My issues with ProtonMail
I am using my own domain for email, which is something I would recommend everyone to do. I was using a cheap ‘web hosting with email’ Hetzner plan before, which was not ideal. In November in the Black Friday consumerism thing I decided to get a ProtonMail subscription and move there. But I’m having a couple of issues with their service. Some of them have to do with the way their product work and some of them have to do with my specific needs.
Can not open some mails on mobile
With some emails, not a lot but I think a couple percent, I can’t open them on iOS. When I click on them, the app tries to open the mail, it shows the subject in a new window and then closes it and I can’t read it. Those emails give no problem on the web interface.
And this is really a big problem. Your mail client should be able to read mails! I have not run into trouble because of this yet, but I fear that one day I have to show a mail to the retrieve a package, or can’t open a concert ticket to show at the venue, or such. If your mail app can’t do that what is it good for?
There is the existing workaround of opening the web interface on mobile Safari, but this is really not ideal. ProtonMail confirmed this to be an issue and states they’re working on fixing it.
Mail spoof warning does not show in mobile app
My employer just switched to a new provider for managing payroll and HR stuff. Somehow, ProtonMail shows a warning that their mail server is not properly configured and that the mail could be spoofed. My coworkers that receive their personal mail on Gmail or Outlook do not get this warning. I contacted our security officer and our conclusion was that the mails are valid and that ProtonMail might be a bit too pedantic.
But the strange thing is that this warning only shows in the web interface, not in the iOS app. So if I check my mail on my phone, I don’t see this warning, but if I check it on my desktop, I do see it.
If ProtonMail would flag a valid issue in a mail, I would really like to know if I’m potentially being spoofed, also if I’m checking my mail on mobile!
Mail read flags do not seem to sync between mobile and desktop
I check my mail on my phone, and later during the day I check on my laptop. Some mails I know I have read on my phone show up as unread in web mail. This is pretty annoying. On Reddit in r/proton multiple people are reporting this issue, and this was confirmed by Proton as an issue that was known and they are investigating. Again pretty table-stakes stuff for a mail client.
Pulsating menu in ProtonMail
When I’m in a message and I open the context menu, it ‘pulsates’. This is a stupid and small issue, but it has been there for over two months now, which I think is testament of the not so big amount of polish their apps get.
This only happens on iOS. My co-worker using Android does not have this problem.
No third party mobile clients
ProtonMail has a model where they encrypt all data at rest, and you decrypt it on your device. This seems nice, but it has a couple of drawbacks. One of them is that you’re not easily able to use your favorite mail client with their service, because they don’t support IMAP or so, because then they would need to decrypt content on their servers.
There is a solution for this; if you want to run Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever the solution is to install the ProtonMail proxy on your laptop, which takes care of talking to ProtonMail to get your encrypted data and decrypt it. Then your own mail client can connect to the local ProtonMail proxy over IMAP. The downside of this is that it does not work on mobile; there you would need to either use their mail client or use it in a web page.
I’m using Linux on the desktop, with ProtonMail in a browser tab, because I don’t really like using this proxy.
No instant search in webmail without local indexing
Another drawback of the ‘decrypt on your device’ thing is that search in webmail does not automatically work! For proper search they have to download and index all your mails in your browser. This takes at least initially a lot of time.
Conclusion
ProtonMail is a company that I would really like to love. They are steward-owned and have a privacy-focused product. Also they are building a big portfolio of products such as VPN and calendar. But their core product is mail. Their mail product has a bunch of rough edges. This something I did not expect: I know email is hard. But ProtonMail has been around for some time now and they seem to be quite popular. I would have expected less issues. I will be migrating my mail elsewhere soon.
That said, most of my issues are with the iOS app. If you are on Android, chances are you have a much better experience.