Nice mission, but lousy features that are 7+ years behind nearly all alternatives
Proton Mail will work great for you if all you do is read email, one at a time, maybe reply to some, and occasionally move a message from one folder to another.
Proton Mail will not work for you if, like me, you would like to:
- Bulk-delete more than 50 messages at a time
- Use filters to nearly all email you might ever get, to create a Sanebox/HEY-like experience because the filter limits are set to a miserly 250.
- You don’t want to see email threads that contain every message you’ve ever had with the same subject
- You don’t want to see ads
- Use the mobile apps to do nearly anything, like look at email
- See inline attachments
- Have intelligently applied out of office replies
Let me define a few of these points.
Proton Mail can’t delete more than 50 messages at a time
I imported my mail from Fastmail. I thought, “I bet I could do a search for “Amazon.com” and find every shipping notification and receipt I don’t need from the last ten years. And I could. But the results display 50 messages at a time and sprawled across at least 32 pages for me.
Proton Mail’s search doesn’t show you how many messages there are in the search, and you can’t “Select All from this Search.” I’d have had to delete all those old emails by manually deleting 50 at a time.
Further, Proton Mail has no mention of this on a roadmap as of late 2025. Plenty of Reddit and forum threads complain about this since 2022.
Proton’s recommended path is to “create a filter” and apply the search/delete command that way, then check a box for “Apply to all current messages.” I tried this and it did nothing. I was told “It can take a while.” I guess “a few days” counts as a while and counting…
The other option was to use the Bridge app to connect in via Apple Mail or Thunderbird or whatever and do it from there. But I did not want to do this onerous process.
Proton’s filter limit is set at 250
This one is admittedly quirky of me, but I filter everything. I want people I work for and with and real messages in my inbox. Everything else gets chucked to a “Feed” folder. To do this in Fastmail I’ve just been applying rigorous rules. When a message gets through or goes sideways, I “Filter based on this message” and then set a future rule to force it to the Feed folder.
This actually gets me pretty close to the HEY experience and with a little bit of time most all my email works this way just fine. But Proton limits you to 250 active filters. I’ve tried combining multiple rules/senders into one filter rule. And this would work. Except that navigating to the filter settings is a real chore. Settings > Filters > Find the filter > Edit > Next > Add the sender domain > Next > Save. Done. And you can’t edit Filters at all on the mobile app. Nada. Zilch.
Email threads are spectacularly dumb and show all prior conversations forever
Every year a client of mine sends an email about their end-of-year holiday letter. We call it the “end of year holiday letter.” Naturally, they write a subject that is “EOY Holiday Letter.” And this year was no exception except imagine my surprise that it pulled this exact same thread from 2024. And 2023. All together. I’ve never experienced this before in any service. Yes, it was from the same sender and had the same subject line (though earlier ones had “Re:” appended to the front).
I’m guessing Fastmail and others have some smarts about how old an email has to be, or maybe the “Re:” is discarded or considered somehow. But Proton Mail just surfaces 3 years of emails in one. Imagine seeing every 2FA code, every shipping notification, every utility receipt in one thread forever. Proton does appear to disregard trashed messages, but only those that have been deleted after the 30-day window.
I have this same issue with website alert emails that always come from the same address and same subject line on the regular, like my Wordfence security digests. Proton “helpfully” pulled these into a thread with over 200 like it from the last ten years.
I suppose to some this could be a feature, but, at best, it should be a little smarter. It relies too heavily on the Subject field and isn’t very smart.
Proton absolutely shows you ads
There are Black Friday ads, even for subscribers. Some people find this no big deal, but if you’ve paid money to subscribe and then you still ads to subscribe something has gone horribly wrong in the marketing and finance departments at Proton HQ.
Just the most boneheaded, tasteless thing I can think of. People who don’t get worked up about it must be their customer base. I absolutely cannot stand seeing that little gift icon smack next to my search box in the web interface. Hard no.
Mobile apps lack tons of features
Best I can tell, you can’t drag/drop files into messages from Finder or Dropbox or any other app on the iPad. You can’t modify filters. You can’t do as robust searches from the mobile apps, either.
And they are painfully slow. You can delete some messages from the web interface and switch to your phone and maybe they’ll be gone. Eventually. Or maybe new ones will show up there, too. Sometime. I did a lot of force-quitting to get it to re-shuffle whatever it needs to do.
Attachments don’t show inline
I suspect this may be a limitation of the encryption security. If so, that’s fair I guess. But when you look at an email in Fastmail it shows the images that are inline. This is very common from Apple Mail users who just drag a JPG into an email. In Proton, this does not show inline and instead gets relegated to an attachments bar at the bottom.
To be clear: this is not a matter of hitting the “Load Images” button. That works fine. What I’m talking about is when someone has sent you a “real” email not from a mass mailing that just happens to have some JPGs in it.
Vacation replies are very dumb
This is why I left HEY because the email replies are so dumb in most services they are useless. Fastmail gets this as close to right as can be.
I have some aliases and I, like anyone, get email from people and I get email from lists. HEY and Proton both reply willy-nilly to darn near every email that comes in. That phishing email, that “Hey, we offer office cleaning services!” spam message, the USPS mail digest I get for Informed Delivery, and my client emails.
Fastmail figured this out with two stupid checkboxes:
- Send only to my contacts and,
- Send only to [these] aliases
Perfect. Suddenly the “only to contacts” option removes 99% of the false emails. And the result is I don’t get a bunch of emails that look like they’re from myself. In HEY this is bonkers because you come back to an inbox that just as your name and profile photo for every message in your inbox. In Proton, it shoves your full name in the field (Fastmail just says “me”).
This means I don’t get every email looking like:
From: Susie Q. Public, John Doe, Justin Harter
(Fastmail, when there are real replies, will show: “Susie Q. Public, John Doe, me”, which is a far more elegant and shorter way of seeing names meaningful to you in a list and not just your own name. I know I’m there! I’m right here!)
One thing Proton does nice: tracking pixel detection
Fastmail just doesn’t do this and they seem to refuse. I guess they think it’s too much work, or they can’t do it well. But with Proton the little shield icon will show a number if a tracker is found and blocked. Even if it’s not 100% accurate, this is nice to know. This is how I discovered a person was emailing me and using some kind of third party service to quietly detect when emails were opened. I do not like this. And this is why the proxy loaders, like iCloud Private Relay, don’t really help, either. What you want is to remove that entirely, not “load it anyway and just scramble where it opened from.” No, I don’t want that thing to ever know what I did, anywhere, ever.
In Fastmail, your only real defense is to just straight up block all images, including from those in your contacts. Which is a real bummer.
I like the Proton mission, and I like that they’re taking big swings. But the email is just not there. VPN is great, and I quite like Proton Pass (even over 1Password, simply because I find it works more reliably in Safari). But I just can’t get over how this email feels feature-stuck 7 years in the past.
