Excellent privacy, but Drive and Mail reliability need improvement
Certo — ecco la versione con **Proton Drive prima** e **Proton Mail alla fine**.
I chose Proton Unlimited mainly because Proton is one of the very few providers whose technical architecture appears to genuinely implement the level of security and privacy it publicly claims to provide. From that point of view, I still consider Proton one of the strongest services available.
Unfortunately, my experience with Proton Drive and Proton Mail has not been equally positive in terms of reliability and synchronization.
Proton Drive was the most concerning part for me.
Normal synchronization was reasonably fast, but making files available offline could become extremely slow, sometimes around one file every 30 seconds for ordinary photos and documents.
I also observed situations where the application reported that synchronization was complete while files still appeared to be waiting for upload or download. In some cases, newly created files did not appear online as expected.
This is particularly problematic because a synchronization application should give the user a reliable indication of whether all data has actually been uploaded and synchronized. If the application reports that everything is synchronized while some files are still pending, it becomes difficult to trust the displayed status without manually checking the remote storage.
I understand that end-to-end encryption requires additional processing, and I appreciate Proton's security model. However, my archive contains thousands of files, so performance and, above all, reliability at scale are essential.
I need to be able to trust the synchronization state without continuously checking whether every file has actually been transferred correctly.
I eventually decided to cancel Proton Unlimited and migrate my files back to Dropbox. I am now restoring recent backups and comparing folders to make sure nothing has been lost or missed during synchronization. This is a substantial amount of additional work, and I am obviously not happy about having to do it.
Another disappointing aspect is Proton's refund policy. Once the standard refund period has expired, cancelling or discontinuing a Proton Unlimited subscription does not automatically result in a refund for the unused portion of the plan, even when the decision to stop using the service is related to technical or reliability issues.
In my case, I asked Proton to reconsider the refund because of the problems described above, but I was initially informed that I was not eligible under the standard refund policy.
I also encountered several issues with Proton Mail.
The folder hierarchy is too limited for my needs, especially when migrating and managing a large existing mailbox.
I experienced inconsistencies between the mailbox structure shown on mobile, on the web interface, and in Thunderbird through Proton Mail Bridge.
During migration from my old Gmail account, several messages ended up in a recovery folder and generated errors.
After resetting Proton Mail Bridge, some messages disappeared from the local folder structure, leaving me uncertain whether they were lost, still present on Proton’s servers, inaccessible from the client, or only available in the original Gmail account.
Proton Mail Bridge synchronization was also quite slow.
My mailbox contains thousands of emails accumulated over many years, so preserving the structure and being able to verify that everything has been migrated correctly is very important to me.
This is a real pity because Proton’s privacy and security model is one of the best reasons to choose the service. In my experience, however, Proton Drive synchronization, the desktop applications, and Proton Mail Bridge are not yet at the same level as the underlying security architecture.
I hope Proton continues improving these areas, because if reliability and synchronization become as strong as the privacy model, the suite could be outstanding.