ProtonMail Review: Secure email for small and micro businesses

ProtonMail is the world’s largest secure email service. It offers end-to-end encryption and lots of other great security features to keep your communications private. Even the company hosting your emails has no way of reading them, so you can rest assured that they can’t be read by third parties either.

ProtonMail offers plans suitable for everyone, from the occasional user concerned about privacy to the busy professional who demands the highest levels of security and reliability.

If you value productivity, organizing your mailbox can be tedious if the service developers didn’t care for user experience. Many service providers have folder options to group emails, but it may not be enough. To increase their service’s flexibility, Protonmail has custom labels that you can add separately from folders. The best part is that you can add emails to labels, and it will not interfere with your folders categorization. Should you decide to remove a label from email, it will not change their folder. Also, if you no longer need a label, you can delete it without second thoughts – it will not delete any emails.

There may not be an actual human being spying on you when you use a familiar e-mail client. But there’s a reason why these services are free. E-mail clients are designed to extract keywords from your conversations and use them to choose targeted ads for you.

Previously ProtonMail used to have the only layout option. Looks weren’t its particular strength. Though, recently they have redesigned their whole UI. It was a complete revamp which wasn’t changed since the start seven years ago when they first launched.

Messages sent with those clients are rarely encrypted. And even when they are, it is typically just while they’re being sent. When they’re just sitting on the e-mail provider’s server, they can easily be read by anyone who gains access to that server.

If you need better specs than these, the company bumps you up to the ProtonMail Enterprise plan. This is a customizable tier where you can mix and match additional storage, more addresses, a dedicated support plan, and other options. However, there’s no set pricing; every quote must be made with a ProtonMail sales rep. As mentioned, the basic ProtonMail Professional plan lacks ProtonVPN, but you can request it be added to your account, which will let you take advantage of additional discounts.

With so many free e-mail clients available, it might seem strange to pay for such a service. This is especially true when you realize that the ProtonMail interface is not exactly better than the other alternatives.

But of course, when you subscribe to ProtonMail, what you’re really paying for is privacy, security, and peace of mind. This probably doesn’t seem so strange.

ProtonMail has drastically expanded its search capabilities. You can search for particular keywords and email addresses, inboxes, dates, and whether the messages were read or not. This is very convenient since many encrypted email providers don’t choose to include the feature.

It’s worth mentioning that this feature will help you to some extent. As you can see, you can’t search email content. It’s because the emails are stored on their servers with zero-knowledge encryption. In turn, they can’t be indexed, which also means that they can’t be searched.

Is ProtonMail safe and secure?

With ProtonMail end-to-end encryption, no one except you and the recipient can view your emails. And you can send encrypted emails to non-ProtonMail users as well. For even more security, ProtonMail adds two-factor authentication as an additional layer of protection. So, you can rest assured that no one will be snooping through your inbox or successfully intercepting your correspondence.

If you want to use ProtonMail faster, it might be a good idea to tame their keyboard shortcuts. Using them, you can quickly save drafts, open the previous message, show the original message, etc.

It gives you more flexibility when using ProtonMail. Not to mention, if you stick with it for a longer time, the shortcuts become second nature. They are a bit different from Outlook keyboard shortcuts. Still, they are intuitive enough to pick up even for novice users.