CozyNet Blog

Proton Mail erased one of my accounts

Publish Date: 2026-07-06

I've maintained two ProtonMail accounts ever since the early days of Proton. My primary ProtonMail account was always a paid account while the secondary was a free account. Unfortunately the secondary account was erased by ProtonMail at some point since I didn't sign into it frequently enough.

I used the secondary account with a number of services, such as my Digital Ocean account which I run my mail server from and a few web services. Additionally, my domain registrar was also setup for my secondary ProtonMail account too, which I'm working to correct. I'm unsure of what all else used the account since I didn't exactly detail that in my password manager, but so far it seems the rest are fortunately inconsequential if it proves to be a problem.

I've liked ProtonMail, but over the last few years here I've been slowly migrating my primary email back to my own service out of personal preference. This was partly spurred on by reputation issues between Proton and security proxy relays like Proofpoint, frequently causing my outbound emails to be directed to the recipients spam folder or out right blocked. I'll continue to maintain my remaining ProtonMail account, but I wouldn't suggest using their service with the expectation of not having to sign in or engage with it often; i.e. a junk mail account. From my experience, most people never check their emails and only have one because it was an arbitrary requirement to setup an account for some other service. Do this with ProtonMail and you can kiss it goodbye, unless you pay em to keep it around.

I used the secondary account specifically for web service / hosting accounts apart from my primary ProtonMail account since my name was in the address, but apparently this isn't an ideal use case for Proton and today I don't care about my name being revealed anyhow. I feel like back then when I made these accounts, it wasn't possible to have multiple aliases tied to a single account, otherwise I would have just done that, or I just wasn't aware of that feature back then... I'm not so concerned with anonymity as I am ownership, because what you own is your property, meaning you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy and protection from the unreasonable searches, seizures, censorship, and manipulative abuse common among big tech services. Email is kind of an edge case though since SMTP is an unfederated protocol (for now), meaning there's really no confidentiality between relays regardless of whether you own your mail server or not, so in all, there isn't much of a point in self hosting your own email unless you're like me and find it a useful perk for other reasons.

Regrettably, I must say that these days if people are looking for a good email service provider, I'd recommend iCloud Mail and to steer clear of the "privacy" activist rackets; they're not really worth the hassle and you'd be a fool to think emails are actually confidential anyhow and doubly so with VPN's unless you need something to bypass arbitrary network restrictions. The automatic inline encryption feature of ProtonMail is kind of neat, but it only works between other ProtonMail users.

RIP secondary ProtonMail account. 2013 - 2026(?)

I'm quite disappointed with ProtonMail here, but the blame is really on my shoulders for using their service in the first place and not consistently signing into it; and besides, I got what I paid for and this was a silly blunder on my part. I know egg and my face were in alignment!

This sort of thing by the way is exactly why I prefer to run my own services. I learned this lesson long ago from the Photobucket hostage incident, which prompted me to setup my first web server for self hosting a private file share service, and was reminded again with ProtonMail. I value stability and the best kind is the kind you don't have to worry about coming back around one day out of the blue to kick you in the pants because someone decided to change up policy. I'd expect my server hosting provider to wet the bed before Postfix, which has actually already happened once, but it's not the end of the world. At least not yet...

Thanks for reading my blog!