Proton Mail - Privacy policy

Last modified: 15 March 2023

This sub-policy is an integral part of the Proton Privacy Policy. It details the data processing activities specifically related to the creation and activity of your Proton Account when you use Proton Mail.

2.2.1 Account Creation: It is not necessary to provide personal information in order to create an Account, but you may provide an external email address for notification or password recovery purposes. Should you choose to provide it, we do associate this email address with your Account (for password recovery or notification purposes). Such data will only be used to contact you with important notifications about the Services, to send you information related to security, to verify your account or to send you password recovery links if you enable the option. We may also inform you about new Proton products in which you might have an interest. The legal basis for processing is consent and you are free to remove that data in your Account settings panel at any time.

In order to pursue our legitimate interest of preventing the creation of accounts by spam bots or human spammers, we use a variety of human verification methods. Verification may also be requested for some sensitive operations besides account creation in order to protect against brute-force attacks. You may be asked to verify using either hCaptcha (or reCAPTCHA in the event that hCaptcha is unavailable), email, or SMS. IP addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers provided are saved temporarily in order to send you a verification code and for anti-spam purposes. The period of temporary data retention is determined by our legitimate interests of protecting the service from spam, and also by any applicable Swiss legal requirements we must comply with. If this data is saved permanently, it is always saved as a cryptographic hash, which ensures that the raw values cannot be deciphered by us. Learn more

2.2.2 Account Activity: Due to limitations of the SMTP protocol, we have access to the following email metadata: sender and recipient email addresses, the IP address incoming messages originated from, attachment name, message subject, and message sent and received times. We do NOT have access to encrypted message content, but unencrypted messages sent from external providers to your Account, or from Proton Mail to external unencrypted email services, are scanned for spam and viruses to pursue the legitimate interest of protecting the integrity of our Services and users. Such inbound messages are scanned for spam in memory, and then encrypted and written to disk. We do not possess the technical ability to scan the content of the messages after they have been encrypted. We also have access to the following records of Account activity: number of messages sent, amount of storage space used, total number of messages, last login time. User data is never used for advertising purposes.

2.2.3 IP logging: By default, we do not keep permanent IP logs in relation with your Account. However, IP logs may be kept temporarily to combat abuse and fraud, and your IP address may be retained permanently if you are engaged in activities that breach our terms and conditions (e.g. spamming, DDoS attacks against our infrastructure, brute force attacks). The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interest to protect our service against nefarious activities.

If you enable authentication logging for your Account, the record of your login IP addresses is kept for as long as the feature is enabled. This feature is off by default, and all the records are deleted upon deactivation of the feature. The legal basis of this processing is consent, and you are free to opt in or opt out of that processing at any time in the security panel of your Account.

2.2.4 Easy Switch with "Sign In with Google": When you use our Easy Switch tool to import your data from Google and authenticate using the “Sign in with Google” option, Easy Switch's processing of information received from Google APIs will be performed in accordance with Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

2.2.5 Easy Switch with username and password combination: When you use our Easy Switch tool to import your emails from another service provider, the credentials of the email account from which the importation is performed are stored by us for the limited duration of the importation. Once the importation is performed, those credentials are entirely deleted from our systems.

2.2.6 Data storage: All servers used in connection with the provision of the Service are wholly owned and operated by the Company or its subsidiaries. Only employees of the Company have physical or other access to the servers. Data is always stored in encrypted format on our servers, which are located solely in Switzerland and Germany, under the protection of some of the world's strictest privacy laws. Offline backups, which may be stored periodically, are also encrypted. We cannot decrypt any user encrypted content on either the production servers or in the backups. Backups are kept for up to 30 days.