Ask HN: Are Protonmail.com Addresses Snubbed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are Protonmail.com Addresses Snubbed?

36 pointstunap52 comments

I've sent emails to ~ 30 entities since July, and the only 3 respondents were: a 'test' reply from a friend, one business & one .gov.

I setup a PM mail for job applications & the local/name is not offensive or inappropriate. I am sending to businesses & agents with posted job openings, so, it's not unsolicited. I expected a high number of no responses, but > 90% is much higher than I expected(before the latest layoffs trend, anyway).

Is such an address likely to go straight to spam or is there a general dislike for Proton Mail I am not aware of? I understand 'free' emails are often abused by bad actors, but I presumed that Proton Mail would be less maligned than most. Is this an incorrect assumption?

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I wanted to use Proton Mail and was very excited and made a fresh new account. Sent a test email to my old gmail and it went to spam immediately. That told me how feasible this was to use as my primary email.

Google has a stranglehold on what it considers "valid" and I don't know how we use other providers as long as they have it.

One of the common spam flags are email addresses or names similar to yours or your affiliates.

It was a totally different name. It just didn't like the Proton domain and this is extremely uncool because all the emails I've gotten from Proton users in the past were definitely not spam and were all authentic people. I can't say the same for Gmail.

Remember when Gmail was new and you needed an invite from an existing user to create an account?

Yahoo mail was tossing those invites right into spam.

Slightly off-topic, but this is the biggest issue I see with the fediverse. If people did one day finally get tired of the twitters changing hands, and the youtubes hurting creators, and everyone finally migrated to federated services, what's to stop everyone from joining one single mega server that treats other nodes unfairly? Just because we've succeeded in getting people off of corporatized, centralized platforms, doesn't mean we've succeeded in getting people to care. They'll still only be driven by what inconveniences them, and being on a node that is blacklisted by the most dominant node is inconvenient.

> I presumed that Proton Mail would be less maligned than most. Is this an incorrect assumption?

Proton Mail seems to be less blackballed than most. But still has massive deliverability issues. If you want reliable delivery, you really have to stick with Microsoft, Google, AWS SES, or mayyyyybe FastMail.

I hate this situation.

Thanks. I tried FastMail a few years back. I had delayed mail problems. Reached out to them. Their email, informing everything looked good on their end, had a 4 hour delay in the header. Heh.

For those who care: FastMail servers are located in the US

> you really have to stick with Microsoft, Google, AWS SES, or mayyyyybe FastMail

The left-field approach would be to build your own client on top of an email API like mailgun or sendgrid (excluding the free tiers). But those are expensive for a personal use-case.

I've had bad luck with delivery on Mailgun, particularly to Yahoo and Hotmail/Outlook/Live.com. They have good luck reaching Gmail.

did you pay for the dedicated IP address? My delivery was good with sendgrid after I payed the $80.

I tried to but they didn't want to assign one due to low volume (at the time). On the one hand I get it, on another I wish they were more honest about their product on its listing.

Do you have any data on "massive deliverability issues"? I'm a customer and knowing this would of course be very relevant to me.

I've been a protonmail user for years and I haven't seen this problem. I email to people with gmail and haven't gotten blocked, as far as I know anyway.

Same here, protonmail users for many years and never faced such issues. Overall the service has been pretty reliable and I don't really see a reason to move away from it.

I see Proton Mail addresses and think the owner is paranoid, hiding something or odd in some way. Similarly, if I see aol or yahoo addresses I think old or not tech savvy. It is not necessarily fair, but they are my first instincts and I am sure it is true of others.

Hmm, only Gmail addresses appear trustworthy then? What else is so prevalent... Outlook?

Just make your own personal email address/domain.

I already have my domain firstlastname.com with Google domains. I can setup email forwarding for free. All goes to my gmail address.

As far as normal people their reaction was "That's cool you have your own email like that"

It's fun and educational. I nabbed first@last.me. Unfortunately my last name isn't quite so easy to spell so it isn't quite the easiest but it's me.

What’s annoying is the number of web forms that assume all email addresses must end in .com, .edu, or maybe .net/.org if you’re lucky. And refuses to let you use your nice custom email domain because it’s “invalid”.

So I have a .family address for my “primary” account and a gmail account for fallback purposes.

I had myname.com for 15 years. I let it go when I had email hosting issues, the Covid hit & I scrutinized my cost:benefit of inflating registrar and hosting fees over the years.

firstlast@firstlast.com always seemed a little redundant to as an email address; and me@firstlast.com also sounds ... weird

I use mail@firstlast.com

I also sometimes use first@firstlast.com because some services don't allow emails starting with keywords, Facebook for example doesn't, or didn't at the time I tried, allow mail / info / admin etc.

I treat it the same and when we have an unwieldy number of applications (always), I just skip over those.

Good to know that is a factor, thanks. You and the parent posters' disclosure is appreciated.

Maybe you don't want to have to work with people like that anyway.

I don't disagree, but it seems better to respond with appreciation for their candidness.

I also don't disagree with your point. But I am also intentionally informing them how their actions may be percieved by a bystander, or their own potential resource pool.

While they are pre-judging others for not using gmail because they see that as weird, I am a valuable capable potential producer judging them for their failings of both academic integrity (as in you just shouldn't do that simply because it's not right) AND also seperately for their failing of pure intelligence and their own self interest, because in fact some of the smartest most capable people are the ones willingly and knowingly taking on the burden of not using gmail for either practical or principled reasons, and they are filtering those people out, which I judge to be stupid. Those are probably exactly the most valuable people to their own interests.

While from the other side, I don't necessarily consider it to be stupidly filtering out potential employers, because I am not desperate for any scrap of employment.

I haven't noticed any special problem with my own PM address, but I have never tried to cold call anyone from it. So I would possibly agree that filtering out 90% is too much even if I'm not desperate, but I haven't encountered that problem because I'm not trying to contact a large number of new strangers.

Having dealt with the privacy officer inbox for a large company in the past I have the same reaction - the most vexatious complaints we received and struggled to resolve all came from people with protonmail addresses.

Yahoo has a decent email service, imo. I mean .. it's just email. And I got my first gmail almost twenty years ago; hard to say it's not old.

Do you lock the door on your house? Do you close the curtains on your bedroom window with a neighbor 20 feet away?

Why? Are you paranoid and odd?

I'm definitely odd that I read the stories of unlucky people's entire lives F'd over because they happily used all the standard convenient google services and then google killed them, in error, and with no human customer service to correct it, and I decide that maybe we shouldn't all just cooperate with a bad thing, and try to get myself some other service providers.

have you tried the protonmail provided @pm.me extension? This has worked for me for getting past spam filters. the @protonmail.com extension almost always gets forwarded to spam. if you dig around in the settings of your email, you should find this option under Account Settings -> Addresses -> Default. i can't recall, but it may be part of the paid version of protonmail.

That's probably because you have to pay to send using pm.me, and spammers use free accounts

In some ways, yes. I have a custom domain that is an alias to protonmail and was having trouble when I first started trying to do foster care licensing. Once I finally started getting through and asked agencies what the heck the deal was, it turned out my emails were automatically going to the spam folder or not even being delivered, provided their own providers were Microsoft or Google, which was true of just about all of them. This is true even though I have valid DKIM, registered the domain under a real name, and am the only user and have not been sending spam anywhere. I guess it's a guilty until proven innocent world out there.

Also I was getting what I thought was an annoying bug trying to register for a video streaming subscription for months under an actual protonmail address I use only for that purpose so the spam it gets doesn't flood regular email. It was just silently never getting to the payment page and reloading the page to enter an email without any kind of error or failure message. Each time, I figured screw it, probably broken, I'll try again next month. I finally just tried a gmail address instead and it worked fine.

I recently concluded a successful job hunt with a protonmail address. I used `@pm.me` alias, which I guess didn't ring any alarm bells.

I have had several issues with my personal .me domain. I’ve attributed it to poorly configured systems that consider it risky simply because it’s the TLD for Montenegro - despite it having millions of registrations for other legitimate purposes.

Hmm, I’m currently using a me TLD and I don't think I’m having trouble. But I’m on a good host and all my dmarc etc is set right. Give yourself a check with https://www.learndmarc.com/

Yeah, I have SPF, DKIM, and a strict DMARC policy all configured for Fastmail, but some hosts just refuse to pass the mail. It's pretty random and sporadic, but it happens. I've also had some web forms refuse to recognize it as a valid email address.

A long time ago my fastmail.us didn't get accepted in places but I can't say I've had problems with that in recent years. Never had a issue with my me, I think people are well aware of the new tlds now.

As an extra bit of authenticity I've been smime signing my sent mail. Not encrypting, just signed. I figure that something no spamer is going to do and I’m hoping any spam filter will look at and pass it. Assuming they don't ignore it and make it a waste of time.

A big way to check if an email address is valid & belongs to a user is to see if it pops up in leaks. It also ages an address.

The more leaks the better. So ymmv when you create a new account.

FWIW I've been using protonmail for 3 years and never had any issues with email deliveries.

Using @protonmail.com, @pm.me, or your own domain name?

A mixture of the 3 actually. I use each for different purposes.

Protonmail addresses are great for signing up to accounts for because the mailbox is encrypted, but not great for actually sending mail to peers because of the spam filtering that google sometimes does.

I wish it weren't so, because its a great service and is so much faster than gmail in my experience, but that's where we're at.

I don’t have canonical data to fall back on, but I suspect that DKIM and DMARC being set up are key to successful mail delivery these days, if you’re not using one of the biggest players like Gmail. I use Rackspace Mail for my personal domain (not the hosted Exchange variety) and with these two configured I’ve had no issues with mail delivery. But many mail hosting providers still don’t support DKIM: which is one reason I’m still relying on Rackspace despite all their broader woes.

Have you previously interacted w these folks?

A user might mark you as spam in their client if they perceive you as engaging in unwanted marketing especially if they’re unclear where you got their email.

And proton was one of two preferred clients the hurtcore folks liked back when I was learning about OSINT + favored by a few other really rude sets of people so it’s absolutely possible especially if you have one of the newer non dot ch addresses.

Do you have a trusted friend you can try emailing to test?

What exactly are you emailing about?

I have found a lot of commercial websites do not allow proton mail now, likely to prevent abuse. It makes me sad, but I get it.

I am not sure why you would use a proton mail address for job applications, it’s like making a website with a weird TLD instead of a .com - no real positive benefit besides maybe saving money, highly likely to be viewed with suspicion.

No matter what email provider you use, you should use a domain you own so that you can switch with minimal hassle.

Beware of going too far out there with new TLDs. I use something like manager@clinch.estate for house stuff and it's nearly impossible to explain over the phone or even in person. "Clinchestate at gmail?" A friend has the same problem with first@last.email.

No issue here. Gmail seems to have an issue with spam lately.

I’ve never had any issues with the @pm.me extension and I’ve been using it ever since it came out. Maybe try that instead ?

I'm going to toss out there, we see a lot of our fraudulent orders being placed with proton mail accounts.

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