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this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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Probably nothing would happen to you. They might correlate your IP address and ban you, but that's likely it.
However, don't do that. Servers aren't free, and if people abuse the charity of these services, they'll stop offering free options for everyone.
If you need extra addresses, use something like https://addy.io/. if you need more storage, might be worth considering self-hosting your email.
I mean, that's probably the worst thing that can happen to your email, lol. Consider how much your online life depends on access to your email.
True, but I would suppose that depends how intertwined your account is with your life. A couple of new accounts probably wouldn't matter that much. I just more meant that they wouldn't try to sue you, or something.
Due to CGNAT it's likely to have up to hundreds or thousands of unrelated customers sharing an IPv4 address
Perhaps, but if I connect from my IP and then 30sec later to a different account on the same IP, and that happens routinely for the same accounts, one could reasonably assume it was potentially one person using two accounts.
You could circumvent that with a VPN, since those IP ranges are usually known and known to be shared, but probably not with a residential IP address.
Anyway, it's just a guess. I don't know with any certainty how they might sus out somebody breaking the policy. I just believe that if they find people doing that with regularity, the free tier many people enjoy can be revoked, and so it would be a dick move to try to abuse account creation.
Sure, but on my WiFi network with my flat mates there would be like five concurrently logged in email accounts constantly connected and receiving traffic from proton. And then behind CGNAT that might extend to a hundred people concurrently logged in with one IP.
The false positives would drive away so many more paying or future paying customers it wouldn't be worth trying
Only thing I can think of is fingerprinting devices but then that'd be obvious, break their business model and also drive away customers
Addy is nice but sometimes blocked, and a bit expensive.
Free for me. I haven't paid them a cent. Depends what you need out of the service.
For sure, but the lack of feature to reply/send is certainly limiting after a certain point
I'm able to reply just fine. They have a special address that goes to your inbox, and when you reply, it looks like you're replying from that alias and not your main email address.
That was one of the first things I checked on, since replying is sometimes necessary.
You can also send by going into your Aliases and clicking "Send" by one of your aliases. This will open a dialogue that creates the recipient address you need to use in whatever email address is verified with Addy.
ETA: and to be abundantly clear, I'm using the free tier. This is all included in the free option.
Free plan states
as unsupported for the free plan... So I'm quite surprised
Sure but they probably make more than enough money. Email is really cheap to run
Perhaps, but you're just guessing. I don't know their operating costs, and I would suspect that neither do you.
If you know better, please enlighten me.
Again, just relatively common sense.
Postfix etc... isn't that hard to run. I selfhost a mailcow installation, which is considered "full" and "expensive to run" and it's still really fine to run. Not expensive when scaling up to multiple users, the most important is the initial performance cost per instance.
We're mostly paying for salaries and R&D I believe. They're developing other services and stuff, but they could easily charge less and still be profitable, they just wouldn't have this much reserves.
Perhaps they don't realise that by lowering their subscription costs, they could get more users... like me
Sounds like a market opportunity.