Proton Mail Reviews 

I've had a proton account for quite some time, I started using it as a gmail alternative a few years ago. After a while, decided to sign up for a paid account for a bigger mailbox, more features, and VPN.
First of all, their VPN is hot garbage.
The mail app is...fine. It hasn't changed or improved in the years since I've first joined.

Previously, they notified before renewal dates so you had a chance to cancel, downgrade or upgrade. This year, nothing. I don't like this sort of sneaky business practice and had thought Proton were the antithesis of it. I canceled, emailed to complain and requested a refund. Then...No reply for several days. Finally some stock message and a request if I wanted to cancel and downgrade. Yes, I say. Silence again. No message or sign of movement at all. I conclude this is a waste of time, dispute the charge via PayPal, and chalk it up to poor service. But no, now they have locked even my free account access until I remove the chargeback.
Okay, I say, this is annoying but I will remove it. Then...guess what? Silence!

I'm not sure how such a poor product can also have such poor service and still somehow survive. They've been trying to push their god-awful related apps for the last year or so, probably not enough people are stupid enough to pay for them, so here we are.

Absolutely love it. Now it was time to get rid of gmail, so i chose Proton Mail. It works, is reliable and is not expensive. I will keep my subscription.

Stay away and save your money. I have paid until May 2027, Proton denied and have now closed my email storage. NEVER EVER PROTON AGAIN.

Protonmail is full of spooks to have a permanent access to account owners' mailboxes. I started to get the following error whenever I tried to sign off for over a month now and no one pays any attention:
"421 Misdirected Request - Request sent to a non-authoritative server."

!!! THIS IS A CRIMINAL ACT AND A CYBER CRIME !!!

Protonmail is supposed to be highly secure as it boasts about its cyber security and that is a big lie.

I would recommend it to NO ONE!

Great product when it works horrible customer service. Three outages in two weeks no access to email or storage or VPN and no explination. I had to search on reddit to find out what was happening with a service I paid for. I reached out to Proton to ask why no one felt the need to keep their customers informed and Elana N shared with me the exact reddit post response in email form. I asked why I had to reach out and Elana said she would be closing the conversation if I had not more questions. I then explained my question was why I'm paying for a product that doesn't work to a company that hopes I just won't notice to which Elana again said if there was nothing else she'd be closing the ticket so here I am. I moved to Proton to get away from google and so far I can say it is not google, as for if it is good at anything else it offers I would say no and that I hope Elana is an AI not a person because if she is then my god.

Extremely disappointed with Proton Mail. I signed up for the Proton Unlimited paid plan directly from their website, but the service did not fit my needs as the student discount isn't applicable in India. Since I was well within their 30-day money-back guarantee window, I requested a cancellation and full refund.It has been days, and I am stuck in an endless loop of waiting 48+ hours for a single response. The only communication I get is automated emails or agents asking stalling questions instead of processing the downgrade.

I currently have two open tickets regarding this exact issue: Ticket #5163252 and my latest form submission Ticket #5175609.For a company that charges premium prices for privacy, their customer convenience and support speed are absolutely terrible.

Free services like Gmail are delivering instantly while a paid tier here leaves you stranded. Process my refund and downgrade immediately.

I created an account.
I saved the details
The following day, I couldn’t access the account, even though I’d saved the details.
Forgot password, tried that, useless
Forgot username, tried that useless.
I gave up.

Unlimited plan claims to have Priority support. That is a lie. I have waited days on end for replies to basic support tickets.

Their calendar sucks. The VPN is slow. Multiple outages with little to no communication to users.

Use Tuta or Infomaniak instead. Paid plans are not worth the money with Proton.

I am very happy there is a good alternative to Gmail, but they have some points of improvement.
I have the problem that the size of my font often changes in an e-mail. This can lead to clear misunderstandings, as all of A SUDDEN THE FONT BECOMES BIGGER. I know it happends when I copy-paste things, but even though I try to undo the changing font-size (e.g. by erasing the font or pasting things with shift-contrl.-v) it keeps happening. In Gmail I never had this problem. Hopefully they can help me. (I already reported the bug, but haven't got a working response or fix yet)

Dear Proton Mail,
I note your response today to the review I posted three days ago. I now have to waste further time publicly clarifying that you did not provide me with any ticket. What I received was a cursory, generic reply claiming a commitment to “joint working,” while simultaneously stating that you are “unable to check each older inquiry.” This contradiction is unacceptable, and your request that I “ask again” merely confirms that no meaningful review of my original issue has taken place.

My email account was deleted. All of my emails gone. No prior warning.

Absolutely unforgivable and the worst possible thing that could happen.

I will NEVER recommend Proton to anyone and will actively dissuade people from using the services.

Edit: What use is sending reminder emails *TO THE EMAIL ACCOUNT THAT IS NOT BEING SIGNED INTO*

Contacted their CEO, Mr. Andy Yen, and copied in customer service days ago. Nothing. I have another enquiry, but am wondering what is the point of contact if they can't be bothered to respond to the first email.

Even though I have a cheaper VPN and Storage Solution, the 'stated' security to ensure AI does not read all mails (like they say Google does ) appealed. I decided to try it before considering upgrades.. I realised when trying to import my GMAIL that I had an account already but could not remember anything about it (probably many years).. I reached out to Support and it's in the 5th day no reply. Definately not what anyone would expect from customer service and certainly no if you're asked to pay for it. It's a great example of poor service and losing potential clients

Sorry, proton but I’m deleting the account and you’re getting a one star review all because you are not user-friendly whatsoever goodbye.

ordered their "Unlimited" package, but quite disappointed. Many products are just low quality. For example. Their VPN app for windows needs more than 30 seconds to start (!!!). What is that? or their password manager. on windows it has fingerprint scanner, but on linux - it doesn't and you have to manually enter your password all the time. Very disappointed by their service.

DO NOT USE PROTON MAIL!!! If you want your passwords hacked, your emails made inaccessible and to be randomly blocked from being able to send and receive emails then use Proton Mail. Proton Mail tell absolute lies about their security, I have never experienced such an unsecure email provider and that is as a paying customer to them. PROTON MAIL TELL LIES AND DO NOT PROTECT YOUR EMAILS AND DATA! DO NOT USE PROTON MAIL!!!

How about a mail provider who blocks legitimate content from reaching you, and telling you that it is for your own protection, even after you whitelist the sender? Think the analogy of that in terms of governments? Do you want that? This is not a provider anyone should ever want to have.

While the support representatives were polite, the supercilious attitude was obvious in their communications (i.e., proton is always right). Support did nothing to resolve the issues with their email system, and denied any responsibility for what had occurred. Support missed the main point of my communications numerous times, and I had to clarify it for them. Even then, they denied that what I claimed happened had indeed happened. At they very least they should have thanked me for the information I provided, which demonstrated that their are some problems with their email system. I'm sure this review will receive a response from proton, asking me to contact them. I won't be doing that, as I've already wasted way too much time on this, and proton couldn't / wouldn't previously resolve the situation. In short: great product, if you don't need support.

I chose Proton Unlimited mainly because Proton is one of the very few providers whose technical architecture genuinely implement the level of security and privacy it publicly claims to provide. From that point of view, I still consider Proton one of the strongest services available.

Unfortunately, my experience with Proton Mail and Proton Drive has not been equally positive in terms of reliability and synchronization.

With Proton Mail, I found the folder hierarchy too limited for my needs. I also experienced inconsistencies between the mailbox structure shown on mobile, on the web interface, and in Thunderbird through Proton Mail Bridge. During migration from an old Gmail account, several messages ended up in a recovery folder and generated errors.

After resetting Proton Mail Bridge, some messages disappeared from the local folder structure, leaving me uncertain whether they were lost, still present on Proton’s servers, inaccessible from the client, or only available in the original Gmail account.

Bridge synchronization was also quite slow.

Proton Drive was more concerning for me. Normal synchronization was reasonably fast, but making files available offline could become extremely slow, sometimes around one file every 30 seconds for ordinary photos and documents. I also observed situations where the application reported that synchronization was complete while files still appeared to be waiting for upload or download, and in some cases newly created files did not appear online as expected.

I understand that end-to-end encryption requires additional processing, and I appreciate the security model. However, my archive contains thousands of files and my mailbox contains thousands of emails accumulated over many years. For this kind of use, I need to be able to trust the synchronization state without continuously checking whether every file and message has actually been transferred correctly.

I eventually decided to cancel Proton Unlimited and migrate my files and emails back to Dropbox and Gmail. I am now restoring recent backups and comparing folders and messages to make sure nothing has been lost, which is a substantial amount of additional work.

This is a real pity because Proton’s privacy and security model is one of the best reasons to choose the service. In my experience, however, the desktop applications, Proton Mail Bridge, and synchronization reliability are not yet at the same level as the underlying security architecture.

I hope Proton continues improving these areas, because if reliability and synchronization become as strong as the privacy model, the suite could be outstanding.

No refund for the "unlimited plan" after the legal period expiration.

20260907 : ticket 5127571

It's impossible to get any meaningful help or customer support for Proton mail. I just subscribed to their Proton Plus yearly plan, and, due to a trivial billing issue, my active account, with important, time-sensitive communications, has been locked out. There is NO WAY to actually interact with a living human being. Everything is run by Zendesk on the other end and a useless AI tool in the user interface, which I was only able to access because I have another free Proton account. There is a fillable form -which I've used multiple times- that only opens up yet another new ticket for the same problem- with no resolution. This is a circular nightmare from hell without resolution!

There is no such thing as 24/7 support as they claim! It's been 3 days, multiple email attempts, and escalations to get help at resolving a trivial billing issue, and we're still at square one. If they had even one live agent for basic customer support, it would solve everything. The "live agent" feature advertised as available with their Customer Support AI tool doesn't actually exist. When selecting that option, they default to an email contact - live agents for Proton mail customer support don't exist at all, in any form, contrary to their advertised hype.

Update (9/3/2026): Proton finally restored access and I am grateful for that. Considering that all other, major mail service platforms are now requiring 2FA, a veritable nightmare if you don't have another device with you, I am going to primarily use Proton and my Mailfence accounts because THEY DON'T USE IT!

Public service announcement: don't use any mail service platform that requires 2FA when traveling. If all you have with you is your laptop and no other device, you may be locked out and cannot access your mail. This is why, when access really matters, I will always use Proton or Mailfence from this day forward.