10 Essential Hacks Every Proton Mail User Should Know
Explore 10 practical tips for Proton Mail, from doubling your free storage and reserving usernames for kids to stripping metadata from photos.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Double your free storage to 1 GB by completing onboarding tasks within 18 days.
- Reserve a username in advance for your child for a $1 contribution.
- Use Easy Switch to seamlessly import messages and contacts from Gmail or Yahoo.
Proton Mail is a privacy-focused email service that strips trackers from messages, maintains zero-access encryption—meaning Proton cannot read or hand over your email contents—and offers end-to-end encryption between Proton mailboxes. If you are a regular user of this platform, mastering a few hidden tricks will help you maximize these robust privacy features and make your email communication as smooth as possible.
For free-tier users with a single email address, storage is capped at 500 MB, which fills up quickly when receiving large attachments. While you can upgrade to a Plus subscription for $4 a month to get 15 GB, budget-conscious users can double their limit to 1 GB simply by completing Proton's onboarding checklist within 18 days of signing up. Look for the storage option on the left sidebar of your mailbox to get started.
If you have a common name, simple email conventions like firstname.lastname are likely already claimed. You can proactively reserve a username through Proton Mail for your children, giving them 15 years to eventually activate it. Just pick an address, contribute $1 toward the Proton Foundation, and save the voucher to share with your child in the future.
Switching from another email provider or consolidating your inboxes is straightforward using Proton's Easy Switch feature. It connects with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, and any IMAP-compatible provider. Once activated, you can send and receive messages from your external address directly within Proton while keeping copies in your original inbox.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
Proton's zero-access encryption architecture ensures that user data remains completely private, meaning not even the company itself can access your messages. Security features like password protection for non-Proton recipients and auto-deleting expiration timers act as vital safeguards in an era where personal data privacy is increasingly compromised across digital platforms.
We have all sent emails containing typos or forgotten attachments. Proton Mail addresses this with a delayed send feature offering up to a 20-second window to change your mind before the message leaves your outbox. The default timer is 10 seconds, but users can adjust it down or up in the message composition settings.
Furthermore, image metadata can inadvertently expose location and timestamp details that compromise your privacy. Proton Mail allows you to strip this data when attaching photos to outgoing drafts. Additionally, users can enable local browser indexing to search through full message contents securely without risking cloud exposure.
Source: Lifehacker
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