ProtonMail is rebranding and adding a lot of storage to all its plans

As far as security is concerned, ProtonMail is one of the better options for secure email – you can get a free (admittedly basic) account and enjoy end-to-end encryption for your contacts. your contacts when you message other ProtonMail users. But the company’s plans are a bit outdated. The free account only has 500MB of storage, while the €4/month plan gets you to a modest 4GB of storage with some other limitations like a limit of 1000 messages sent daily.

However, starting today, the company is making it easier to use all of the services on ProtonMail and the others it offers, including VPNs, cloud storage, and encrypted calendars . Going forward, ProtonMail is rebranding itself as Proton, stepping up its entire suite of privacy-focused services, and updating all of its plans. The company has a new website (proton.me) and both new and existing users can use the @proton.me address instead of the old @protonmail.com option if they so wish.

In the future, Proton will offer three plans: Free, Mail Plus, and Unlimited. The new free tier expands storage to 1GB and is still pretty limited – for example, you can only send 150 messages per day and have three labels and folders. You can also access the basic Proton VPN tool and the user Proton Calendar, although you only get one calendar in this plan. Proton has long said that since it doesn’t serve ads, it relies on subscriptions for revenue, so it’s not too surprising that the free plan is limited.

The Mail Plus plan will cost €5/month, although you can get it for a lower fee if you sign up for a year or two years all in one go. However, this is a big upgrade over the old plan. Users now get 15GB of space shared between their email and Proton Drive cloud storage accounts. There’s no limit to the number of messages you can send or the number of labels and folders you can create, and it also supports the IMAP email client through the Proton Bridge engine. There are also additional features such as a new “short domain” email alias (@pm.me) that you can use to send and receive messages, and 20 calendars that you can share with other users. other.

Finally, the Unlimited plan costs €12/month; the company is positioning it as a way to achieve the top level of all its services at the same time. That translates to 500GB of total storage, making Proton Drive a lot more viable for anyone to use as a backup service. You can use Proton Mail with up to three different custom domain addresses (up from one in the Mail Plus Plan) and with a total of 15 different email addresses (up from 10 on Mail Plus).

But the big difference is that you get the official Proton VPN with the Unlimited plan, instead of the more basic option that comes with the other two Proton plans. This includes up to 10 VPN connections instead of one, 1,700+ servers in total across 63 different countries (instead of 100 ish servers in three countries) and faster speeds. For now, Proton will continue to offer its VPN as a standalone product – you can get details on that as well as a breakdown between the basic free VPN and what you get with the free version. full this.

If you’re new to the Proton world, right now the company has iOS apps for mail and VPN services as well as Android apps for mail, VPN, and calendar. Technically, the Drive cloud storage option is still in beta, so there aren’t any mobile apps for it yet – they’re expected to launch later this year.

And while Proton hasn’t had any major updates to its mail service or other apps other than merging them with the new design language, the company has made a few updates in recent months. Last month, the iOS Mail app got some design updates and a dark mode, as well as a “conversation” mode to make message threads easier to read. Back in February, Proton enabled encrypted search in the Mail web app, and in January it added a tracking pixel blocker.