FranklyMail vs Proton Mail

Mail arriving at Proton is encrypted with your public key before it is stored, so what sits on their disks is not readable by them. That is not marketing. It is a different architecture from ours, it constrains what they can build, and it is the reason a Proton account cannot offer plain IMAP without a piece of software on your machine doing the decryption.

On top of that: end to end encryption between Proton accounts, PGP for people outside, their own apps on every platform, and a bundle that carries VPN, Drive and a calendar. Five people on Mail Plus is about $240 a year; Family covers up to six for EUR 287.88 a year, read off their pricing page in September 2026. For what is in that bundle, neither number is outrageous.

We have none of it. Our mail sits on our server in a form we could read, protected by TLS in transit, a policy written into our privacy page, and code that never writes a line of anyone’s mail to a log. If your requirement is that the provider must be unable to read your mail rather than unwilling, stop here and buy Proton. This page will still be here if the requirement turns out to be something else.

It covers your archive, on their side. That is worth having and it is the strongest version of the promise anyone in this market makes.

It does not cover the other half of your correspondence. A message from your accountant arrives at Proton in readable form and is encrypted there; the copy in your accountant’s sent folder at Gmail is not encrypted at all. The same is true of every reply you send to anyone outside the service. End to end only exists when both ends are inside it, or when both of you have set up PGP, which almost nobody does.

So the guarantee is real but narrower than the word encryption suggests to most people. For a threat model of "a court, an insider or a breach at my provider", it is exactly right. For a threat model of "I am tired of being the product", it is a solution to a different problem, and you are paying a bundle price for it.

To use Proton in Apple Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird you run Proton Mail Bridge, a desktop application that decrypts locally and serves IMAP to your client. It requires a paid plan and it exists only for desktop; there is no Bridge for a phone, so mobile means their app.

Ours is ordinary IMAP, POP3, SMTP and JMAP on the ports you would expect, with Sieve filters, from any client on any device, with nothing to install. If you have had the same mail setup since 2014 and you want the new account to appear in it, that is a two-minute job here and a piece of software there.

It matters on the way out too. Your mail here is standard folders you can copy anywhere, including to Proton, on the day you decide we were the wrong call.

Five mailboxes cost $9 a year with us. Unlimited domains, unlimited addresses, and the price does not move when a sixth person appears, because what costs a mail server money is storage and bandwidth, not headcount.

Against roughly $240 for the same five at Proton, the gap is about $230 a year. If you use the VPN, the drive and the calendar, you are buying four products and the comparison is unfair to them. If you wanted email, you are paying for three things to get one.

Our privacy claim is small and checkable rather than cryptographic: no ads, no scanning, no profiling, nothing trained on your mail, and the business model is the $9 rather than anything we could learn about you. We would rather write that plainly than dress it up as something it is not.