For the privacy-minded, ProtonMail has been one of the best options for secure email — you can get an account for free and enjoy end-to-end encryption for communications when you send messages to other ProtonMail users. But the company’s plans have gotten a bit outdated. Free accounts only come with 500MB of storage, while the $4/month plan bumps you up to a modest 4GB of storage with some other restrictions, like a daily sending limit of 1,000 messages.
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Starting today, however, the company is making it easier to switch all-in to ProtonMail and its other services, including VPN, cloud , and encrypted calendaring. ProtonMail will be rebranded simply as Proton, promoting its entire suite of privacy-focused services and updating all of its plans. The company has a new website (proton.me), and both new and existing users can use the @proton.me address instead of the old @protonmail.com option, if they so choose.
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Proton will now offer three plans: Free, Mail Plus, and Unlimited . The new free tier expands storage to 1GB and remains fairly limited — you can only send 150 messages per day and have three labels and folders, for example. You also get access to the basic Proton VPN tool and the user-friendly Proton Calendar, though you're limited to just one calendar in that plan. Proton has long said that since it doesn't run ads , it relies on subscriptions for revenue, so it's no surprise that the free plan is limited.
The Mail Plus plan will cost €5/month, although you can get it for less if you sign up for a year or two, all in one download. Still, it’s a big upgrade over the old plan. Users now get 15GB of storage shared between their email and Proton Drive cloud storage account. There are no limits on how many messages you can send or how many labels and folders you can create, and it also supports IMAP email clients via the Proton Bridge tool. There are also additional features, such as a new “short domain” email alias (@pm.me) that you can use to send and receive messages, as well as 20 calendars that you can share with other users.
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Finally, the Unlimited plan costs €12/month. The company positions it as a way for the user to get the top tier of all its services at once. This means 500 GB of total storage, making Proton Drive much more viable for use as a backup service. You can use Proton Mail with up to three different custom domain addresses (up from one in the Mail Plus Plan) and a total of 15 different email addresses (up from 10 in Mail Plus).
But the big difference is that you get the full Proton VPN with the Unlimited plan, rather than the more basic option that comes with the other two Proton plans. That includes up to 10 VPN connections instead of one, a total of 1,700+ servers in 63 different countries (instead of 100 servers in three countries), and faster speeds. For now, Proton will continue to offer its VPN as a standalone product.
If you're new to the world of Proton, the company currently has iOS apps for mail and VPN services, and Android apps for mail, VPN , and calendar. The Drive cloud storage option is still technically in beta, so there are no mobile apps yet — they're planned for later this year.
Information source: engadget.com
