Both auto-forwarding and auto-reply are paid features, which makes cancelling & switching much more difficult. Gmail is a breeze comparatively. I highly recommend against using their addresses (e.g. protonmail.com, proton.me, pm.me)
Email forwarding is available for everyone with a paid Proton Mail plan.
(source)
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How do you expect anything to be completely free?
No, Proton email addresses do not. I have ProtonMail addresses using my domain. If tomorrow I point to another email provider, Proton can do nothing about it.
Being paid feature vs free is not vendor lock-in.
You are spreading misinformation, either by misrepresenting the situation or by not understanding what “vendor” (an arguable term since apparently you are focusing on the free version) is lock-in means.
I mostly use my custom domain on protonmail for reasons like this.
Thank you for raising this point.
Are there even other privacy-respecting email providers that are fit for the job? I’m genuinely curious.
EDIT: I absolute hate doing this, but I want to understand: Why is this getting downvoted?
Mailbox.org is a good pick to consider IMO. You can read some comparisons on PrivacyGuides, which I also recommend as a starting point for these sorts of topics. The mailbox.org web UI is not great, but it allows IMAP/SMTP access, so I use Thunderbird on both desktop and Android in order to interact with my inbox. My inbox is auto-encrypted with PGP using their Mailbox Guard thing, so my emails are all encrypted garbage on the web UI anyway. Mailbox.org only allows paid-for accounts, but considering the annoying stuff that Proton and Tuta do to their free accounts I’d rather just be honest about the service I’m getting. It allows auto-forwarding directly in the web UI, but given that you can hook up to it with IMAP anyway, it’s not like you couldn’t just do it yourself.
(Also, as another comment said I also recommend DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection for email aliasing if you need it.)
I have mailbox.org for a side project and although it works well, I don’t really like the experience since several parts of the site default to German instead of my own language.
if you’re not actually promoting gmail, you ought to make that explicitly clear.
by pointing out something bad about proton and praising gmail’s version of that, it looks like you’re doing nothing other than recommending gmail in a privacy community.
everyone already knows gmail has high usability and convenience and zero (financial) cost. using it as an example in this community is redundant and ineffective. better to use another e2ee email service as an example.
All email services have vendor lock-in unless your using your own domain.
For what it is worth, I just moved my mail from my ISP to my own domain at a hosting service after 30 years. Took about 5 months to get everything changed but if I can do it anyone can.
Downside, using your own domain is probably less private but kind of depends.