Proton Mail
Running older Windows games on Linux, enabling AAA title gaming (including VR) on Linux, serving as an alternative email provider to Gmail
It is a capable Gmail alternative for general use and gaming, but its search is poor and its privacy claims have legal limits.
Reliably searching through your email archive, providing anonymous communication where payment data could be handed over to authorities
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FIRST-HAND READS
What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.
“I use Proton mail and utilize their Hide my aliases feature to ensure that every website I sign up on has a different, unique user name and password.”
POSITIVE · features · Reddit · 2026-08-15
“For Proton, they have been releasing a lot of new services lately.”
MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-02
“Most of my important email was migrated to a Protonmail account”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-10
“Every time I load the webapp, it is downloaded from the Proton servers. Even if I once stop to audit it, next time I load it, it may totally be a different codebase (that e.g. adds a backdoor, potentially just for me, and just this one time). - I need to trust that Proton doesn't inject a backdoor to extract my key, then end-to-end encryption is useless.”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-04-06
“I have been frustrated with ProtonMail for this exact reason, i have a catch all but responding is a hassle where i have to manually create an address”
NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-03-23
“protonmail doesn't send complete text in its normal mode and I had to go find that out which took many tries”
NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-11
“I use cloudflare + protonmail for my custom domain, but I have the feeling that some outgoing emails from my domain gets blocked... 90% deliverability means practically useless.”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-03-07
“switched to protonmail in 2014 and haven't looked around since”
POSITIVE · Hacker News · 2026-03-01
“I paid for Proton mail for about a year, but the most basic paid account is very limited for my needs.”
NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-01
“Proton's email search is so bad that I often default to Gmail where I still keep forwarding a copy of all my emails just for searching them later on”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-02-27
“Protonmail is nearly as bad as outlook at dealing with spam. It's impossible to overstate how bad both of them are at filtering spam vs Gmail.”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-02-27
“I have good luck with Protonmail and it still supports POP3. You also get the benefit of encryption.”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-10-03
“I pay to use ProtonMail's privacy preserving Lumo LLM Chat with good web_search tooling”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-09-04
“really simple to move around. I was able to move from Gmail to ProtonMail on a Sunday afternoon without anyone knowing that I'd made a change.”
POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-08-22
“It is surprisingly good, and I trust Proton that it is private”
POSITIVE · Hacker News · 2025-08-21
“When I went to ProtonMail, I religiously tracked every time I used it anywhere so I should be able to unwind it”
NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-08-21
“I once lost the password for Proton Mail and I lost all of my emails”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Reddit · 2025-02-16
“You can't use 3rd party email clients, unless you also install Proton Mail Bridge, which is only available for paid users. And the bridge only works for desktop, so you won't be able to use 3rd party email clients on your phone.”
NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2024-08-05
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