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Comment by antpls | Hacker News Reader

Some years ago, I evaluated Protonmail as a replacement for my personal gmail account.

When came the steps "can I easily move from this service?", I realized you have to _pay_ to export all your emails from the service. They make it super easy for you to open an account and receive emails, and then makes you pay if you want to get a copy of your own data.

I contacted the support to tell them it is likely illegal under European Data Privacy laws. They replied I can still export email for free one by one if I wanted to... (which is obviously not a valid answer when you have 5000 emails)

Then I looked in Swiss laws for a similar clause, and found that Swiss laws doesn't give users of online services the right to easily and freely get a copy of their data. It was a law proposal at the time of my research.

So yeah... Your data is so secure in Switzerland that you don't even own your data !

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Nowadays they do provide an app (Import-Export) to export all your mail, even for free tier accounts, so it's quite easy to move away.

See: https://proton.me/support/export-emails-import-export-app

Which is close-source (or I didn't find it in their github repo).

Does it - legally - matter?

For those who care about OSS and moving to Protonmail from bigcorps email, this _might_ matter, although I think that for the majority of Protonmail users (which doesn't care much about open source), it doesn't matter.

The repository for Proton Mail Bridge (which is open source) claims to also host the source for the Import Export app.

Here: https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge

Briefly looking at the files and code it's hard to tell whether that is still the case, but it's fair to assume Import-Export would reuse most of the machinery behind Bridge.

bridge exposes imap making it easy to download all your data using Thunderbird or another client. I don't know about "export" because imap does what I want and is supported by most providers in the same format.

Hmm.

When I was using Protonmail in free tier, the Import-Export feature was only for the paid tier.

Seems strange that they only opened it for free tier now. This should be a feature available to any tier in the first place.

Good. If you want to pay with your personal data, use gmail. If you want to keep your personal data, then pay the people who run the service with actual money.

I see it as a way of getting paid for the development of services. People willing to pay for an offering are more likely to provide quality feedback. Once it is stable there and dev time has been recouped, you can offer it to the free tier.

I actually don't have an issue with that. Once it is available to free tier users, it frees up the devs to go to the next item on the list once again only available to the paid users. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sounds like a fairly sound bizplan.

> I see it as a way of getting paid for the development of services.

The obvious reason is that a company has an incentive to make it easy to onboard and no incentive to help you migrate off or even an incentive to make it difficult or costly to leave. I don't see how making import/export something only a payed tier has is specifically or especially for funding development. It's not the deal breaker or the reason people choose Protonmail over others, even if it can be a consideration.

Do you not agree that the types of support requests or other feedback from the masses in the free tier tends to be of a much lower quality than you might get from a paid user? The expense of supporting those requests are not insignificant. By ensuring that the product is in a much more stable state before reaching the free tier can help keep those support costs lower.

>It's not the deal breaker or the reason people choose Protonmail over others, even if it can be a consideration.

Yet here we are on a dev centric forum talking about it being a "bad" decision. From a dev perspective, the decision of starting something in a paid tier then (if ever) releasing to the free tier is not offensive to me. A company offers a free thing that has fewer features than a paid tier, "news at 11" type of story it is not. Doing poor research into the limitations of the free tier and complaining publicly about not having access to the paid features on the free tier is also not news worthy. Again, yet, here we are.

Hey Dylan I saw your comment on USPS api. I am very much unguided on how to use it. Can you please email me? I don't know how to use it and I even called them, no luck! Please email me. --impetus1 a t protonmail(dot)com.>

Try harder. You can run their bridge to expose imap and use any client to export your emails. Also, your info from "years" ago is out of date as they are a small company that has been working on product/features all those years.

Their point was about having to pay to export your data. Afaik Bridge is still to this day only available to paying users. Still, their statement is no longer true since exporting in bulk is permitted for free with the Import-Export app.

You have to pay to receive a service? Good heavens!

Exporting an XML file from a database of already existing emails is very likely a query that takes milliseconds to run automatically.

If it's true they require you pay to export emails it sounds like borderline extortion.

Then buying any digital good or licence is extortion. After all it’s just an INSERT query! They could just do it for free, yet they refuse to…

It's artificial scarcity, which to me is immoral, but it is what it is.

In your example, you have the choice not to buy the license. In the case of Protonmail, they already have your emails, and are already serving them to you, so holding your correspondence hostage if you want to export it all in one go is a bit of a dick move.

Is that why a Google Takeout of your Gmail takes 24 hours to complete?

that's obviously a strawman. What's being critized is the heroin-dealer model of doing business, i.e. "the first dose is free" but you'll be locked in, which seems increasingly popular among a lot of services that try to compete with the big players.

Wouldn't comparing paying a few dollars to leave a service forever to a "heroin dealer" be the strawman here?

no because the comparison is in the mechanism of luring in customers, not the substance or the price. We can go with any commodity you feel comfortable with if that improves the analogy for you

to be fair, any half-decent email client already has this functionality built in for free.

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