📅 27 Jan 2021
As a fairly new user of Proton Mail, I wanted to do a quick review. I may expand this in the future to a part 2 but for now this will be fairly short.
I have been increasingly interested in privacy and security online. This hasn’t really been for any particular reason, but rather I have just started paying attention to the amount of information I was throwing out there and the ease at which it could be exploited.
At the same time, I have come to an understanding of the sheer size of information I was offering up to google. I have multiple gmail accounts, used to use google as my main search engine, and had a ton of history on youtube and google maps.
After reading some reviews on different privacy/security focused email solutions, I decided to give Proton Mail a try. Interestingly, as I was doing this, I remembered at some point in the past I created a Hushmail account.
The reason I bring up Hushmail is because at the time (around 15 years ago?) it was nothing special. In fact, I remember the UX being absolutely horrendous. I can’t comment on the state of Hushmail now, but needless to say, after starting my Proton Mail account, I am thoroughly impressed. The UX seems to be well laid out and I have had no struggles navigating through.
I read that Proton Mail only offers 500 MB to free users so my first order of business was making sure that would work. This may sound silly, but I honestly had no idea how much 500 MB looks like in terms of email.
When I checked my gmail data, I was using 1.5 GB! But, I quickly learned that nearly all of this was emailed photos I had saved for the last 10 years. This goes back to how much information I was offering up to Google. There was no reason for those photos to be there. I had already downloaded them, but they were just sitting in my email, just waiting for the world to see.
I was able to fairly quickly get down well below 500 MB and I have now started the process of slowly transitioning to Proton Mail. I am in the process of some password changes, so I am just changing the email address of each account at the same time.
Long-term, I will probably keep gmail. In the professional world, gmail is very standard and I will probably keep at least one account for that reason.
A few notable features:
- I set up 2FA right away
- I activated the "shortened email" feature, allowing me to receive at "pm.me" instead of the full "protonmail.com". Interestingly, a few accounts I tried to change wouldn't let me use the full email address, but when I switched to the "pm.me" everything worked fine.
- I opted for the highest encryption available for my encryption keys
- They do offer IMAP but I haven't messed around with it yet
I hope this review was useful. I’m excited to see what else Proton Mail has to offer.
Day 9: #100DaysToOffload
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