After 19 years of hosting email for my domains on Google Workspace (I was an early internal tester when it was still Google Apps) I finally moved my domains to proton.me last month when they had a Cyber Monday sale.

There were a lot of reasons that boiled down to:

• I no longer trust Google to not use my data to train Gemini
• I pay less for 500GB worth of storage for proton services than I did for 30GB on Google. And proton includes a VPN as part of my package’s services.

If you have a proton email account but you haven’t already started importing email into proton, don’t kick that off until you read this - it’s what I wish I had known when I was setting up my account. If you don’t have one but are considering one, here’s a referral link that will get you two weeks for free and $20 off of your first bill. Disclaimer - I get $20 in credit too.

Getting Started

Don’t start importing your email right away. Instead, work in this order:

1. Set up your domain’s DNS to deliver to proton
2. Create filters, labels and folders based on your incoming messages.
3. If you want a lot more control of your filters than gMail allows, take a look at the sieve filter options. One of their first examples is using sieve to create a filter that works based on what contact group the sender is in. I found it a lot easier to have a single ephemeral political label that I filter most fundraising emails into based on adding their sender address to a political contact group, same for tech-ephemeral and shopping-notices
4. You can turn phone notification on or off on a per-folder basis, so create at least two folders - one for messages you want to filter and label, but don’t want them making your phone ping, and one for ones you do actually want notifications. I have filters that label messages and move them to a Notify folder, and other filters that label them and move them to a Filtered folder that doesn’t notify me. The only messages in my Inbox proper are either spam or stuff I haven’t created a filter for.
5. Once you like what your filters are doing, then you kick off the mail ingestion so that they’ll be applied to messages as they get imported. I made the mistake of kicking off the ingestion first, so not all filters got applied to the messages. I had 19 years worth of email, so it took three-ish days to ingest everything.

Nicer things about Proton Mail

• Filters can apply multiple labels to a message, unlike gmail - I filed an internal feature request about that in 2006 and it still isn’t in gMail.
• You’re not stuck using the gui to make filters. You can also make more complex filters by writing them in sieve. And you can start a filter using the gui, then edit the generated sieve code.
• The sieve editor won’t let you save unless it’s valid sieve syntax. It may not act how you’re expecting, but at least it doesn’t break filtration entirely.

Not terrible but not so nice either

• Once you modify a filter by editing its sieve representation, you can easily get to a point where you can only edit it via sieve. Which is fair, the gui only understands the sieve it generates. My first modification is usually to make it work on contact groups and that always roach motels it to the sieve editor
• You have to enable downloading metadata in the mail search dialog to be able to do full-text searches, and depending on how much mail you have that download could take a while. On the other hand, they aren’t doing it server side because the email is encrypted at rest.
• When you edit a filter, there’s an option to apply it to all your existing mail. They only allow a limited number of those backfills to be running at once, so you have to wait for one to finish before you can kick off another. I have 19 years of email, so the backfills can take some time. I think I also ran into a limit on how many can be kicked off in a single day.

Finally

So far I’m a lot happier using Proton to host my domains than I was with hosting them on Google Workspace. I’m paying less and getting more functionality and more privacy. I had stayed on Google mainly out of inertia and thinking it’d be a huge pain to move, and they made that really easy.