One "downside" is having to run the local bridge application that proxies / decrypts your emails if you want a regular desktop client (say thunderbird) connect to it. Other than that haven't had any problems. Also the android app is really nice and so is the web client.

Been running gmail and proton side by side for over a year, slowly moving all accounts and redirecting contacts to my proton address. Really suggest getting a custom domain so moving providers is as easy as changing MX records in the future.

Same, and also +1 to custom domain.

However - the local bridge has been crashing over the last several days for unknown reasons.

And, there are many sites which will not recognize @protonmail addresses as valid when signing up.

I am in the process of weaning off gmail completely - but expect it to take a lot longer than expected.

Ive already given up chrome completely on desktop - and run brave and ff.

I wish there were a way to just delete my entire online presence and start a new one.

I'm moving away from gmail in favour of protonmail, so far I've experienced no issues.

I've emailed my contacts informing of the switch, and I'm passively migrating important accounts/services; in fact, this forced me to consider which services are actually important and worth receiving e-mail from. If I go a couple of months without getting e-mails from some service and nothing bad comes from it, then I probably won't ever read it anyway and it's not important.

As soon as their mobile app is better, I'll likely switch to their paid service, although a private calendar and a corresponding quality app would make the 5€/month seem like better value for money.

I set up auto forwarding from my Gmail to my Protonmail and an auto reply from my Gmail that informs the sender that I have a new address (not including the new address). After a few months of this I had everything switched. I still maintain my Gmail account, but no new mail is going through it.

the autoreply is a great addition! i’ll have to add that to my switching process. thanks.

Buy a domain and use an email provider which supports custom domains (and maybe catch alls) and use this domain from now on. Makes switching providers way more easy as you don't use their domain in your email everywhere.

> so difficult to switch. So many accounts and services have my Gmail registered, I don't think I could collect them all.

Register a domain (e.g. something23423.de for 15USD/year) and use that as your primary email address (e.g., [email protected]), then connect it to any provider you wish underneath via editing the MX records at the registrar. Many email providers support this and have instructions [1,2,3].

You can have Gmail then forward all emails to your new address, and then each email that arrives from Gmail, you know needs updating to the new address.

You do not need to change your email address when switching providers.

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html

[2] https://kb.mailbox.org/display/BMBOKBEN/Using+e-mail+address...

[3] https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/set-up-a-custo...

Note that there's often an additional cost charged on the email provider's side to use custom DNS.

Proton user and content with it overall. Note that you don't need to switch. Make Proton your primary email and keep Gmail alongside. You can do the switching at your own leisure and reconfigure accounts as needed. Can keep Gmail for low-value subscriptions and spamcatcher. Also could automatically forward from Gmail to Proton (or other privacy-aware provider).

I am using both Proton Mail and VPN and am quite happy with it.

In your case deeper problem is that so much of you digital life depends on a single point of failure - your Gmail account and it can go in a blink of an eye.

Trick for a switch is to do one a time. Next time you visit a site, go to setting and set email to your new provider, like [email protected] or whatever.

Also can advise you password manager, like 1Password, that will make switch and maintenance much easier.

I use ProtonMail as my primary email address, I kept my Gmail account (auto-forwarding to Proton), and little by little I've been updating all my newsletters and accounts. Very little mail now passes through my Gmail, but I probably won't ever delete the account just in case.

When I switched from gmail to Fastmail I just slowly switched everything over. It took a few years before I was comfortable killing the gmail account. But I got there.

Is fastmail as reliable as Proton mail?

I don’t know how reliable Proton Mail is, but Fastmail has been rock solid for me.

That said, Russia banning Proton Mail is one hell of an endorsement for Proton Mail, in my estimation. I want to believe in the dream of ubiquitous end-to-end encrypted email. I don’t know if Proton is the right manifestation of that, but it certainly doesn’t hurt in terms of keeping the dream alive. So, I wouldn’t want to wave anyone off Proton, even though Fastmail is a great service.

I think the major problem with any PGP Mail system is that nobody else uses it. I have a semi-technical friend who, for ideological reasons, decided to switch to Proton Mail. I dusted off a GPG-capable email client and provided him with my public key. After some technical headaches we exchanged a couple of emails and promptly went back to organizing the occasional happy hour or movie outing via Signal.

I use it for my primary email, absolutely no complaints about it. The web interface is nice and clean, the app is pretty good too. I migrated from Gmail about five years ago (after an invite from a friend) and I've not looked back.

It is quite good but I have found several issues which are annoying and solved by competition.

Protonmail bridge on linux has problem with attachments bigger than 2 MB and it disconnects a lot.

Android app is mediocre at best:

- feels really slow

- shows notifications for emails already read on web

- deleting or moving email to different folder waits for confirmation from backend which is really confusing (you can still see deleted emails but you can't delete them again)

I hope they will work on those UX issues otherwise I really like it.

> it seems so difficult to switch

I had an experience changing email address in the past and it's not that difficult, it's just time consuming. What I did is said to myself "that's it, I'm using this new address from now on". Then over the course of a year I monitored old email and evaluated each message. If I needed it (online shopping account, banking, etc), I went to whatever service sent it and changed my email. Some services don't support changing emails, in that case I would accept the loss and create a new account.

> Can anybody using ProtonMail recommend it?

Privacy concerns aside, to me it's not better nor worse than any other email provider. There is a caveat though. On Android (and web app) you can't search through messages' bodies, only by subject/sender/etc. This is because they don't index them. You can do this on desktop if you're using Bridge app with, say, Thunderbird. Thunderbird then will do the indexing.

> You can do this on desktop if you're using Bridge app with, say, Thunderbird. Thunderbird then will do the indexing.

Bridge is for paid users only, and it's not open source thing. https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail enables full-text search support for free accounts if the "local store" enabled, described in https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail/wiki/FAQ.

As part of my degoogling plan, I opted for Posteo. Upsides are that they are recommended by the FSF [0], and they run on an open source software stack [1], and were in the business for a good number of years. Changing my old address wasn't as much of a pain as I thought it would be, I personally needed to update around 30 services.

After all this was done, I felt better, and still do after 2 years. Not sure of the other aftereffects regarding privacy and such. But I voted with my wallet, that's for sure.

[0] https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems [1] https://posteo.de/en/site/about_posteo

The approach is a lot more flawed than people necessarily realize. If I move my health insurance, my credit cards, banks, and utilities to protonmail, I'm not sure it's changing much. My credit card company is directly selling my information, and it doesn't matter if they emailed me some information or not. The same goes for the utilities. Gmail can't get at the information, which is a bonus, but they might simply be buying the information about you instead of scraping it from your inbox. Everyone else (the financial companies, the utilities, etc) are already selling your information.

i’m doing it. forward all gmail to proton, reply from proton mail only. unsubscribe or more all junk over. eventually you’ll be fully switched over. takes time.

definitely use a custom domain so you never have to do this again.

I use ProtonMail and I still use my Gmail. I put the really important stuff like bank info etc with ProtonMail and keep things like Blog Subscription emails with Gmail.

I've been using protonmail for the last 3 years, and I've been satisfied with it. For the switch, you don't have to do it at once. I've been migrating services one by one (but I'm quite the procrastinator), and still receive some mail on the gmail account. But I use PM as the primary email for new contacts and new services.

I switched a few years back. forwarded all mail from gmail then set up a filter that adds a label "GMAIL" in red text. anytime you see that label, go to the site and switch to protonmail.

I'm at the point now where I only get see that label every one in a blue moon. I'll probably switch over for good soon enough but I'm not in a rush either

Can you not forward email from Gmail to ProtonMail? Regardless, use them in tandem and start moving every service over one by one. That is what I did and after a few months, no more Gmail.. and I am very happy that I made the move.

Doesn't gmail though still get to see your emails even with the forward?

it’s temporary until you’re fully switched over.

It's been great. Only downside has been some small hiccups with saving drafts via iOS app. The web app seems to be the source of truth and always reliable.