I love the combination of features though. I pay for pro so I get catch-all email on custom domains. Really helps to see who sells your info and secure storage and no advertising with good web-mail client are obviously major selling points too.
Catch-all is nice but I came from the self-hosting world where I could also customise the from address when I reply to a catch-all email. Protonmail only lets you reply from a non-catch-all address, so you end up leaking your "private" address if you ever reply. That's my only real complaint about Protonmail. I requested this feature but I doubt it's high up their priority list.
I've been with Protonmail a long time and never encountered anything like this. They'll get it figured out and prevent it from happening again. Once this is over, I'm confident the other parts of your experience with them will be good.
Protip: if you're on a Mac, the ProtonMail bridge is a nice utility to use ProtonMail with Mail.app.
I've used proton for several years now. The only headache I've ever had is being unable to subscribe to the openbsd mailing list. And that's only because openbsd added proton servers to a spam list... a decision I wish they would revisit.
Edit: I initially said freebsd mailing list. It was the openbsd mailing list.
I'm a customer for more than a year and never had any noticeable outages-issues so far. A few times, I encountered issues in their UI, but I'm also using the beta-version so that's to be expected.
FYI, there's also an awesome unofficial open-source Electron client for ProtonMail, ElectronMail: https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail I prefer a standalone client but still like their GUI over thunderbird et al; ElectronMail fills this gap perfectly
As a paying user I feel that the reliability of their services in recent months has been completely unacceptable for me. That combined with the ridiculously slow rollout of new products (will calendar ever be fully released?) has now made me look at alternatives. I love the product itself and the idea behind it, but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN service is pretty absurd in itself and now I have to put up with these reliability issues too?
We apologize for the unexpected incident this morning that resulted in an hour of downtime. We take this incident very seriously and will be conducting a full investigation and making changes to ensure that it does not reoccur.
This is the first significant downtime we have had in several years, and while we will strive to do better, the incident this morning is something way out of ordinary for Proton.
Regarding development speed, we are working on increasing our development velocity, but due to our security/privacy first approach, we can't cut any corners. You might remember that Gmail was in beta for 5 years before full release. Calendar has been in beta for around a year, and certainly won't take us 5 years.
ProtonMail has been rock solid for me for several years now. I might have just gotten "lucky", but Gmail has been down more often for me than PM.
While I do look forward to their calendar solution, it's by no means a deal breaker. I've seen too many products driven into the sand by feature bloat. I use PM for email, that's all it needs to do, and it does that very well IMO.
It's also the only provider that I know of that keeps your emails as ransom if you don't continue payment once you're on an upgraded account, instead of downgrading it for you at the billing cycle.
Good thing I only used my PM email to test things out, paid for an upgrade because I liked their public image, only to come back a year later and have no access to anything unless I pay up.
Your comment could explain why they need to have downtime for maintaining something. Maybe even a pressing security fix, that breaks things.
That being said, I don't understand why companies don't have test systems for validation of updade and maintenance procedures.
My systems actually always had two test systems. One which was identical with Prod, and another one where test-users could test new features coming out of development system(s).
> reliability of their services in recent months has
Didn't affect me at all, sure they seem to currently slowly do some major infrastructure changes and there
seem to have been service interruptions, but again mail is an asynchronous "slow" communication protocol so this didn't really affect me at all and besides today I didn't even notice it.
> ridiculously slow rollout of new products
Do you buy into services because of not yet rolled out products? I at least don't and I prefer them to have a slow rollout leading to a stable product once released then a rushed rollout.
> but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN
I agree that their price for people with many custom domains is high, but then lets be honest most people (I know, in my experience) have sometimes a custom domain very rarely two and hardly ever more. So my guess is for most users it's reasonable priced.
I didn't had any problems with ProtonMail last year; tutanota on the other hand had this issue in early December where my ISP was locked out from accessing login page for few days - it wasn't a single case since I saw other people with Orange services facing same problem.
I use pm on personal emails where I need privacy. For work emails that I assume everyone can read and that needs availability I use Fastmail and G Suite
> We are currently experiencing some technical difficulties with a planned maintenance, and are working to bring the service back online as soon as possible.
(Speaking as a free member)
Pretty reliable generally, meets almost all my expectations as a non intrusive mailing service. Surprised that it crashed, but gotta cut them some slack.
I've experienced some serious bugs on ProtonMail, one of them being that a saved draft from the desktop web app subsequently sent from the iOS app doesn't show up in the sent mails.
I've since switched to Tutanota which I'm very happy with and is in some ways more secure. It doesn't support third-party clients for security reasons but theirs is open source.
It seems to be related to a database intervention, but can anyone shed some light on how this results in outages in both incoming and outgoing mail servers?
database has user accounts, email server needs to lookup user account information of some kind to handle mail and can't would be the most straight-forward assumption.
Email are in general retried for a short while if delivery fails. Earlier the SMTP server was responding:
550 5.5.1 Protocol error
As of now the socket is timing out, so no mail can be delivered at all. Most services will retry this later on if possible, perhaps hours or days into the future so long as the response is not a permanent failure message.
If an hour's downtime would make you 'seriously consider' switching, I doubt you will find any service that meets your requirements. You're asking for 99.96% uptime. I don't think any email provider will guarantee you that.
While I agree with the sibling that an hour's downtime isn't much, and that you can't expect much better performance than that, I'd like to give a shoutout to mailbox.org.
I originally chose them over Proton when degooglifying my life because of Proton's absolutely batshit crazy idea not to offer IMAP access. I've been very very happy with mailbox for years. Their web interface is ugly, but like I said… IMAP.
[+] [-] sammorrowdrums|5 years ago|reply
I love the combination of features though. I pay for pro so I get catch-all email on custom domains. Really helps to see who sells your info and secure storage and no advertising with good web-mail client are obviously major selling points too.
I wish them luck resolving the situation.
[+] [-] sleavey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kylehotchkiss|5 years ago|reply
Protip: if you're on a Mac, the ProtonMail bridge is a nice utility to use ProtonMail with Mail.app.
[+] [-] quasirandom|5 years ago|reply
Edit: I initially said freebsd mailing list. It was the openbsd mailing list.
[+] [-] Shacklz|5 years ago|reply
FYI, there's also an awesome unofficial open-source Electron client for ProtonMail, ElectronMail: https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail I prefer a standalone client but still like their GUI over thunderbird et al; ElectronMail fills this gap perfectly
[+] [-] b1476|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protonmail|5 years ago|reply
This is the first significant downtime we have had in several years, and while we will strive to do better, the incident this morning is something way out of ordinary for Proton.
Regarding development speed, we are working on increasing our development velocity, but due to our security/privacy first approach, we can't cut any corners. You might remember that Gmail was in beta for 5 years before full release. Calendar has been in beta for around a year, and certainly won't take us 5 years.
[+] [-] sandgiant|5 years ago|reply
While I do look forward to their calendar solution, it's by no means a deal breaker. I've seen too many products driven into the sand by feature bloat. I use PM for email, that's all it needs to do, and it does that very well IMO.
[+] [-] mhitza|5 years ago|reply
Good thing I only used my PM email to test things out, paid for an upgrade because I liked their public image, only to come back a year later and have no access to anything unless I pay up.
[+] [-] MrDresden|5 years ago|reply
And while a proton calendar would maybe be useful, I personally don't need them nor want them to become a one stop shop for all things.
[+] [-] de6u99er|5 years ago|reply
That being said, I don't understand why companies don't have test systems for validation of updade and maintenance procedures.
My systems actually always had two test systems. One which was identical with Prod, and another one where test-users could test new features coming out of development system(s).
[+] [-] dathinab|5 years ago|reply
> reliability of their services in recent months has
Didn't affect me at all, sure they seem to currently slowly do some major infrastructure changes and there seem to have been service interruptions, but again mail is an asynchronous "slow" communication protocol so this didn't really affect me at all and besides today I didn't even notice it.
> ridiculously slow rollout of new products
Do you buy into services because of not yet rolled out products? I at least don't and I prefer them to have a slow rollout leading to a stable product once released then a rushed rollout.
> but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN
I agree that their price for people with many custom domains is high, but then lets be honest most people (I know, in my experience) have sometimes a custom domain very rarely two and hardly ever more. So my guess is for most users it's reasonable priced.
[+] [-] pndy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DavideNL|5 years ago|reply
Elaborate...
[+] [-] wp381640|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobsmooth|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raptorraver|5 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/ProtonMail/status/1356145410574852098?s=...
[+] [-] philshem|5 years ago|reply
Monday 1st February 2021 08:15:00
https://protonstatus.com/incidents/125
snapshot of the status page: https://web.archive.org/web/20210201074153/https://protonsta...
[+] [-] dathinab|5 years ago|reply
Currently it's still a partial outage (due to timeouts).
My guess they created a backup system on the fly or similar on part of they system while they try to fix the other part.
[+] [-] philshem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kilboy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ucha|5 years ago|reply
I've since switched to Tutanota which I'm very happy with and is in some ways more secure. It doesn't support third-party clients for security reasons but theirs is open source.
And to top it off, it's significantly cheaper...
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hugofloss|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] detaro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kylehotchkiss|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sz4kerto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifty|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AntiRush|5 years ago|reply
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4
[+] [-] aero-glide2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RL_Quine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] marban|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcusfrex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ternaryoperator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gspr|5 years ago|reply
I originally chose them over Proton when degooglifying my life because of Proton's absolutely batshit crazy idea not to offer IMAP access. I've been very very happy with mailbox for years. Their web interface is ugly, but like I said… IMAP.