Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zxcvbn4038 2263 days ago
I've been curious about ProtonMail for a long while - my greatest hesitation is that I use multiple addresses and ProtonMail seems to be based around a single address. I'm not sure why email providers all want to charge per address - why not allow multiple addresses and charge for transit or storage? However at minimum multiple instances of this running could be a step towards multiple accounts.
3 comments

They allow multiple addresses and domains if you pay for premium, its not per address but a monthly fee which includes the functionality of handling them. Their UI is actually really friendly for multiple addresses unlike for example gmail.
Why per address, you ask? My opinion on why is because it is a finite namespace, so if any single person took a disproportionate amount of names it would adversely impact others. You can approach that by assigning a cost to addresses and adjusting as necessary and/or using quotas to limit abuse/over use of the namespace. In addition, an email provider’s reputation hinges on its ability to prevent abuse on its own platform; the ability to acquire huge numbers of addresses or rapidly switch between addresses would effectively make the provider a safe haven for spammers who are difficult to block externally without blocking the whole provider.

This is mostly conjecture, though; I don’t actually know for sure how it’s viewed by providers and I also don’t have a complete view of how SPAM prevention actually works (certainly seems complicated.)

While they do charge per address for the smallest account size, the Premium subscription includes a few for free and it's very cheap to add additional domains.

I use 6 domains with them; a few from the Premium tier and a few I added as extras. I also get my VPN through Proton and the whole thing costs less than 15USD per month.

As already mentioned in this thread, the interface to handle all this is fantastic too.