A lot of push against Proton on here lately. Makes me suspicious.
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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Valid criticism is suspicious?
OP said they are blocking tor users. I say the error message might just be legit and someone is spamming username existence checks through Tor.
Not saying it's some sort of conspiracy theory, but it do be kinda sus. People are just quick to hate Proton over anything. It's like bias confirmation. They seem to be justifying their hatred, or looking for reasons to do so. I mean, "leaving Switzerland"? Really?! I thought that was because Switzerland was considering a privacy-unfriendly law. That's bad, now?
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Is it that maybe someone on your exit node is trying to enumerate valid accounts?
I have tried a new circuite before publish this post - without success. but considering that I use their onion adress they could nit see my tor exit node as far as I now, anyway.
Good point, but also who is enumerating the accounts may have been using many circuits.
Yeah, I've had to go through 20 or 30 circuits once to make Google's captcha allow me through. It just failed with the message "Unusual traffic from your computer network". Someone was probably running a botnet, as this only happens rarely. If Google wanted to block Tor, they'd have done so by now anyway.
He used the onion address, which doesn't go through an exit node like regular darknet-to-clearnet traffic.
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Have you actually asked proton support about this issue, if so what have they said?
It seems like you got frustrated and instead of trying to get help you decided to complain on lemmy.
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What makes you think this has anything to do with Tor?
I previously commented I would write the support, now I actually read the docs first and found out why:
If you want to create an account over tor you can, just not via the clearnet URL, probably due to rate limiting by IP adress. However if you use their Onion Link as specified in this article by their support (https://proton.me/support/tor-setup) it works just fine (as far as I just tested). So great! Because using .onion services is far more secure than accessing clearnet over Tor anyway.
Here the url, verify it with the link in the support article tho: https://protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleegetolb73fuirgj7r4o4vfu7ozyd.onion/
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Just tested it, same here. Clearnet works but tor not. I will contact support since part of the reason I like to pay for unlimited is to subsidize free, anonymous accounts.
Edit: here is my other comment:
I previously commented I would write the support, now I actually read the docs first and found out why:
If you want to create an account over tor you can, just not via the clearnet URL, probably due to rate limiting by IP adress. However if you use their Onion Link as specified in this article by their support (https://proton.me/support/tor-setup) it works just fine (as far as I just tested). So great! Because using .onion services is far more secure than accessing clearnet over Tor anyway.
Here the url, verify it with the link in the support article tho: https://protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleegetolb73fuirgj7r4o4vfu7ozyd.onion/
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Does anybody know valid alternatives to proton mail, I think they have been enshitified
Tuta ? But only for mail AFAIK.
There is a relatively small number of shared Tor exit node IP addresses.
So it’s more likely using Tor will trigger “too many attempts for IP” throttling for any service with bot protection.
It’s nothing against Tor, but is an expected side-affect of attempting to be anonymous by sharing the same IP address with many people.
Mailbox.org (option if you want custom domain) or Posteo.de
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A while back I tried to create an account with vpn and got notice that said something about how I couldn’t use it to validate other accounts without validating that account because other companies had threatened to label them as untrustworthy or spam.
Proton always felt like a scam to me. Their claims on privacy and security are questionable at best.
My issue exactly. Their marketing isn't careful, which I would expect from a security focused business.
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Their software is open source and you can verify it yourself.
You can't verify that they actually run that on their servers.
So, they operate a repo of open source code as a cover for their internal repo of completely different code?
I'm not saying they do that. But you have to trust them that they don't do it. You can never proof it.
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I got that same error when I was setting up my account.
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