Both auto-forwarding and auto-reply are paid features, which makes cancelling & switching much more difficult. Gmail is a breeze comparatively. I highly recommend against using their addresses (e.g. protonmail.com, proton.me, pm.me)
Email forwarding is available for everyone with a paid Proton Mail plan.
(source)
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No, Proton email addresses do not. I have ProtonMail addresses using my domain. If tomorrow I point to another email provider, Proton can do nothing about it.
Being paid feature vs free is not vendor lock-in.
You are spreading misinformation, either by misrepresenting the situation or by not understanding what “vendor” (an arguable term since apparently you are focusing on the free version) is lock-in means.
their point is not the custom domain usage, who cares about that, for that you need a domain to begin with and its not that common to have a personal one. but that you can’t set up automatic forwarding without continuously paying. that makes switching considerably harder for the everyday people.
I think OP is overblowing things, and is especially misguided in recommending gmail, but at the same time, they do have a valid point and I think you’re somewhat misrepresenting what they said.
For one, they specifically said that the proton domain email addresses are problematic (
protonmail.com,pm.me), and weren’t talking about custom domains that sit in front of Proton mail.For two, their point is valid. Auto-forwarding being paid, does create vendor lock-in and make it hard to switch away from Protonmail if you use the OOTB addresses. It’s something worth considering.
As you said, the recommendation should be to use a custom domain that sits in front of Protonmail rather than switching to Gmail, but paid auto-forwarding is a valid criticism.
I have Proton Mail addresses using my domain.
Those are your addresses then not Proton’s. Hence why switching is easy and is irrelevant to my complaint which is specific to the domains listed
Wikipedia says…
In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.
If I want to switch away I have to pay every month in perpetuity to deliver emails to my new provider. In other words, I’ll always have to be a customer
Because you wouldn’t be actually switching so that’s not lock-in, that’s just you expecting free stuff forever.
Anyway, I understand your point. I also want free stuff and I also want all my free stuff to be exactly what I need. My criticism is more than you selecting a provider, not paying for it, know what the problem is then complain it’s not what you need despite knowing it in advance. What also was problematic for me is that your title is not correct.
Finally, maybe you are technically right (which I do not believe) but you can see from the total number of downvotes to your post and the upvotes on my comments that, at least in this community, your interpretation is being quite criticized.
To end on a pragmatic note : please PLEASE do get funding (it does not have to be your own money) for Proton to provide forwarding for free for all email addresses. I’m sure nobody on this community would complain about that, I surely won’t!
PS: if you are into lock-in and tech, consider reading “Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy” by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian - ISBN 087584863X - Harvard Business Press 1998 and if it’s a bit too much here are my notes on it https://fabien.benetou.fr/ReadingNotes/InformationRules written 15 years ago.
My criticism is more than you selecting a provider, not paying for it, know what the problem is then complain it’s not what you need despite knowing it in advance.
I was a paying customer. I was not aware of this functionality being paid. If I had been aware, I wouldn’t have used Proton addresses. Now I’m facing the consequences after switching. Others have commented being in the same position,
you can see from the total number of downvotes to your post and the upvotes on my comments
If you think I care, you’re wrong. The point of this post is to remind and inform, not argue over technical definitions. If it helps one person then it’s served its purpose
You do not have to care. I’m only highlighting that according to this community your post is precisely not “informing” much.
Also while checking your history https://lemmy.ml/post/19526546 it seems to be a pattern of misunderstanding then blaming it on others.
I guess that’s what not arguing over petty details like “technical definitions” might result in.
Please do not use Proton if you do not think it’s appropriate for your usage. Please do inform others about problems you do encounter. Please do note though that when you are misrepresenting the situation, e.g. with titles that are shortcuts and thus incorrect, you are NOT helping.
A while ago i bought a custom domain from namecheap but i don’t seem to feel safe using it for banking, would you recommend using it for my bank instead of a protonmail email alias?
Maybe I’m missing something, do you often communicate via email to your bank?
I know I do not. Pretty much never ever. That being said if I were to have to, rather than via their website or phone call, I can update that data on my bank account. I’m sure I must go through few (security) hoops to do it but I doubt it takes me more than 5min. In such case… I would put whatever email and I need to switch because I don’t want to pay for that domain anymore then I would just update my contact information there.
TL;DR: I also use my own domain name for banking but in my case I’d argue it doesn’t matter much.
How do you expect anything to be completely free?
A better question would be, why do domains cost so much.
Domains cost like $1 if you’re flexible. Email hosting is what costs money.
Point seems to be that people are switching from gmail to proton for free email, but it’s going to be even more difficult if Proton becomes like Google turned out since you’ll have to pay to get all the email to your new address while you are transitioning to whatever is next. Instead go to that next thing now before you get “locked in” by having all of your important emails going there. With gmail at least you can forward the emails for free from the places you forget to change your email with at first.
Yes I realized this too late, after I had already used the private email adresses from proton pass everywhere.
My solution ( while not completely private but better than using the same one everywhere) Is to use my own [email protected] for thing already linked to personal info and then set up custom domain for proton pass hidden emails to @fuckgoogle.otherdomain.com
Then if proton ever goes to shit I can still go to another email provider and all I have to do is move the domains. Yes it isn’t free but there is no such thing as a free lunch, self hosting isn’t free either and I don’t have the mental bandwidth to self host an email server right now.
Nothing is preventing you from changing those email addresses to the one you now have on your own domain.
The ignorance from OP is not vendor lock-in.
Yes there is it’s called procrastination
All email services have vendor lock-in unless your using your own domain.
For what it is worth, I just moved my mail from my ISP to my own domain at a hosting service after 30 years. Took about 5 months to get everything changed but if I can do it anyone can.
Downside, using your own domain is probably less private but kind of depends.
my beef with proton mail is that i can’t use it on thunderbird and their android app doesn’t have notifications (at least without google spy services.)
Thank you for raising this point.
Are there even other privacy-respecting email providers that are fit for the job? I’m genuinely curious.
DuckDuckGo will give you free forwarding with a duck.com address. It also strips all trackers. I love it.
This is pretty cool and definitely has use, but IIUC this is strictly a free forwarding address, right? I don’t think it tries to compete with Proton Mail or Tuta Mail.
Correct, that’s all it is. But if a live person is asking me for an email, and I don’t want to break out my phone to generate something complicated and hard for them to understand, this works great. (They have enough trouble understanding “duck.com,” even though after the first few instances of utter confusion, I now say, “@duck.com, like the bird, quack, quack.” And they still get extremely confused.
if you’re not actually promoting gmail, you ought to make that explicitly clear.
by pointing out something bad about proton and praising gmail’s version of that, it looks like you’re doing nothing other than recommending gmail in a privacy community.
everyone already knows gmail has high usability and convenience and zero (financial) cost. using it as an example in this community is redundant and ineffective. better to use another e2ee email service as an example.
I don’t support Proton for other reasons, but I’ll note that if anyone is having this problem you can use a half-measure of setting your other email address as a recovery email and enabling “daily email notifications”, which will email you once a day if there’s unread stuff in your Proton mailbox.
Can I ask what those other reasons are? (genuinely curious if I should switch away from them)
The straw that broke the camel’s back for me is the CEO’s icky tweet about how great Republicans are for your privacy and how they stand up for the little guys (what), which they doubled down on using the official Reddit Proton account. There’s already been a ton of discussion about this on the internet if you care to look for more angles on it.
But before that I’d already grown quite leery of them for their trend of endlessly starting new services before the old ones are polished, along with trying to push everyone into their walled garden and endlessly using naggy popups in the UI about it. Worst of all, they have a clear trend of not giving a damn about Linux support, sometimes giving up on certain features for their Linux clients or releasing the clients way after the Windows/Mac versions. For a “privacy company”, not putting Linux as a first-class citizen is really just unacceptable, and they’ve been around for long enough that it’s clearly a trend and not a fluke. To me, Proton just feels like a wannabe version of Apple. Its continued actions give me the feeling that it exists to serve itself, not its users.
