Why I don't trust Proton for my email and data

Proton is the best-known private email name, and I do not recommend it. This is not an accusation that Proton is acting in bad faith. It is a set of reasons about its record, about what its encryption actually covers, and about how much of one person's life a single company is starting to hold. Any one of these on its own would be minor. Together they are why I point people elsewhere.

Its open-source record does not match its marketing

Proton has long marketed itself as fully open source, and for years that was not true of the apps that matter. The code is where the encryption runs, so an app you cannot read is an app you cannot check.

• The Android mail app stayed closed from 2016 until 2020 (Proton's own announcement).
• The Windows Drive app was closed from its release in mid-2023 until late 2024 (Proton's own announcement).
• The mobile calendar apps were left unpublished for years, until late 2025 (Privacy Guides discussion).
• Proton called its Lumo assistant open source in mid-2025, before any of its code existed (OSAI Index writeup).

When Proton does publish code, it often publishes it as a read-only snapshot that takes no outside contributions and does not appear on F-Droid, the open-source app store. The wider pattern is the problem: a paid private service you cannot verify is asking for the same blind trust as a free one.

"Encrypted" does not mean everything is end-to-end encrypted

Proton Mail is encrypted so that Proton cannot read your stored mail, which is a real protection. It is only fully end-to-end encrypted when the other person is also on Proton, or you both use PGP. Mail you send to a Gmail address is readable at the other end, and the subject line of a message is never encrypted at all. This is a limit of email itself, and it is true of Tuta too. The issue is that Proton's marketing implies more privacy than plain email can give, and people choose it believing every message is sealed.

One company is coming to hold too much

Proton began as an email service. It now runs mail, calendar, a drive, a VPN, a password manager, a wallet and a documents editor, and it has bought the alias service SimpleLogin and the notes app Standard Notes. The pitch is convenience: one account for everything.

That convenience is the concern. One company holding your mail, your files, your VPN, your passwords and your aliases is the single point of trust that privacy is supposed to avoid. Good intentions today do not bind a future owner, a future funding crunch, or a future government order. The whole idea behind splitting your life across services is that no one company can be leaned on to give up all of you at once. A privacy company becoming the one place that holds everything works against that idea, however well it means.

What I use instead

You do not need one provider for everything, and you are better off without one. For each Proton service there is a strong alternative that keeps your trust spread out:

• Mail: Tuta, or a mailbox on your own domain through Migadu.
• Files and photos: Proton Drive is still the best there is. The other notable candidates are Ente and Filen. Filen is a lot cheaper, but it falls short on backup safety: you would be risking them losing all your personal documents and photos, which is unlikely but not worth the risk in my opinion. Ente does pass the mark for backup safety, but it will not store more than 1000 documents (separate to photos), so it only suits photo storage plus a few important documents. So Proton Drive is unfortunately the best general solution. Right now it is fully open source and end-to-end encrypted, so there is no immediate concern, but I worry it might not stay that way one day.
• Calendar, contacts and tasks: a self-hosted Nextcloud or EteSync.
• Passwords: Bitwarden.
• VPN: Mullvad.
• Email masks, in place of SimpleLogin: addy.io.

Setting each of these up, and choosing between them, is what the Privacy Mogul learning journey walks you through step by step.

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