Proton transformed how I do email

Proton has been cooking up something quite special recently. 404 Media recently released a few reports (which I highly recommend you read yourself)^[1] detailing aggressive pushes for LLM use at Proton, even in the face of employee concerns about insufficient security testing and quality assurance before shipping; CEO Andy Yen reportedly called these concerns “loser thinking” and that they should be using AI to move faster.

For a long time, I had viewed Proton as a company that deeply valued security. I’m sure it’s still pretty solidly secure (certainly moreso than most Big Tech products), but this kind of thinking from its leadership is deeply worrying to me. I fear the long-term impacts of this kind of thinking, even if they make concessions and transparency pledges now as a response to the backlash. You can’t rush security or earning customer trust back.

Longstanding concerns I had about Proton

I’ve felt that Proton focuses too much on building up a big ecosystem of apps for the privacy-conscious consumer, especially since a common recommendation in privacy circles is to not put all of your eggs into one basket; i.e., don’t trust one company with everything. When I used Proton, I only ever used Proton Mail and Proton VPN because I worried that I would get locked into their ecosystem.

Proton also isn’t a Big Tech company, it cannot afford the upkeep and development of a massive software ecosystem like a conventional tech giant, so I’ve always felt its products just weren’t as polished as the mainstream options it tries to compete with.

Truly, one of the only real reasons I ever used Proton was because I was wanting to get away from Big Tech. Its end-to-end encryption was an alluring promise, but in practice most mail I send and receive happens between less secure providers who can probably read my emails anyway. I have maybe sent one or two emails to other Proton users, and they were my friends.

So basically, it always felt like Proton wanted to be a Big Tech company that is loved by the privacy community. For these reasons and the latest news, I cancelled my subscription to Proton and looked to greener pastures.

Where next?

My path won’t be the same as everyone else’s. As said above, privacy was not my primary concern so much as getting my email off of Google’s servers. Truly private email wasn’t realistic anyway—go use Signal, the Matrix Protocol, or some other purpose-built secure communications protocol.

That said, I chose to switch to Fastmail. Not exactly on every privacy-conscious user’s mind for a replacement. The service has felt fine so far. But I want to talk to you about today is not how great and awesome and cool Fastmail is or whatever—I don’t feel much attachment to it as a service. I want to talk about how I have used my move away from Proton to completely transform how I do email.

I switched to Proton long before I had my own domain. I have made many email address changes throughout my life (my password manager can confirm that), and there’s always a pain to switching providers. It requires you go around changing your email on basically every account. This got easier with a password manager, since all of my accounts are listed and I can see at a glance what needs to be switched over still, but it is not a glamorous process. Choosing a provider locks you in.

In my case, I even still have a Gmail domain for a lot of my IRL stuff, my Proton domain for app/service/Internet stuff, and a whole crap ton of aliases these days. There’s a bit of everything everywhere, and I only had one Proton address meaning there was no difference between personal correspondence and all of the other nonsense we do with email.

I now have three purposes: one for my Internet stuff (duskfall.dev, which you can reach out to me on my contact page), one for my IRL stuff (like banking, government, professional, etc.), and one to be a custom domain for addy.io, my email aliasing service.

A lot of my accounts online registered with standard addy aliases, which have the domain “duskfall.addy.io”, not ideal if I want to mask my identity—or worse yet, need to move away from addy in the future. Using custom domains on my main emails helps with not needing to change the addresses on important accounts like my bank when I switch providers, but if I still had to switch out every alias on some potential future email aliasing service change, then I’d be completely screwed.

These custom domains are starting to look more beneficial than simply looking pretty, so that’s nice. My purchases weren’t a waste of money after all (unless we’re talking about my Proton subscription…).