[antpls]

Some years ago, I evaluated Protonmail as a replacement for my personal gmail account.

When came the steps "can I easily move from this service?", I realized you have to _pay_ to export all your emails from the service. They make it super easy for you to open an account and receive emails, and then makes you pay if you want to get a copy of your own data.

I contacted the support to tell them it is likely illegal under European Data Privacy laws. They replied I can still export email for free one by one if I wanted to... (which is obviously not a valid answer when you have 5000 emails)

Then I looked in Swiss laws for a similar clause, and found that Swiss laws doesn't give users of online services the right to easily and freely get a copy of their data. It was a law proposal at the time of my research.

So yeah... Your data is so secure in Switzerland that you don't even own your data !

[flupe]

Nowadays they do provide an app (Import-Export) to export all your mail, even for free tier accounts, so it's quite easy to move away.

See: https://proton.me/support/export-emails-import-export-app

[memorable]

Hmm.

When I was using Protonmail in free tier, the Import-Export feature was only for the paid tier.

Seems strange that they only opened it for free tier now. This should be a feature available to any tier in the first place.

[julienpalard]

Which is close-source (or I didn't find it in their github repo).

[timtom39]

Try harder. You can run their bridge to expose imap and use any client to export your emails. Also, your info from "years" ago is out of date as they are a small company that has been working on product/features all those years.

[flupe]

Their point was about having to pay to export your data. Afaik Bridge is still to this day only available to paying users. Still, their statement is no longer true since exporting in bulk is permitted for free with the Import-Export app.

[coffeeblack]

You have to pay to receive a service? Good heavens!

[Test0129]

Exporting an XML file from a database of already existing emails is very likely a query that takes milliseconds to run automatically.

If it's true they require you pay to export emails it sounds like borderline extortion.

[Barrin92]

that's obviously a strawman. What's being critized is the heroin-dealer model of doing business, i.e. "the first dose is free" but you'll be locked in, which seems increasingly popular among a lot of services that try to compete with the big players.

[ranger_danger]

to be fair, any half-decent email client already has this functionality built in for free.