The guerilla war being fought by Proton Mail against Gmail has entered a new phase.
Proton Mail has launched a feature to help consumers transition away from Gmail,
and it is using some nasty rhetoric to make its case.
“Unlike Gmail, Proton doesn’t scan your emails, serve you ads, use your data for AI training, or build
profiles on your correspondence,” the Switzerland-based firm says in a blog post. “Your inbox is yours, not a data source.”
We’ve heard all this
before. But we wonder about the new service: Is this a one-stop solution for consumers or a staged process?
Proton Mail concedes that breaking up with Gmail overnight “might not seem so
easy, because it means informing all of your contacts and updating your email across possibly dozens of other services.”
So here’s the idea: “To make
switching from Gmail easier, you can now send emails from your Gmail address directly inside Proton Mail,” the company advises consumers.
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It continues, “This new feature
allows you to check your Gmail inbox directly from Proton Mail, meaning you don’t need to go back to the Gmail app, which brings about several privacy benefits.”
Users can also
import their latest Gmail messages into Proton Mail and send emails from their Gmail address from within Proton Mail.
Of course, Proton Mail also has a tool for importing emails from
Outlook, Yahoo and Apple Mail.
Rest assured this doesn’t do anything for marketers.
“Proton strips trackers, ads and spam from your emails, giving you greater privacy
compared to Gmail, which is basically adware. The Gmail app gathers an immense amount of data about you, and by Google’s own admission(new window), uses your approximate location to
show you more relevant ads, all of which is prevented by switching to the Proton Mail app.”
Most people probably don’t even want to be cut off from all forms of marketing, although
some set up separate email accounts to use when ordering or shopping.
Of course, there is a large group that really is fed up with marketing email and worried about
privacy So they might be interested in a service like this. Get ready to scrape them from your list, assuming they are on there.