My grievances with Proton

I think some clarification is due because there is a lot of equivocation regarding the term “alias” so I want to make the terminology clearer.

The Proton email address system is convoluted. There are five types of email addresses within the Proton ecosystem detailed in their FAQ. Though their FAQ leaves some very important nuance, I will quote it here:

• Free personal address : This is the email you signed up with. For example, alicejones@proton.me or alicejones@protonmail.com.
• Additional address : This is based on a Proton Mail domain (for example, alice-work@protonmail.com) or your own domain (for example, alice@alicejones.com).
• Plus addressing : These are unlimited extra addresses using the + sign.
• Organization user address : Users who belong to a Proton for Business organization can have individual logins and mailboxes.
• Hide-my-email aliases : These help hide your real email address using Proton Pass.

I will explain these types of addresses as I have understood them, because this might offer us the opportunity to review my thinking and clear up any possible misconceptions that have occurred throughout this thread. Whether my understanding justifies my conclusion is up to you to decide.

Since “Organization user addresses” are irrelevant here, I will not be covering them.

For illustrative purposes, through these examples assume that my Proton username is bob@proton.me. I will be using it throughout this post.

1. Plus addresses

These are what I have been referring to as +suffix aliases. This is the most basic type of “alias” that is provided by virtually every modern email service. Plus addresses serve as a way to sort your correspondence by allowing the sender to optionally send email to a determined subcategory. They are especially useful with filters. For example, you may subscribe to a newsletter with the alias bob+news@proton.me. You could configure your inbox to automatically sort all of the emails sent to this address into a “News” folder.

These aliases are infinite in theory, are technically zero-cost, and available in all plans. They technically do not “exist” in the sense of existing in a record, i.e., they are transient. They offer a practical utility, but they do not provide any sort of benefit in the privacy space, since the true email address of the recipient is trivially knowable to the sender. In this manner, participation in plus-addressing is entirely voluntary.

The limitations are succinctly expressed in SimpleLogin’s FAQ, as follows:

Email subaddressing, also known as the plus (+) trick, popularized by Gmail and supported by some email services, allows you to create new email addresses by appending “+” to your current email address. Says your email is name@proton.me, you can quickly create another address like name+facebook@proton.me for Facebook, name+groupon@proton.me for Groupon, etc. Though practical, it has some downsides:

• You cannot reply from the + address: your real email will appear as the sender.
• The + trick is well-known and some websites don’t allow sign-ups with email addresses that contain +.
• Using + trick doesn’t protect your privacy: one can easily remove the + part to have your real email. If your + address appears in the data breach, your real address is probably also in the hands of spammers. You could check whether your email is leaked using website like have i been pwned
• By removing the + part, advertisers can link these + addresses together to have your browsing history.

Any Proton user can “have” as many plus-addresses as they wish. In fact, I would argue that you do not even “create” these addresses, and really, it’s your senders that create them for you. Plus-addresses are an ephemeral logistical construct.

When your subscription ends, nothing in regards to these aliases changes.

2. The SimpleLogin aliases

These are aliases offered by Proton’s SimpleLogin service, and they serve to compartmentalize your online identity. They are not “disposable”, as they are meant to be permanent aliases. From SimpleLogin’s own FAQ:

SimpleLogin alias are permanent as opposed to the temporary email addresses created on services like temp-mail.org.

SimpleLogin also doesn’t store the emails, they are stored in your mailbox.

SimpleLogin is simply a different product for a different need.

These aliases may look something like google.fasting85@passmail.net (following the pattern <servicename>.<random-word><numbers>@<aliasdomain>. They look nothing like Proton addresses, or like your Proton address, because they are designed for the express purpose of masking it.

SimpleLogin was designed to address what is essentially my threat model: defeating compiling cross-referenced data of a victim through the means of data breaches or data brokers. From SimpleLogin’s own FAQ:

An email alias is random and there’s no way to link 2 email aliases to the same person.

For email aliases created with a catch-all domain, they can only be linked together if the domain is known to have the catch-all option enabled. There’s no way to detect whether a domain has this option enabled or to know how many people are using a domain, a bad actor usually ignores these email addresses altogether.

Further:

If you use a different email alias for each website and one of your aliases starts receiving emails it isn’t supposed to receive, you can be sure that this alias is either leaked or sold.

For example, if your email alias for Facebook receives emails from LinkedIn, that means Facebook has sold your data to LinkedIn or they’ve had a data breach. Either way, you can just disable this alias. Your real email address stays hidden.

Data brokers, a $200 billion industry use your email address as the common denominator to match users between different datasets. Having thousands of email addresses make their job harder and your privacy better.

Given that SimpleLogin aliases are meant to be permanent , by their own statement, and also by practical necessity, the user expects, and rightfully so, that SimpleLogin aliases will be permanent. And they are: when your subscription expires, these aliases remain with the ability to both send and receive , by SimpleLogin’s own FAQ:

When your subscription ends, all aliases you created continue working normally, both on receiving and sending emails. Concretely:

• All aliases/domains/directories/mailboxes you have created are kept and continue working normally.
• You cannot create new aliases if you exceed the free plan limit, i.e. have more than 10 aliases.
• As features like catch-all or directory allow you to create aliases on-the-fly, those aliases cannot be automatically created if you have more than 10 aliases.
• You cannot add new domain, directory or mailbox.

For example, if you have 100 aliases by the time your subscription ends, these 100 aliases will continue receiving and sending emails normally. You cannot however create new aliases.

So when your subscription ends, your SimpleLogin aliases remain functional in perpetuity.

3. Additional Proton addresses (Proton aliases)

These are what I have been referring to as “Proton aliases”. This has been a source of much equivocation throughout this discussion, and justly so, because Proton’s addressing model is complex. From Proton’s FAQ:

If you subscribe to a Proton Mail paid plan, you can create additional email addresses, also known as aliases, which you can use instead of your free personal email addresses. And all Proton Mail users can create unlimited extra addresses, known as +aliases, by adding + after your username in one of your free personal email addresses.

If you have a paid plan, you can create at least 10 additional Proton aliases. For example, the paid user bob@proton.me can create the aliases banana@proton.me, apple@proton.me, and so on, and be able to send and receive emails through these aliases. As such, they can serve to both compartmentalize online identities and sort correspondence.

Unlike plus-addressing (+suffix aliases), participation in these aliases is not optional because the underlying, true Proton mailbox cannot be discovered by the sender. And unlike SimpleLogin aliases, Proton aliases are directly integrated with your Proton Mail mailbox, and function as a part of a traditional email alias system. These are the most important ways in which they differ from one another.

To clarify: An additional address does not come with an additional account, storage space, calendars, or anything beyond an additional label from which you can send and receive emails. In many ways, SimpleLogin aliases and Proton aliases are functionally identical.

These aliases, namely Proton aliases, are entirely disabled when your subscription ends. You cannot send, nor receive emails from these aliases.

4. The @pm.me aliases.

A @pm.me alias, in its most basic form, is a Proton alias (like I’ve explained in 3.), but ending with a @pm.me domain. It is a subset of Proton aliases, as in, every “@pm.me alias” is-a “Proton alias”. However, there is an exception.

When you first upgrade your Proton account, you are conferred a permanent @pm.me alias as a benefit for having upgraded your account. This alias is granted in the form of your primary address, (e.g. bob@proton.me gets bob@pm.me) and has many special properties. For clarity’s sake, I will call this alias the “special @pm.me alias”.

First, the special @pm.me alias exists in a Schrodinger’s Cat state of being a real Proton alias and not really a Proton alias. For starters, it is not a “true Proton alias” because it does not count towards your alias limit. It also differs from “true Proton aliases” because it cannot be disabled nor deleted. So if you are on a plan that only allows you to create up to X Proton aliases, the amount of Proton aliases you can truly have is [X + special @pm.me alias]. In the FAQ, this is what Proton calls “your short domain”.

When you activate your short domain:

• Both addresses can be used to send and receive emails. For example, the user Eric Norbert can use both eric.norbert@protonmail.com and eric.norbert@pm.me.
• Once activated, a short domain address (@pm.me) can’t be disabled or deleted.

Your short domain address doesn’t count toward your account address limit. However, additional addresses created with the @pm.me domain will count toward your limit.

Practically, this special @pm.me alias is not a privacy feature. It acts as a visual improvement over the longer name, for which Proton customers are encouraged to upgrade. Its benefits are purely aesthetic. From Proton’s own FAQ:

Short domain email addresses make it easier to type out your Proton Mail email address and share it with others.

Strangely, another special behavioral property that the “special @pm.me alias” has, is that when your subscription ends, it does not behave like a “true Proton alias” either, but also not like a SimpleLogin alias. Once your subscription ends, your “special @pm.me alias” will continue to be able to receive emails, but not send. From Proton’s FAQ:

If you downgrade from a paid plan to Proton Free, your short domain address will be converted to receive-only. You can still receive messages sent to your @pm.me address, but you won’t be able to send emails from it.

---

Relevant to this thread, we have four different types of aliases, discussed throughout this thread with varying levels of equivocation, and each behaves differently when your subscription expires.

To recap, there are four different types of subscription-expiry behavior:

1. +suffix aliases remain fully operational across plans;
2. SimpleLogin aliases remain fully operational across plans, but you cannot create new ones;
3. Proton aliases are entirely disabled, being unable to send nor receive emails, EXCEPT :
4. @pm.me aliases are entirely disabled as well, with the exception of the “special @pm.me alias”, which becomes receive-only.

These are four different subscription-expiry behaviors across functionally similar constructs. The fact that I did not expect Proton aliases to behave in their most unreasonable, personally damaging way, is entirely reasonable, given Proton’s track record of being a straightforward company.

Now, was I in the wrong for even making the assumption that Proton aliases would remain operational, or at least receive-only, when my subscription ended?

Specifically, Proton’s FAQ states that Proton aliases (additional addresses) are more suited for “permanent use”, much like the SimpleLogin FAQ states that SimpleLogin aliases are suited for permanent use:

If you need an address for more widespread and permanent usage, then an additional address is better. For example, you might have john.smith@proton.me for your personal email, while having acmeinc@proton.me for your small business.

Further, I will justify my thinking by saying that Proton never made it clear that this was an existing behavior. I have checked the FAQ pages and Terms of Service most directly relevant to alias behavior, and could not find any documentation of how additional Proton-domain addresses are handled when a subscription ends.

Terms of Service (last updated 31 March 2026): Terms of Service | Proton FAQ: How to create and use an additional address (alias) | Proton FAQ: Short domain (@pm.me) email addresses | Proton FAQ: Types of email addresses and aliases | Proton

In truth, the situation is more nuanced than what was earlier insinuated, that I simply want things for free. In actuality, the only reason that I know, for sure, that Proton aliases are disabled when the subscription ends, is because I specifically inquired with Proton’s Customer Support regarding it.

With that, I stand by my position, that Proton’s alias system is designed as a subscription lock-in, with catastrophic consequences for the consumer. I do not want “free things”, much less do I feel “entitled” to these aliases. In reality, I actually just want to be able to not lose an entire open channel of contact with people and services that I rely on and rely on me, and the fact that Proton can leverage this ability, behind a smokescreen of pattern subversions, while having everyone else defend them for it, is frankly disturbing.

I invite @Proton_Team to review this thread and address this grievance.