ProtonMail is dead, long live Proton


It is the revival of ProtonMail, which becomes Proton. Another identity is given to the rival service of Gmail, as well as a different strategy.

ProtonMail is dead, long live Proton. The Gmail competitor announces Wednesday, May 25 a change of identity and approach. Identity first, by adopting a more general name. No longer a question of being associated only with e-mail. Proton intends to be more than mail, with other services around. Approach then, in order to precisely reflect this seesaw.

Proton isn’t backing down from its initial promise of privacy and data confidentiality — within the bounds of the law, an obligation that won it controversy (and a change of rhetoric) in the fall, when the service had to hand over IP addresses to the police, angering netizens who had placed excessive expectation in Proton.

It is in fact a question of unifying and homogenizing the experience of Internet users who trust the service. If ProtonMail was born in reaction to the revelations of Edward Snowden on the electronic surveillance of the NSA, with the desire to provide secure messaging, the platform has since diversified: a VPN, storage in the cloud, a calendar.

ProtonMail is just an app

ProtonMail will always exist, but as an application attached to the Proton company. The rest does not change: there is always end-to-end encryption by default to secure the exchange of emails. As for usability, the service is user-friendly enough that anyone can pick it up (and migrating from Gmail isn’t difficult).

Source: Proton

All the other products (Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, Proton VPN) are available in the same way, and brought together in a single ecosystem. In addition to the change of brand and the reorganization of the various services, this is also accompanied by a redesign of the website, an updated price list, new functionalities and improved integration.

This transformation paves the way for the launch of other services and products, in order to strengthen this software galaxy in the making. We could, why not, see the arrival of an instant chat service (Proton Chat?) or an electronic wallet (Proton Wallet?). It is not impossible: in any case, the CEO has not closed this door.

Thus, there is still a free e-mail offer, which offers very basic access to the e-mail service — with many limits in daily use: a single e-mail, 1 GB of disk space, a maximum of 150 messages per day, 3 files and 3 labels authorized. A basic offer to discover the service and which can be used as a loss leader for a paid formula.

Because the suite is billed: the intermediate subscription at 4.99 euros per month removes most barriers and adds the Proton calendar (we had evaluated Proton Calendar against Google Calendar). Finally, an offer at 11.99 euros gives access to VPN and Drive, and expands the previous features a little more. Discounts are offered in the event of a 1 or 2 year subscription.

What convince Internet users to take the plunge and leave the competitors on which they are today? Proton hopes so, despite the tariff barrier which can put off. But the service remains convinced that protecting privacy is well worth a few euros a month. The platform, moreover, is pleased that 70 million people around the world think like it.

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Source: Proton



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