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I've been using Proton Mail as my main private email service for many years, since they first came out to the market. I started with a free subscription just to try it, and I was happy with the quality of the service, especially the end-to-end encryption and all the security features. After that, I've paid for a personal plan for several years already.
The differences between the paid and the free versions and the pricing can be found on their website, here. One of the things that made me sign up is not just the reasonable pricing, but also the fact that I would be able to have unlimited organisation folders and more mail storage. One of the things that I noticed when I started using Proton is that I barely receive spam, ever, and I love/d that.
Pricing is quite decent for a fully encrypted email service, especially if you pay yearly, bi-yearly or for 3 years. You can pay in Euro or US dollars, which isn't great for any other currency with bad exchange rates with those two. Sometimes they have promotions to subscribe for discounted fees or competitions to get a year subscription, but those are rare.
The basic paid subscription has drive, your own domain, several calendars, basic VPN, a vault and also the possibility of creating several alias email addresses. This is my subscription and that's more than enough for me. Perhaps the 15 GB storage capacity is a bit low if you intend to use the domain or Proton Drive. However, I use it mostly for email; despite having a very busy email account with plenty of attachments, this storage is pretty good.
You can use your email service online on your browser, on the desktop version (with Thunderbird or Outlook for example) and on the mobile app. If you want the IMAP version, you have to install the Proton Bridge on your computer as this is what allows you to have the account encrypted. The Bridge is very easy to download, install and configure, as you'll get step-by-step info re the settings you have to put in. The app is very easy to configure and use, and, most importantly, very reliable. Synchronization is good, but not excellent, with some sort of time-lag between mobile and desktop versions.
The interface on the browser and app is OK. I like the colour scheme and overall look, but it lacks serious customization features, something that annoys me.
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Customer Service is poor. They always blame you for any problem that comes from their end or anything that happens that they don't know what it is. Their 'solutions' are always primary-school sort of thing. They act robotically, don't read your emails in full, don't listen (read) to what you say properly, and have a sort of cockiness that annoys me. It doesn't matter that you write on weekdays or weekends, they're always slow and terrible. My guess is that the company has no interest in having fully trained staff and on the quality of the CS they offer, or just pay their officers little money and they don't care. Thanks gosh, I barely have any problem with the service, so I don't have to contact them much.
IN SHORT
Overall, I find the service terrific for a cheap paid subscription, with all the software working well most of the time, reliable app, barely any spam, full encryption and plenty of features for you to take advantage of. The main downsides are the small storage capability if you want to use your Proton domain and slow unhelpful customer service. Of course, you can subscribe to Proton Unlimited and many of the things that bother me, would not be a bother.
RESPONSE FROM THE COMPANY
Hi! Thank you for taking the time to review our service and share your feedback with us. Please note that each of our customer support agents is trained and prepared with great diligence before they start answering publicly and will never address you in a rude or obnoxious way. Our support agents are also in constant communication with our developers and engineers to provide you with the latest information regarding bug fixes, troubleshooting, and upcoming improvements. However, if the assistance you had received was not to your liking or seems unfit, please update your review to share your ticket number with us here. We'd be happy to track your case internally and investigate.
WHAT I'M GOING TO DO
Nothing. It is all true. I have had no results, help or solutions from CS every time I have contacted them. The company can come and say w-h-a-t-e-v-e-r. That doesn't change that CS is poor. I don't blame CS people, just the company, who trains them poorly.
