I have long been a supporter of the Proton security environment and was, for many years, a paid-up premium member of Proton Mail. I became disillusioned with this because of the way it handled emails on my Android devices and I changed over to Mailfence as my main secure email. However, I have been drawn back into the Proton ecosystem for several reasons.
First, I opted for Proton VPN after trying many VPN offerings and became disillusioned with them, largely because they were insecure and regularly dropped out. This was particularly true of Surfshark which I persevered with for several years until I realised I was micturating in the breeze and cancelled my account. Proton VPN has proved to be not only robust, with no drop-outs since I signed up, but it is phenomenally fast.
Because I had not deleted my Proton account, I had access to Proton Mail Proton Drive, Proton Pass and Proton Calendar as a free calendar. I subscribed to Proton Pass, but this is gathering dust in a virtual cupboard as it is not as good as Bitwarden.
I use Proton Drive as I only store sensitive documents etc here but the 2GB limit was restricting. pCloud is my primary cloud storage option, but I did not want to subscribe and pay extra for its full encryption module. Tight bastard, I know!
Recently, Proton upped the game and introduced a 1GB storage level for Proton Mail, when it was previously 500mb. Similarly, Proton Drive saw its free storage level rise from 500MB to 5GB. Okay, you have to jump through a few hoops to get this extra storage (see here) but it takes minimal effort. There was an issue with raising my storage amounts, but this was swiftly resolved by the ever-efficient support team.
So, now I use Proton VPN, Calendar and Drive as my main tools. Proton Mail is largely dormant, but it does raise the issue of do I jump back into the Proton ecosystem? When my pCloud subscription with the 200GB of storage ends, it makes sense to jump into the Proton Unlimited plan. This would give me 500 GB of cloud storage in Drive, plus many other benefits for slightly more than the pCloud pricing.
Who knows, I might make the jump sooner than later. Watch this space.
