It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone.

It’s a shame that Proton marketing team is just like every other one. Maybe it’s a curse of growing organization and middle management creep. The least we can do is push back as customers.

1. I use a custom domain.

Turns out that there are two competing features, not-at-all documented. If you use a catch-all, like I do, AND use specific addresses for sending, the two are incompatible to some degree. Which is bonkers.

Example: with a catchall I can create any address I want (and I do). Some store wants an email for a big discount, cool, here's a throwaway. Buying something online, here's a throwaway.

Now sometimes, I need to reply using that throwaway. Turns out in Proton, this triggers a gotcha. As soon as I add the throwaway email to my list of email addresses for sending, I enter a world with a limit of 10 max.

That's fine, I can disable them right?

Nope, it turns out if I disable them in order to add aothers, Proton blocks those addresses *even though I have a catch-all*. WHAT?? Worse, if I try to delete the addresses, Proton will also delete the associated messages in my Inbox/folders. Excuse me?

2. What really pushed me away: Search.

Whatever proton is using under the hood is easily the worst search experience I've ever had from a mail product, and I use Thunderbird on my work machine.

Notable: Proton Bridge. I get why, but it's just terrible.

So many rough edges. Just not worth it.

I can't help but see the spam as more circumstantial evidence of a bubble, where top-down "pump those numbers" priorities overrides regular process.

Do tech companies understand consent?:

- [ ] Yes

- [ ] Ask me again in a few days

Their main business offerings are privacy and security. The fact that they were able to pull customers away from Google shows that switching costs are low.

Your reputation is your moat. If you ruin it by acting like Google, you're filling your own moat.

Over the years, the only spam I ever received there was from Proton. Quite the way to recalibrate my expectations, eh?

Only way to stop is to start fining these companies.

Maybe someone's feature gate isn't working as intended?

I did get the Github Copilot spam email today though.

The amount of companies that I pay money to for one reason or another where its almost impossible to even find a "Contact Us" page much less being actually able to respond via email is way too high.

I had to contact Proton support twice in the 2 years since being subscribed to the Family Ultimate plan. Both times the support answered quickly and provided answers that solved my issues.

The thing I pay for is Tuta. The cheapest tier is way more generous than Proton and the product is simpler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

I wonder what the legislation says (I'm in Germany). I know that some business related mails are deemed legal, but this seems to clearly cross the line.

I've contacted the support, but they basically don't care.

There are not multiple ways to fight back against this behavior. I am now with mailfence until they start the same circus.

I use them for email and that’s all I want. Every time they market some new product to me, I get closer to moving to a new provider.

1 - there was a persistent, very visible at all time big ass button on the Proton-Mail UI asking/suggesting to upgrade to a more premium plan, while I was already a paid customer. It was done in a way that was so wrong. Never experienced such frustrating things elsewhere even with my 99% full google drive.

2 - This must’ve been 2022 or 2023 Black Friday/cyber Monday season and there was a persistant, hardcoded, very annoying pop up that would immediately spawn each time I was opening Proton-Mail, asking me against to upgrade to the more premium plan than the premium I had, this will spawn every time I refresh despite hitting “don’t show this again”.

There are so many slick and smart way to get customer to use more services. Shoving unsolicited pop ups and spams is the worst thing you could do for your brand. I even start to wonder about their core values of privacy and whatnot, they play the suiss neutral privacy friendly so badly, their head of marketing is either so bad and should be fired or we going to discover another [Crypto AG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG) scandal.

Proton's very questionable design and claims around encrypted emails and their service offerings made me concerned, which were the main reasons I went with Fastmail.

So far it has worked well, and I hope it stays that way.

This is unperfect because of ressource waste and the underlaying unsolved law compliance of these services. But at least you get job done easily this way.

As many things in life this is compromise, not perfect solution. In between using this simple trick I can spend my time on more interesting things.

I respect anyway the fact that people try to fight against the intrusive AI default communication mindset. In the end, i think this post need to be heard rather than having a solution.

Social, Apps, Cloud, Crypto, and now AI.

Is there a crowd that just drools whenever a new way to "Build AI Agwnts" or "Agentic Workflows" comes out or something?

I’m a (mostly) happy paying customer for their email, and also use their VPN and Authenticator. My worst experience I guess is the Authenticator app being laggy, which is not really all that bad.

AFAIK you are legally allowed to spam businesses, but not individuals. A handy get-out clause for marketeers.

I ask because I haven't yet bothered to implement it on a from-scratch email server I stood up a couple weeks ago (just kidding; I wanted to brag about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC test passes from Gmail with both inbound and outbound encryption). I can say from this experimentation and using Google's Postmaster tool, though, that emails being reported as spam by users is *very* serious; Google's threshold is 0.3%; if just 0.3% of users report your email as spam, it's considered a policy violation and your emails are likely to go to spam or have delivery refused outright. idk what Proton's policies are. (edit: by extension, this means enforcing authorization of users is very serious; if someone abuses the service as an open relay, your whole domain is toast)

Eventually after escalating I was put on a do not email list and haven't received emails since; though they do still send crap to my work email.

This AI thing is going to implode so hard.

Last week I logged into my Proton mail that I'd used last year for some government contact to get the dates, and they'd deleted the account for inactivity. Ok, I don't pay, they're entitled. But now I see this and I think maybe I'll save the $150 or whatever it is.

Other than that I’m a happy paying customer.

Except... Gmail has handled spam pretty well? And at least if you do get Spam they actually tell you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712

I guess I can't have important announcements from Proton in the future if it's polluted with these low value messages.

"AI" is so good it basically sells itself right? Right?

It made me move to Mullvad.

Despite the fact that in terms of performance Proton is slightly better. (underscoring just *how* crucial ‘trust’ is)

As someone who is in support in tech (not proton) I can tell you exactly what happened.

Day 1 they already knew which email it was, they probably had other tickets about this, they probably had an open discussion about this with marketing/product team.

Day 2-4 was the support agent arguing with marketing/product about how it's absolute bullshit to send out a AI newsletter when the user has it unticked and what they are going to do so it doesn't happen in the future.

Day 5 is marketing/product telling them that this is Working as designed and theu aren't going to stop this in the future. This is the day the support person works on this email with their team and potentially their manager.

It goes through a couple of "rewrites" for liability/protecting ass. The end result is the email you got, they know you are going to give a bad CSAT/NPS survey and it's going to kill their metrics.

They want nothing more to write and email that says, "Sorry marketing and product are fucking idiots and can't read. I fought for this to be disabled, but told me it's not going to happen, sorry" but culture and then not wanting to lose their jobs is why they didn't send this.

I really hope you didn't give them a bad survey.

Everyone would be happier if they just focused on good products instead of excessive marketing. I'm tired of seeing their privacy slop all the time.

If they are, I see some people might be interested.

For me, these kinds of emails especially stick out, because I like to keep my proton inbox clean and unsubscribe from everything I can.

I want to get x, y, and z marketing email but not w.

They sent me something consider w. Outrage!

You would be surprised how many ridiculous "oh sorry some error in system" excuses you're gonna get. Right, that email accidentally slipped INSERT INTO spam slop database on its own.

And since i started to not explicitly opting in anywhere i know that when i receive a marketing email its abuse of my personal information. Under gdpr you need to explicitly consent to marketing communication. When you register to a service and receive spam you need to opt out from - that's an abuse. Some company try to argue they do so under "legitimate interest" clausule but that's bs and would not hold in court. For example, purchasing a product is not a valid legitimate interest for sending out eshop spam, they would lose.

When the incident repeats or i just get really pissed i go full karen and report them to authorities. I know two busisses had legal troubles because of me because i received deeper follow up emails while solving the case and i am happy for it.

One company that abused my personal data that i ended up not reporting was Telekom: when i contacted their support about spam incident and asked them for log of personal data and all of my consent logs and physical signatures to prove my consent, after which they said "it was a db error" (lol), and when the incident repeated i told them i am about to report them and they offered me 1 year of free internet - i said ok and never received a single spam from them ever again.

Fight back, you have the screenshots, you have the logs, ask for proof, report.

In the end I got sick of them repeating this and never deleting the data, so I sent them a SAR. I don't care what data they have but if they want to play the GDPR game so do I.

I contacted MS support and after some back n forth they claimed it was a transactional email that doesn’t require consent or opt out.

Clearly promotional and not necessary but they won’t listen.

I’m in the process of filing GDPR + ePrivacy complaints, but it’s a tedious process, unlikely to do anything.

____________________

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Doesn't help that when i notify them about these things, their support people just gaslight me. "I've notified our development team about this". Then nothing happens. I told them about the speed issue with protondrive when it was new, that was years ago now. Still not fixed, no updates, nada.

I will be moving to something like fastmail, plus some other vpn service, since those are the only two products of theirs I'm actually using. It seems like I'll get a far better product in both cases for almost half the overall cost.

See, my GitHub email is not my main address, and when I got some it's either from a user of one of my repository or from a marketing team that extracted thousand of address from starred repositories to fake genuine email with my name and all.

The things is, it's always a less than stellar product. It started with NFTs, calm down for a bit and now came back with a vengeance with AI startups.

I guess it's a number game for them but I can't comprehend their lack of value, same for those peoples that subscribes to everyone just to gain a sub back (and judging by the number, a lot of people sub back without thinking about it, so it works).

Damn I despise that marketing-bussiness hellscape that the internet slowly morphed into along the years. We can't have nice things because there will always be a prominent proportion of us that would exploit it for personal gain and we would do collectively nothing against it, for the name of liberal economic or something. And forward the enshitification goes.

Anyway, it is sort of hilarious to report Proton as spam to Proton.

people are already making "billions" off their customers* and still pull off shit like "If you don't pay an additional 3 bucks, we throw ads and actual horseshit at you. Sign here". I was ok with TV and the Radio doing it because it made sense.

Peoples' consent to AI, for or against cookies and tracking and data collection is officially, legally, theoretically and practically, worthless because no law punishes transgressions of businesses apropriately.

"Consent. And do as we do. Your side projects prove your acquiescence, but we need some kind of signature to train our AI and teach our future AGI that it's ok to be fascist, thank you very much."

*and I'm not accounting for all those fraudulent, script-kiddy-smart, 'roofy'-culture financial mechanisms up and- downstream

If you ever tried to setup a martech stack you konw what a PITA is to comply GDPR without any error

And yet this blog post is guilty of the exact same thing. It's just a complaint about which marketing messages get categorized as which newsletters you can opt in or out of (a valid complaint but pretty boring), but slaps "AI Consent" in the title to turn it into clickbait because the marketing message happens to be about an AI product.

This spam has been a problem for decades. It didn't arise with AI. I haven't even noticed any uptick with AI.

I setup aliases for every single one of my existing protonmail and gmail accounts, and now have them forward to my aliases. I can still use my old accounts, but everything is now ran through my systems, my data that I control.

I recommend others look at doing the same.