Protonmail just announced they are now deleting inactive accounts, making it a huge pain in the ass for you to have many different free burner emails. As we all know, passive surveillance with email is a huge problem, as many dumb websites force insecure email authentication to login to their services. And so a single email provider can then easily see all your activity across the entire internet.
In order to evade this mass surveillance, many turn to many burner emails from Protonmail. Now Proton just announced they are cracking down on this to make this harder on you, by forcing you to keep a system to remember when accounts have to be logged into or be deleted, or you’ll lose access to your verification accounts. Their spam emails nagged the following,
We are announcing our new policy regarding the storage of data, that will be implemented on April 9, 2025. Under this policy, we reserve the right to delete all data associated with Proton Accounts on a Free plan that remain inactive for one year (12 consecutive months).
At a first glance, their new policy of allowing the existing accounts to remain till 2026 seems very reasonable,
As you had a Proton Account on a Free plan before this policy change took place, we’re giving you an additional one-year grace period before it takes effect. That means you have until April 9 2026, or two years from now, to log in to your account to prevent data deletion.
But one will quickly realize that this incentivizes users to keep the accounts they already have, and to not make new burners. In other words, less privacy. So we repeat our earlier messages for users to consider self-hosted VPS email, so if they control it, then they can reduce the need for burners, and make their life easier.
If one doesn’t wish to self-host, consider Simplified Privacy’s service to do the work for you. And you even get other services included such as docs (CryptPad) and chat (XMPP/SimpleX) on the same VPS.