Proton dropped from the top spot on my list of “user-first email platforms” when they announced they’ll be deleting accounts that haven’t logged into their service in some arbitrary amount of time. If I can’t rely on my email / messaging / phone / communications provider to keep an open line for as long as I need it – whether that’s one year or two years or twenty years, then I’m not going to use it. And if they require payment in exchange for providing that service, then it better accept privacy-preserving payment, but even then, I’m probably not going to use it.

Proton had a great thing going where their VPN service and business service funded the cost of maintaining free accounts. The fact that they chose to destroy years of trust by announcing a deletion policy, indicated to me that they no longer care about their users more than they care about running a business.

I’m not even asking for something unreasonable. It’d be one thing if they didn’t want to maintain free accounts with no activity but hundreds of gigabytes of storage. But they haven’t stratified the limit by storage usage. If you’ve got a free account consuming a few megabytes of storage, maybe an email you setup for the government service you interact with every few years… well you better make sure you remember to do the arbitrary chore of logging into that account every year, or Proton will just delete it, no questions asked.

Maybe they’ll send you some reminders if you gave them a “recovery” email, but that defeats the point of signing up to a privacy-preserving email service and calls into question the premise that they even are one.

(In related news, I need to text myself on Google Voice every few months or they’re gonna delete the number I use for 2FA on critical services… and this is an account that has $4 of credit loaded into it from ten years ago…)

I built one that doesn't delete accounts and plan to accept payments in CryptoNote. If anyone wants to try it ping me.

> deleting accounts that haven’t logged into their service in some arbitrary amount of time

One year, to be exact: https://proton.me/support/inactive-accounts

I've had multiple proton accounts and can vouch for (pure anecdote of course) two of those working fine despite me forgetting to use them completely for at least four years. So not sure how true what you say is. These are both free accounts btw.

The amount of hate that Proton gets here for the above still ambiguous situation (and in many other comment threads) is bizarre and oddly hive-minded.. The company is far from perfect but compared to the overtly parasitical openly done deep scanning of your email content and utter disregard for any responsiveness to user complaints from any major American tech company's email service, Proton is positively saintly by comparison. Id' suggest growing and regularly watering a bit of perspective.

EDIT: I see a number of comments about Proton's "jankiness" and service unreliability here too. I haven't experienced any of that either on desktop or mobile.

> Proton dropped from the top spot on my list of “user-first email platforms” when they announced they’ll be deleting accounts that haven’t logged into their service in some arbitrary amount of time.

... for free accounts only, after 12-24 months of not having logged in at all.

> And if they require payment in exchange for providing that service, then it better accept privacy-preserving payment, but even then, I’m probably not going to use it.

They allow you to physically send in cash.

> I’m not even asking for something unreasonable

I don't disagree in principle, but the way you're asking for these things does in fact make you come across as an unreasonable customer.

Who is at the top spot now?

If you don't pay, you are not a customer. They are doing you a favour. Don't be a begger.