Meet Our New Favourite Email Provider

🙌 Welcome to our very first product review!
Today, we will share why you should ditch Big Tech's most popular email providers and clients: Gmail (Google), Outlook (Microsoft), and Mail (Apple). We will walk you through what we looked for and what we found–an exceptional European alternative that got us so excited, we made the switch immediately... *drumroll*... Proton Mail!
BONUS: we are interviewing Andy Yen, founder and CEO of Proton, at the end of this newsletter. So stay with us until the end!
🕑 6-min read
👀 Big Tech(Bro) is watching you…
"Hello, Is It Me You're Looking For? (It's Gmail)". In 2017, 13 years after launching Gmail, Google announced they would stop scanning your emails for advertising purposes. But here is the catch: Google actually still scans all your emails to power Gmail's "smart" features like sorting messages into various tabs or providing auto-complete suggestions. Under the guise of improving your user experience, Gmail actually never stopped scanning the full content of the emails of 22% of the world’s population (yes, Gmail has 1.8 billion active users).
If Big Tech can scan your emails, so too can the U.S. government (and European governments for that matter). Who knows you better than your therapist? Google, Apple, and Meta. Who comes in as a close second? The U.S. government. In 2024, these three U.S. companies handed over the details of hundreds of thousands of accounts, according to their own Transparency report here, here and here. What makes it even worse?
- As you can see from the reports, the number of requests keeps skyrocketing year after year.
- While requests from the U.S. government are off the charts, Germany, France, and a handful of other European countries are catching up fast.
- Many of these requests can bypass a judge’s authorization and more secretive requests are not even counted in these numbers.
- It is not just about surveillance. In February, Microsoft simply shut down the email account of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court based in The Hague, likely following Donald Trump’s executive order.
So now you know why you should make the switch: it is time for you to find a privacy-focused European alternative to Big Tech’s surveillance-heavy solutions.
🔎 Euromentum’s checklist for finding the best European alternative
Affordability: we want to find alternatives that are as close to being free as possible, so everyone can make the switch from Gmail, Hotmail, or iCloud.
User experience: we want to be able to easily transfer our existing emails, and enjoy the basic email features that we already use everyday.
Privacy: we do not want to sacrifice the confidentiality of our emails in exchange for “smart features” that invasively scan our inbox. (This is the part where we learned a lot about end-to-end encryption in the last weeks 😉).
🌟 Let us introduce you to our favourite European email provider: Proton Mail
First of all, it is an email client that covers nearly all of the must-have features and selling-points we truly like about Gmail. It is free! It has labels, (spam) folders, anti-phishing alerts and ‘1-click unsubscribe’ from newsletters. You can schedule, snooze, and ‘undo send’ your emails. Proton Mail does all of this with a modern and elegant interface.
Then, and that is what truly made us switch: it hands-down beats Gmail, Microsoft, and all the others on the privacy front, since Proton Mail simply refuses to have any sort of knowledge of your emails. Your private communications are completely encrypted: that means that when sending your email, it is turned into a secret code before it leaves your computer. Then, your receiver uses a special key to decode it. Even when your receiver is using another email client, Proton still keeps it encrypted on their own servers.
And the switching experience? Using Proton Mail’s ‘Easy Switch’ feature, in just a few minutes, we migrated years of our Gmail and Hotmail emails to our new Proton email accounts. Our old emails were even automatically organized into folders with the same old labels.
Finally, for those of you who like ‘advanced’ features, Proton Mail also has paid plans that offer a lot of the features you may know from Google Workspace: more storage, multiple email addresses and aliases per account, custom domains, as well as their fuller suite which include a calendar, password manager, drive, and VPN. (That is a lot for Euromentum to review but we want to go into the weekend too 😉).
BONUS: Check out our interview with Andy Yen, founder and CEO of Proton
Earlier this week, we had the chance to submit some questions (and yours too, we hope) to him. Spoiler: he did not hold back 🔥
Euromentum: What made you decide to build an alternative to Gmail in Europe?
Andy: Proton was created by scientists who met at CERN, so the first version of Proton Mail was actually written in Switzerland. We stayed because of Swiss neutrality and strong privacy laws. Proton's core mission is privacy, freedom, and democracy, and Europe has long been leading when it comes to these values. While the Americans exported surveillance capitalism around the world, I believe there's an opportunity for Europe to in turn export our values of security and privacy, this is Europe's only enduring competitive advantage.
Euromentum: Where are you seeing the most signups recently and what is driving them?
Andy: To be honest, we see strong growth from all continents. Of course, many people today are concerned about Big Tech companies being completely subservient to the current US government, that's actually always been the case, even if people did not realize it before. This may be a factor driving growth, but I think our success is not predominantly because we're European, but because we offer services that are more aligned with what users actually want. It's the choice between surveillance versus privacy, exploitation versus freedom.
Euromentum: What is the next Proton mail feature that will convince more people to make the switch?
I can't reveal our roadmap at this time, but because of differences in business model (protecting user privacy versus exploiting user data), we can bring features that Gmail can never bring, because it runs counter to Google's exploitative business model. This goes beyond just end-to-end encryption, and in the coming months, we do have a couple features coming that show what is possible with email if you put people instead of advertisers first.
Euromentum: How does being based in Switzerland help you build a better product for users?
As I mentioned, I think it's more about technology and business model than location. For instance, Proton Mail uses end-to-end encryption and zero-access encryption to ensure that we cannot decrypt your mailbox. This ensures that no third-party can ever read your messages, not even us. Encryption depends on the laws of mathematics, and not the laws of Switzerland. Finally, Proton's main shareholder is the non-profit Proton Foundation, which means that when we build products, we can put people ahead of profits, and this ultimately leads to a better product and better user experience. Millions of people have switched to Proton Mail and never looked back because it is simply better.
Euromentum: Is activism and lobbying core to Proton’s mission? What does that look like in Europe?
The Proton Foundation is indeed active in advocacy and public policy and we view it as an essential part of our mission. We believe that technological sovereignty, security, and democracy are actually the same issue, and we believe that the time has come for Europe to declare its technological independence and stop being merely a Chinese or American colony. For these reasons, we are strongly in support of the EuroStack industry initiative which unites over 200 of Europe's leading tech companies behind the principles of Buy European, Sell European, and Fund European.
🤝 And that is a wrap
We really enjoyed our journey of switching to Proton. If you switched too, we would love to feature some testimonials in our next update, with your permission.
If you have not made the switch, what is missing? Or, what would make you take the leap? Have you found any other alternative? We would love to hear from you!
See you soon,