Both auto-forwarding and auto-reply are paid features, which makes cancelling & switching much more difficult. Gmail is a breeze comparatively. I highly recommend against using their addresses (e.g. protonmail.com, proton.me, pm.me)
Email forwarding is available for everyone with a paid Proton Mail plan.
(source)
No, Proton email addresses do not. I have ProtonMail addresses using my domain. If tomorrow I point to another email provider, Proton can do nothing about it.
Being paid feature vs free is not vendor lock-in.
You are spreading misinformation, either by misrepresenting the situation or by not understanding what “vendor” (an arguable term since apparently you are focusing on the free version) is lock-in means.
A while ago i bought a custom domain from namecheap but i don’t seem to feel safe using it for banking, would you recommend using it for my bank instead of a protonmail email alias?
I have selfhosted my mail on my own domain, on a server in my closet, for about 4 years. In that time I never switched over realy important things, like government etc, out of fear of missing an email and not knowing. That was the only reason not to switch for me. I’ve had to move a few times in a short peroid and my career started taking more of my time, so I have less time to manage the server, thus I started looking around. Now I settled on proton, I don’t use any of their domains, only my own, and I’ve switched literally everything over, except for the recovery mail for my domain registrar login. Since proton hosts professionally, I trust them not to drop mails without telling me, and I don’t realy see a reason not to switch over. If I ever want to move provider, or start selfhosting again, I’ll setup the new provider, update the dns for my domain and done.
If you have some specific questions about my setup or choices, let me know, although I’m probably not able to reply in the next 12ish hours.
I think OP is overblowing things, and is especially misguided in recommending gmail, but at the same time, they do have a valid point and I think you’re somewhat misrepresenting what they said.
For one, they specifically said that the proton domain email addresses are problematic (
protonmail.com,pm.me), and weren’t talking about custom domains that sit in front of Proton mail.For two, their point is valid. Auto-forwarding being paid, does create vendor lock-in and make it hard to switch away from Protonmail if you use the OOTB addresses. It’s something worth considering.
As you said, the recommendation should be to use a custom domain that sits in front of Protonmail rather than switching to Gmail, but paid auto-forwarding is a valid criticism.
I don’t think the OP is saying to switch to gmail. They’re saying if you think switching from gmail is hard, just wait until you have to pay to forward all of your email if you need to move away from Proton mail if they end up being as bad as Google. They’re saying use something else that’s neither gmail nor proton mail.
The details might be technically correct but then the title is rage bait.
Thank you
their point is not the custom domain usage, who cares about that, for that you need a domain to begin with and its not that common to have a personal one. but that you can’t set up automatic forwarding without continuously paying. that makes switching considerably harder for the everyday people.
Then they should change their title to say free email addresses only.