handle some sensitive information, you expect them to be transparent on what they do. If they block account creation over TOR because of spam issues, then that's should be said clearly on their platform.
OP is not only complaining about free account, they are also mentioning paid account, which has a 1k message per day limit. No spammer is going to pay 5 euros to send 30k message in a month, that just not worth it. So there's no reason to block paid account too.
This isn't rocket science, Protonmail. You make it look hard. I'll take my money elsewhere (open to suggestions here).
Feel free to report where. Something tells me it ain't that easy to find a decent alternative.
That said, I do have a country perfect for this - lax law enforcement, outside EU but bordering it, no US, Chinese or Russian affiliation, either, very reliable high speed Internet and cheap electricity.
Something tells me as soon as most people see the name, they will refuse to sign up.
Wouldn't even need to see the name to refuse to sign up. Assuming it's not Switzerland, all the other options seem bad.
(hn discussion from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28350466
from years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18238581)
Why give up on this point? There's nothing that says true anonymity has to lead to spam. Spammers have the limit that they have to spam to , presumably make money, since they go via the 1000 tries and only needing one hit to win. They have a weakness. users and activists dont have this weakness really.
They probably have that, but spammers can wait. They have the time and money(!) to figure these limits out.
> There's nothing that says true anonymity has to lead to spam.
Lack of burdens against abuse does say that it leads to abuse.
Otherwise I'll just use Gmail it's free.
So that is your alternative... Not sure what your threat model was.
I would switch to Gmail and donate my $50/year to EFF.