Proton Mail

Proton Mail is an encrypted email service based in Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded in 2014 by scientists who met at CERN, and it now serves over 100 million accounts. The company behind it, Proton AG, is owned by the Proton Foundation, a Swiss non-profit. No venture capital investors are involved, so there's no pressure to mine your data for profit.

Only you can read your emails. Proton encrypts everything on your device before it reaches their servers. Even Proton's own team cannot access your messages. Emails between Proton users are encrypted end to end automatically. For emails to outside providers, you can send password-protected messages that expire after a set time.

Paid plans include access to Proton's full ecosystem: a VPN, encrypted cloud storage, a calendar, and a password manager. All client apps are open source, so anyone can inspect the code. Servers sit in Switzerland, Germany, and Norway.

Worth knowing

The free plan gives you just 1 GB of storage and caps you at 150 messages per day. That's tight if you get a lot of email. Upgrading to Mail Plus costs at least €3.99 per month.

Proton is a Swiss company, not an EU one. Switzerland has strong privacy laws, but it's not part of the EU. When Swiss courts issue valid legal orders, Proton must comply. This has happened several times with activist accounts, where Proton handed over metadata like IP addresses and payment information. Your email content stays encrypted and unreadable, but metadata is not covered by that protection. Subject lines aren't encrypted either.

Customer support can be slow, especially on the free tier. Some users report account suspensions with little explanation. New features tend to arrive slower than you'd expect from a company this size.