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I'm currently a paying Proton customer. I'm dreaming of the day when I can cancel my subscription, to be honest. I've been a customer for a few years now. Long

I'm currently a paying Proton customer. I'm dreaming of the day when I can cancel my subscription, to be honest. I've been a customer for a few years now. Long enough to watch the company steadily scope creep in ways I don't agree with. I wasn't 100% against the VPN idea. But then came Drive. And calendar. And ... Thing is, their core Mail product kinda sucks. End to end encryption is great, but have you ever actually tried to search for emails in Proton Mail? It's embarrassingly bad. I've lost count of the number of times I know exactly what I'm looking for in my mail archives, but no matter what search incantations I try, I can't find it. Their bridge clients are stupid. The way threaded replies are handled are stupid. Their web UI is frustratingly laggy in Firefox. I didn't particularly like their iOS app, and now that I'm on Android, I don't particularly like their Android app, either. For me, the next step is to self host my email. Yes yes, I know: "but self hosting your email is notoriously hard and bla bla bla!". Yes, no doubt. But email is important, and I've been burned by GMail, appalled by Fastmail spying for the Aussie govt (god, what a shitshow that was/is), and suffered constant disappointment as a Proton customer. Self hosting feels like the only option left.

staunton 3y ago
Self hosting by itself is easy. The hard part is not getting all your sent emails marked as spam. It's not really a technical problem.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  I won't self-host, but even hosted mail can easily be spam-canned. I have found success, using SPF and DKIM signing. I had to do that, to get emails from my current app, through Apple's anonymizer.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    The thing I often see forgotten is ensuring your reverse DNS is set right.
- layer8 3y ago
  It’s not a particularly hard problem, since it can be solved by using a smarthost.
- pelasaco 3y ago
  can you get the email search solved easily than having it on protonmail?
gtirloni 3y ago
I tried ProtonMail for a few months and gave up. It was indeed too slow for my usage.
rad_gruchalski 3y ago
> I'm dreaming of the day when I can cancel my subscription Are they holding you hostage? Is there a contractual obligation preventing you from cancelling? Why can’t you just cancel it if it sucks?
lycos 3y ago
Meanwhile everybody you exchange e-mails with doesn't care about any of this and unless using E2EE all your email contents will be known by their e-mail providers anyway.
franky47 3y ago
> End to end encryption is great, but have you ever actually tried to search I've implemented a few e2ee apps, both for myself and clients, and every single time this comes up, along with other business metrics / queries. If the encryption model ensures the server cannot process the data in any way, it means everything has to be done locally by clients, and only on their own data. Also, bye bye BI.
richardfey 3y ago
Tried to register some months ago and they blocked me, support was giving a cold "we cannot tell why we are blocking you". It turns out their system gives a high score to self hosted email, since everything works if you use something like gmail.
- protonmail 3y ago
  This doesn't sound right. Our anti-abuse systems don't discriminate against self-hosted email by default. You can find the possible reasons for account suspension here: https://proton.me/legal/terms https://proton.me/legal/terms. You're also welcome to share your support ticket number with us here so we can track it internally.

staunton 3y ago

Self hosting by itself is easy. The hard part is not getting all your sent emails marked as spam. It's not really a technical problem.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I won't self-host, but even hosted mail can easily be spam-canned. I have found success, using SPF and DKIM signing. I had to do that, to get emails from my current app, through Apple's anonymizer.
- vel0city 3y ago
  The thing I often see forgotten is ensuring your reverse DNS is set right.
layer8 3y ago
It’s not a particularly hard problem, since it can be solved by using a smarthost.
pelasaco 3y ago
can you get the email search solved easily than having it on protonmail?

gtirloni 3y ago

I tried ProtonMail for a few months and gave up. It was indeed too slow for my usage.

rad_gruchalski 3y ago

> I'm dreaming of the day when I can cancel my subscription Are they holding you hostage? Is there a contractual obligation preventing you from cancelling? Why can’t you just cancel it if it sucks?

lycos 3y ago

Meanwhile everybody you exchange e-mails with doesn't care about any of this and unless using E2EE all your email contents will be known by their e-mail providers anyway.

franky47 3y ago

> End to end encryption is great, but have you ever actually tried to search I've implemented a few e2ee apps, both for myself and clients, and every single time this comes up, along with other business metrics / queries. If the encryption model ensures the server cannot process the data in any way, it means everything has to be done locally by clients, and only on their own data. Also, bye bye BI.

richardfey 3y ago

Tried to register some months ago and they blocked me, support was giving a cold "we cannot tell why we are blocking you". It turns out their system gives a high score to self hosted email, since everything works if you use something like gmail.

protonmail 3y ago
This doesn't sound right. Our anti-abuse systems don't discriminate against self-hosted email by default. You can find the possible reasons for account suspension here: https://proton.me/legal/terms https://proton.me/legal/terms. You're also welcome to share your support ticket number with us here so we can track it internally.