For people with a privacy mind, ProtonMail has been one of the best options for secure email: you can get an account (by the way, basic) for free and enjoy end-to-end encryption for your communications when you send messages to other ProtonMail users. But the company’s plans have become somewhat obsolete. Free accounts only include 500MB of storage, while the € 4 / month plan takes you to a modest 4GB of storage with some other limitations, such as a limit of 1,000 messages per day.
As of today, however, the company is providing full access to ProtonMail and other services it offers, such as a VPN, cloud storage, and an encrypted calendar. In the future, ProtonMail will be branded simply as Proton, pushing its entire set of privacy-focused services and updating all of its plans. The company has a new website (proton.me) and both new and existing users can use the @ proton.me address instead of the old @ protonmail.com option if they wish.
Proton
In the future, Proton will offer three plans: Free, Mail Plus and Unlimited. The new free level expands storage to 1GB and stays fairly restricted – you can only send 150 messages a day and have three tags and folders, for example. You can also access the basic Proton VPN tool and the user’s Proton calendar, although you are only limited to one calendar in this plan. Proton has long said that since it does not run ads, it depends on subscriptions for revenue, so it’s no wonder the free plan is restricted.
The Mail Plus plan will cost € 5 / month, although you can get it for less if you sign up for a year or two all at once. However, it is a big upgrade over the old plan. Users now receive 15 GB of shared storage between their email and the Proton Drive cloud storage account. There are no restrictions on how many messages you can send or how many tags and folders you can create, and it also supports IMAP email clients using the Proton Bridge tool. There are also additional features such as a new “short domain” email alias (@ pm.me) that you can use to send and receive messages, as well as 20 calendars that you can share with other users.
Finally, the Unlimited plan costs € 12 / month; the company is positioning it as a way to achieve the highest level of all its services at once. This means 500 GB of total storage, making Proton Drive much more viable for people to use as a backup service. You can use Proton Mail with up to three different custom domain addresses (from one of the Mail Plus Plan) and a total of 15 different email addresses (from 10 to Mail Plus).
Proton
But the big difference is that you get the full Proton VPN with the Unlimited plan, instead of the more basic option that includes the other two Proton plans. This includes up to 10 VPN connections instead of one, a total of more than 1,700 servers in 63 different countries (instead of 100 servers in three countries), and faster speeds. For now, Proton will also continue to offer its VPN as a standalone product; you can get the details as well as the breakdown between the basic free VPN and what you get with the full version here.
If you’re new to Proton, the company now has iOS apps for mail and VPN services, and Android apps for mail, VPN, and calendar. Drive’s cloud storage option is still technically in beta, so there’s no mobile app for it yet; are scheduled for later this year.
And while Proton has no major updates to the mail service or its other apps other than unifying them with its new design language, the company has made some updates in recent months. Last month, the iOS Mail app received some design updates and a dark mode, as well as a “talk” mode to make it easier to read message threads. In February, Proton turned on encrypted search in the Mail web application, and in January it added a tracking pixel blocker.
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