PROTONMAIL: Have you ever heard of a service called ProtonMail?
It’s been out for nearly 10 years now, and it’s extremely popular amongst enthusiasts.
In fact, they have over 70 million users.
But, the average person has never even heard of the service.
This is quite a shame because ProtonMail was essentially designed to be a better version
of Gmail from every aspect.
For example, ProtonMail doesn’t even know who you are.
They don’t even ask for a name to open a ProtonMail email address.
Conversely, Gmail asks for full name, date of birth, gender, and phone number.
The only information that you have to give Protonmail is another email address or phone
number just so that they can verify that you’re actually a human and that you’re not just
opening a crap ton of accounts.
But, even this data is only briefly stored, and is promptly deleted after verification
is completed.
The privacy doesn't just stop at signup either.
Proton also doesn’t track your IP address or review any of the emails that you send
or receive.
Additionally, all of the emails that you send and receive are completely end to end encrypted
which is not the case with Gmail.
Gmail does encrypt your emails when possible, but their encryption is inherently inferior
because they rely on something called TLS encryption.
The problem is that TLS encryption only works when both the sending and receiving server
support the standard.
We should also note that Google holds all of the keys to said encryption.
So, while TLS encryption may protect you against hackers, it doesn’t actually protect your
privacy against Google.
ProtonMail on the other hand uses something called PGP encryption which is not server
dependent.
The only person who has the keys to open your email is the actual recipients of your email.
So, objectively speaking ProtonMail blows Gmail out of the water in terms of privacy
and security.
Yet, Gmail still destroys ProtonMail when it comes to marketshare.
So, why does no one want ProtonMail despite it offering everything that people supposedly
want.
LACK OF RESOURCES: Taking a look back, one of the main factors
that has held back ProtonMail over the years is that they don’t have a very strong background.
Virtually every popular email client that has ever existed has been backed by a mega
tech company who’s main business is not email.
For example, Aol was Aol, Yahoo was Yahoo, Hotmail was Microsoft, and Gmail was of course
Google.
This is no coincidence.
The reality is that creating an email service is not only expensive, but it’s not exactly
lucrative either.
I mean, have you ever wondered how Gmail even makes money in the first place?
Historically, email providers made money by showing you ads throughout the UI, but that’s
not really a thing in 2023.
The way that email providers make money today is by sending you personalized ads to your
inbox.
You know that promotions tab under your Gmail account, that’s why that’s there.
But, virtually no one even opens up that tab or clicks on those emails, so most email users
don’t make the provider any money directly.
But, companies like Google and Microsoft are more than ok with that.
Their goal with Gmail and Outlook aren’t to make money.
Their goal is to simply control marketshare and create synergy between all of their services.
It also makes their data collection and ad targeting way easier.
When you login into your Google account on a new computer, they already know exactly
who you are.
So, the next time you search on Google, they don’t have to waste time serving you low
quality generic ads.
Instead, they can serve you targetted ads that have a far greater likelihood of converting.
As you can see, email services are much more of a customer acquisition avenue as opposed
to a real money driver.
And this makes it extraordinarily difficult for a company to be built around just doing
emails which ProtonMail has figured out first hand.
These struggles date back to the launch of ProtonMail itself.
Within just three days of beta launch, ProtonMail was running into server capacity issues.
This forced them to temporarily suspend new signups until they could expand server capacity.
While understandable, this isn’t exactly a great first impression.
To make things worse, they had to resort to crowdfunding to actually continue growing.
Fortunately, their supporters were extremely generous and helped them destroy their fundraising
goal, but PayPal had other plans.
PayPal would end up freezing a quarter million dollars worth of donations because they apparently
had concerns regarding the legality of encryption.
Proton would eventually work through all of these obstacles, but these are simply examples
of pain points that their competitors never even had to deal with.
Well, actually technically, Google did have server capacity issues because they were trying
to offer 200 times more storage than everyone else.
But, they actually turned this into an advantage.
They maintained Gmail an an invite only platform for many years which actually created an allure
of exclusivity.
For Proton, however, these obstacles were truly just obstacles.
PAID SERVICE: Aside from facing infrastructure challenges
that made it difficult to grow, Proton also had to address the elephant in the room which
was how they were actually going to make money.
Given that they weren’t collecting any user data, they couldn’t create or deliver any
targetted ads.
They could deliver generic ads but that would kind of go against their whole brand image,
so that was off limits as well.
This meant that the only way that Proton could reliably make money was from their consumers
themselves which is not exactly a bad thing.
The reason that consumers have to pay Proton is because, with Proton, they’re actually
the customers.
With every other email service, the advertisers are the customers and the users are actually
the products.
With that being said though, people have become accustomed to getting email for free.
So, Proton has to work through a pretty large mental barrier.
We should note that Proton does have a free tier, but it’s not sufficient for any sort
of professional application.
The free tier only comes with 500 MB of storage.
If you’re regularly emailing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, you’ll
probably run of storage by the time you even get to 100 emails.
You can boost this to 1 GB by completing a few additional steps, but that doesn’t really
make the situation all that much better.
And, I don’t think any of us want to go back to the days of constantly deleting old
emails.
So, realistically, you would want to spring for atleast the Proton Mail Plus plan which
comes in at €5 per month or €48 per year.
On the theme of protecting your privacy, we should note that Proton accepts cryptocurrency
payments, so you don’t have to give them your credit card details or anything like
that.
Anyway, if you do spring for this plan, you’ll actually get a service that’s comparable
to Gmail.
You get an account that can support up to 10 email addresses, 15 GB of storage, custom
domains, and auto-reply features.
You also get access to the Proton Drive, Proton Calender, and even the Proton VPN.
If you spring for the Proton Unlimited plan, you’ll have to pay €12 per month or €120
per year.
But, this will boost your email address limit to 15, your storage limit to 500 GB, and your
custom domain limit to 3.
So, Proton is absolutely a viable email service, but to unlock this functionality you have
to pay.
And though people say that they value their privacy and security over everything else,
the reality is that most people don’t value those enough to pay for it, especially because
they’ve gotten used to not paying for such services.
We should also note that paying €50 or €120 per year for an email account is only viable
in the western world.
And by the looks of it, Proton has already won over much of this market.
So, until Proton is able to afford to give out more generous free tiers, I suspect that
they’ll continue to struggle when it comes to breaking into the mainstream market.
FUNDAMENTAL SHORTFALL: Even if we put aside Proton’s shortfalls
in terms of infrastructure and revenue, they still have to overcome likely the biggest
obstacle which is the obstacle of convenience.
And I’m not talking about the convenience of ProtonMail itself.
They have a beautiful, modern, bubbly UI that’s on par with if not better than the competiion,
so it’s not the convenience of the UI that will hold them back.
Rather, it’s the convenience of email address itself.
While people don’t like big companies collecting personal data to make money, this data collection
is what allows for many of the conveniences that we’ve become accustomed to as well.
Take login with Google, for example.
The only reason that this service works is because Google is able to pass on all of the
data that the service needs from your Google account.
But, Proton wouldn’t even be able to autofill your name much less your phone number, address,
or payment information.
Proton is trying to address this shortfall with their recent acquisition of SimpleLogin.
But, it’s not clear how useful this service will be given Proton’s overall goals of
privacy.
It’s not just new account creation that will become more difficult either.
It’ll become substantially harder to sync changes between devices.
For example, let’s say you told Chrome to save your password for Amazon.
With a Google account, the Chrome on your iPhone and iPad would automatically know this
password.
And the next time you try to access Amazon on your iPhone or iPad, it’ll autofill.
Surely, that’s just a minor inconvenience, but this could become a lot more annoying
when you get a new computer or laptop.
Imagine how many chrome extensions you would have to reinstall, how many passwords you
would have to reenter, and how many files you would have to transfer over.
Ironically, these were all givens when buying a new device 10 to 15 years, but thanks to
the cloud, cookies, and yes data collection, these have all becomes struggles of the past
for most of us.
By switching to ProtonMail, however, you would lose many of these perks that come along with
have a Gmail/Google account.
But, atleast those are just inconveniences as opposed to full on obstacles.
The reality is that ProtonMail also comes along with a gamebreaking obstacle.
Here’s the thing, what type of person would be looking for a completely anonymous email
address.
People looking for privacy yes, but also shady people, spammers, hackers, etc.
So, naturally, many companies and governments are weary of Proton email addresses, and many
of them have actually full on blocked proton email addresses altogether.
So, you’ll also need to have a backup email address from one of the big providers to actually
use services from these companies, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of Proton in
the first place.
You can get around this by using a custom domain, but that gets into the whole paid
service problem all over again.
THE FUTURE OF PROTONMAIL: In the end, Protonmail is a perfect example
of our love hate relationship with big tech.
You would think that the internet would be jumping up and down at the sight of such a
product.
But, Protonmail has already been out for nearly 10 years, and they’re still only appealing
to a niche demographic.
The reality is that while people hate that their data is being collected, they’ve also
gotten used to all of the conveniences that come along with that.
What Proton is trying to accomplish is truly commendable, but while they’ve been able
to achieve a significant amount of success within a niche market, their mainstream prospects
are not nearly as clear.
It appears that the hurdles of getting people to pay for an email service along with the
shortfalls in terms of convenience are simply too much to overcome, but I’d be happy to
be proven wrong.
Would you be willing to switch to ProtonMail?
Comment that down below.
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