Ask HN: Are Protonmail.com Addresses Snubbed?

I wanted to use Proton Mail and was very excited and made a fresh new account. Sent a test email to my old gmail and it went to spam immediately. That told me how feasible this was to use as my primary email.

Google has a stranglehold on what it considers "valid" and I don't know how we use other providers as long as they have it.

> I presumed that Proton Mail would be less maligned than most. Is this an incorrect assumption?

Proton Mail seems to be less blackballed than most. But still has massive deliverability issues. If you want reliable delivery, you really have to stick with Microsoft, Google, AWS SES, or mayyyyybe FastMail.

I hate this situation.

I see Proton Mail addresses and think the owner is paranoid, hiding something or odd in some way. Similarly, if I see aol or yahoo addresses I think old or not tech savvy. It is not necessarily fair, but they are my first instincts and I am sure it is true of others.

have you tried the protonmail provided @pm.me extension? This has worked for me for getting past spam filters. the @protonmail.com extension almost always gets forwarded to spam. if you dig around in the settings of your email, you should find this option under Account Settings -> Addresses -> Default. i can't recall, but it may be part of the paid version of protonmail.

In some ways, yes. I have a custom domain that is an alias to protonmail and was having trouble when I first started trying to do foster care licensing. Once I finally started getting through and asked agencies what the heck the deal was, it turned out my emails were automatically going to the spam folder or not even being delivered, provided their own providers were Microsoft or Google, which was true of just about all of them. This is true even though I have valid DKIM, registered the domain under a real name, and am the only user and have not been sending spam anywhere. I guess it's a guilty until proven innocent world out there.

Also I was getting what I thought was an annoying bug trying to register for a video streaming subscription for months under an actual protonmail address I use only for that purpose so the spam it gets doesn't flood regular email. It was just silently never getting to the payment page and reloading the page to enter an email without any kind of error or failure message. Each time, I figured screw it, probably broken, I'll try again next month. I finally just tried a gmail address instead and it worked fine.

I recently concluded a successful job hunt with a protonmail address. I used `@pm.me` alias, which I guess didn't ring any alarm bells.

A big way to check if an email address is valid & belongs to a user is to see if it pops up in leaks. It also ages an address.

The more leaks the better. So ymmv when you create a new account.

FWIW I've been using protonmail for 3 years and never had any issues with email deliveries.

Protonmail addresses are great for signing up to accounts for because the mailbox is encrypted, but not great for actually sending mail to peers because of the spam filtering that google sometimes does.

I wish it weren't so, because its a great service and is so much faster than gmail in my experience, but that's where we're at.

I don’t have canonical data to fall back on, but I suspect that DKIM and DMARC being set up are key to successful mail delivery these days, if you’re not using one of the biggest players like Gmail. I use Rackspace Mail for my personal domain (not the hosted Exchange variety) and with these two configured I’ve had no issues with mail delivery. But many mail hosting providers still don’t support DKIM: which is one reason I’m still relying on Rackspace despite all their broader woes.

Have you previously interacted w these folks?

A user might mark you as spam in their client if they perceive you as engaging in unwanted marketing especially if they’re unclear where you got their email.

And proton was one of two preferred clients the hurtcore folks liked back when I was learning about OSINT + favored by a few other really rude sets of people so it’s absolutely possible especially if you have one of the newer non dot ch addresses.

Do you have a trusted friend you can try emailing to test?

What exactly are you emailing about?

I have found a lot of commercial websites do not allow proton mail now, likely to prevent abuse. It makes me sad, but I get it.

I am not sure why you would use a proton mail address for job applications, it’s like making a website with a weird TLD instead of a .com - no real positive benefit besides maybe saving money, highly likely to be viewed with suspicion.

No matter what email provider you use, you should use a domain you own so that you can switch with minimal hassle.

Beware of going too far out there with new TLDs. I use something like manager@clinch.estate for house stuff and it's nearly impossible to explain over the phone or even in person. "Clinchestate at gmail?" A friend has the same problem with first@last.email.

No issue here. Gmail seems to have an issue with spam lately.

I’ve never had any issues with the @pm.me extension and I’ve been using it ever since it came out. Maybe try that instead ?

I'm going to toss out there, we see a lot of our fraudulent orders being placed with proton mail accounts.