Proton dropped from the top spot on my list of “user-first email platforms” when they announced they’ll be deleting accounts that haven’t logged into their service in some arbitrary amount of time. If I can’t rely on my email / messaging / phone / communications provider to keep an open line for as long as I need it – whether that’s one year or two years or twenty years, then I’m not going to use it. And if they require payment in exchange for providing that service, then it better accept privacy-preserving payment, but even then, I’m probably not going to use it.

Proton had a great thing going where their VPN service and business service funded the cost of maintaining free accounts. The fact that they chose to destroy years of trust by announcing a deletion policy, indicated to me that they no longer care about their users more than they care about running a business.

I’m not even asking for something unreasonable. It’d be one thing if they didn’t want to maintain free accounts with no activity but hundreds of gigabytes of storage. But they haven’t stratified the limit by storage usage. If you’ve got a free account consuming a few megabytes of storage, maybe an email you setup for the government service you interact with every few years… well you better make sure you remember to do the arbitrary chore of logging into that account every year, or Proton will just delete it, no questions asked.

Maybe they’ll send you some reminders if you gave them a “recovery” email, but that defeats the point of signing up to a privacy-preserving email service and calls into question the premise that they even are one.

(In related news, I need to text myself on Google Voice every few months or they’re gonna delete the number I use for 2FA on critical services… and this is an account that has $4 of credit loaded into it from ten years ago…)