literally signed up for proton mail, their yearly paid plan, around half an hour ago.
I assumed an email service was supposed to be stable first, given how important it is. I was going to use proton mail as my contact email with my domain registrar.
All services have outages. The difference is that when Outlook goes out (https://uptime.qodex.ai/outlook/incidents), it's a happy occasion because nobody can work and we all take an hour off, but when something like Proton goes offline, we're the only ones who can't access our important stuff.
Anyway, point is, Proton is generally very reliable, but shit happens.
I've found this to be true too, that's why I've moved most of my personal email to my own email servers, so at least I can decide when those outages happen, as they tend to mostly happen when you do some changes, not just randomly by themselves. At once you've setup monitoring and recovery for the usual suspects (disks, network, etc).
I've had proton for years and have no complaints. I can only think of one or two other outages in that time. Most services do have outages from time to time. tbf, I don't seem to be having any issues with proton today, so far.
I've been a paying customer for many years and can't recall the last time this happened apart from now. It's honestly been a pretty stable service and rarely encountered any issues with it.
What made you pick proton over something like mailbox.org? You'd get calendar and contacts sync, IMAP and POP access, custom domains, really nice webmail, and so on..
Proton seems really limited for what you get, and the webmail is absolutely abysmal in performance and design.
Mailbox.org is based in Germany, which is why you generally cannot trust its feature that automatically encrypts all incoming emails. Other german mail providers, such as Tuta, have already been forced at the direction of government authorities to store every incoming email from certain accounts separately in unencrypted form. Even though Proton also cooperates with authorities, Swiss data protection laws are significantly stricter in this regard. So far, there is no regulation there that requires them to implement a backdoor. They only disclose metadata, the IP address, and the backup email address. Whereas Mailbox would have to forward the entire emails to the authorities.
I see, I don't use email for anything private because even if my mail server stores it encrypted, it passes through potentially multiple other servers on the way which have unknown privacy.
It's just for notifications and newsletters mostly.
I imagine part of the performance issue is their encryption flow? Their search is sub par even with the on-device search enabled, but besides that i’ve been a happy customer for a few years now. Catch all domain, multiple domains, their cli lets you download all messages and I setup a RAG flow to better search.
Regarding outages, this is the first one I’ve actually noticed and affected me. Obviously not great, but maybe I’ve been deluded in seeing GitHub‘s fiasco of what acceptable means.
Proton is horrible. Notoriously bad email service.
I ended it after they only sent half my email to my accountant because they would apparently send the server saved draft version, which was not made current when I clicked send.
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