Unlike with ProtonMail, which explicitly supports the feature, working with PGP inside of Gmail is much less streamlined and borderline unusable on mobile. Using PGP inside of Gmail is possible but difficult, with browser extensions like Mailvelope and FlowCrypt making it easier to manage. In essence, this is a bit of a trick, since the recipient must click on a link to open the message, but it works well enough, and it’s not something that Gmail or Outlook provides. ProtonMail even allows you to send password-protected, self-destructing messages to users of any webmail platform. ProtonMail also facilitates the use of Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, which allows you to “lock” email contents so that only recipients with the key can open them. All communications between ProtonMail users are automatically end-to-end encrypted so that not even ProtonMail’s employees can read them.

In addition to providing encryption on the server, ProtonMail also makes it easy to send encrypted messages between users. Gmail can tell what you’re doing and when you’re doing it based on the contents of your inbox, and that’s become a feature that many users rely upon. Google will use AI to “read” your email for services like the Google Assistant to make useful suggestions at opportune moments. This isn’t the case with standard webmail providers like Gmail, which only encrypts data between your browser and its servers. In the case of a security breach, data swiped from ProtonMail’s servers wouldn’t be of any use. ProtonMail encrypts all data on the server so that it is rendered useless to anyone without the key to decrypt it. ProtonMail Prioritizes Data Protection and Secure Messaging What Is Secure Email, and Should You Switch? If you want an email service with all the conveniences of Gmail, ProtonMail isn’t it. For example, it won’t automatically crawl through your email and add events to your calendar.ĭeciding between a traditional provider like Google and a secure provider like ProtonMail is a case of weighing up convenience and privacy. Many of the features that make Gmail so useful aren’t possible in ProtonMail due to the emphasis on privacy and security. The free plan is limited-for example, it only offers 500 MB of storage.

While ProtonMail sounds like an upgrade over Gmail, it does come with some caveats.

Is proton email more secure than gmail