> They own your email, they don't support open protocols including SMTP and IMAP and the only way to export your emails is through a proprietary end-user applic

> They own your email, they don't support open protocols including SMTP and IMAP and the only way to export your emails is through a proprietary end-user application. They excuse this nonsense by saying that it's necessary for encryption, which is blatantly false. > This is rich. Why don't you start with the far more fundamental and important standards of SMTP and IMAP, Protonmail? Why don't you open source your desktop & mobile applications or your bridge? What a joke. These are the exact reasons I have discouraged ProtonMail in every discussion it comes up. This is not a system that boasts the best of email as a platform, the decentralized and federated nature of it. In reality, it's just a walled garden of its own, even worse than Gmail, because there's no easy "takeout" solution. The IMAP support has been in the works for more than two years, and continues to remain in beta for a long time. To make things worse, when I checked a while ago, it's available only to paying customers. That's like holding the free user base for ransom. I would not recommend any email platform that actively makes it difficult to switch out. ProtonMail is a good example of such a platform, for my considerations.