> Sure. We'll just believe that ProtonMail locks accounts randomly, for no reason.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/ic19q4/locked_o...

A quick Google search returns tons of results from ProtonMail's subreddit of people complaining that ProtonMail locked them out of their account for unknown random reasons.

This is a curated subreddit.

The post you've linked doesn't say that it was some unknown/random reason just the fact that the person is locked out of the account, not that the account itself is locked, which may be for variety of reasons(losing 2FA, forgetting password, else?). It's more about that support is slow. The person reached out and the issue was eventually resolved.

> The post you've linked doesn't say that it was some unknown/random reason just the fact that the person is locked out of the account, (...)

Fair enough. You can google though. There's a wealth of complains of people seeing their accounts locked.

If you don't have time to run a Google search, you are free to read ProtonMail's own docs, specially how they describe how they lock accounts based on heuristics and how they recognize the occurrence of false positives.

https://proton.me/support/account-disabled

Thanks for posting this, honestly I was unaware this had been happening as widely to others. Wild.

What evidence could be provided here though?

The evidence would be the e-mail account which PM now hold and aren’t going to give over.

I didn’t say it happened more than once, if anything I was saying once was enough and it was a risk I didn’t want to take ever again.

Also, I hadn’t realised this before, but a reply further down the thread has linked to many instances of this happening on reddit.

Trying to contact support? Their response? Ultimately figuring out the real reason? When faced with an issue I usually try to figure it out first. After all, accounts can get flagged wrongly on outlook, gmail and other services as well. And the linked reddit thread does not relate to your case. To me, the very theory of account locked just because someone sends a spam email to said account is, honestly, ridiculous.

> They are by a long way the worst experience I ever had with a provider of any online service, so much so that I’ve since moved my own e-mail that was there back to outlook before some arbitrary spam caused the same thing to happen to me.

Well, I misunderstood you here. Wrongly assumed you meant it happened to you again.

I contacted support, but they simply refused to assist at all.

The account was just.. gone. That's what was so shocking about it - I realised pretty much immediately at the time that there would be no way to recourse a locked account because any means by which you could prove the account would be yours (other than having the password, which we still did, but which was not acceptable to unlock the account according to PM) is inside the inbox itself. More than that - they weren't asking for more information. They simply said it was permanently locked and nothing could be done.

This has happened to others too, as has been posted elsewhere in the thread.

No, all my Gmails and Outlooks still work. It's only Protonmail that stopped. Support didn't reply.

Yeah, I get it. ProtonMail bad. I'm glad that your Gmails and Outlooks still work. Thumbs up. I'm also glad you've created this account just to reply to me, really honored.

You're being really dismissive here - no-one's saying PM bad/others good. I was pointing out an experience with ProtonMail and others have corroborated with their own experience.

All of that said, if it says nothing else it at least suggests that larger providers seem to have a better grasp of how catastrophic being locked out of one's own e-mail can be - PM really don't seem to understand the responsibility they bear being a provider of such critical infrastructure. If this were happening in this same way at larger providers like Google and Microsoft, I'm quite certain there would be heavy regulations by now.

Making an account is really quick, no need to feel honored by such simple act. It's basic privacy - don't keep your identities too long, especially if you're going to tie them to the set of services you're using.

Yes, we will, since it happened to others of us. What kind of evidence would you like? My account is inaccessible. Should I tell you the password so you can try yourself or what?