Encrypted email in the way that Proton and Tuta do it has a lot of drawbacks. Because I almost never use my personal/non-work email to communicate with another human, and automated mails tend to have the message body be no more sensitive than the subject line and metadata, zero-knowledge encryption at rest for just the mail body has a negligible privacy impact for me.
It helps to consider your actual needs and privacy goals, using the services or software that fits them best rather than just following what others say has the best privacy.
I used Proton for two years and, similarly, just recently migrated off of it last month. Since I use custom domains for email through it, and I never cared to use their other services outside of Mail (and occasionally VPN), it was a quick and painless migration. Unlike the painful migration of changing my email address everywhere to be non-gmail (which I still haven’t 100% finished after two years), this time I only needed to update DNS records and copy mailbox data. After migrating, having actual IMAP/JMAP access without a bridge is nice.
Note that you don’t necessarily need to import your entire mailbox when migrating. I never imported my email archive from gmail to proton; an offline archive of all old received emails on my NAS is enough for me if I ever need to search through it. I can even view that archive in Thunderbird.
My thoughts on a few of the other Proton services:
Proton VPN is really nice. One of the few good ones with port forwarding. But some other options have better pricing than VPN Plus alone outside of the Proton Unlimited bundle.
SimpleLogin (or Proton Pass masks) is nice, though using anonymous email masks is a trade-off in dependence. I prefer disposable addresses under my custom domain for anything associated with my identity regardless (like services that use my billing or shipping info), and shared domain masks for anything else. My existing shared-domain email masks in Proton still work even after my subscription ended. Addy and Firefox Relay are fine alternatives, and some other mail services like Fastmail have their own equivalent included.
I’d rather self-host CalDAV/CardDAV than rely on online services for calendar, contacts, etc.
I had already been using a local KeePassXC database and a NAS for many years so I had no reason to use Proton Drive and Pass, except for the latter’s email masks.
Encrypted email in the way that Proton and Tuta do it has a lot of drawbacks. Because I almost never use my personal/non-work email to communicate with another human, and automated mails tend to have the message body be no more sensitive than the subject line and metadata, zero-knowledge encryption at rest for just the mail body has a negligible privacy impact for me.
It helps to consider your actual needs and privacy goals, using the services or software that fits them best rather than just following what others say has the best privacy.
I used Proton for two years and, similarly, just recently migrated off of it last month. Since I use custom domains for email through it, and I never cared to use their other services outside of Mail (and occasionally VPN), it was a quick and painless migration. Unlike the painful migration of changing my email address everywhere to be non-gmail (which I still haven’t 100% finished after two years), this time I only needed to update DNS records and copy mailbox data. After migrating, having actual IMAP/JMAP access without a bridge is nice.
Note that you don’t necessarily need to import your entire mailbox when migrating. I never imported my email archive from gmail to proton; an offline archive of all old received emails on my NAS is enough for me if I ever need to search through it. I can even view that archive in Thunderbird.
My thoughts on a few of the other Proton services: