Human verification

When you create a Proton Account, you might be asked to complete a CAPTCHA challenge or verify a phone number or email address. This is just to help prevent bots and spam — we don’t store your data.

• Verification options
• Troubleshooting
• Why can I only see email or SMS verification options?
• Why Proton uses human verification(nytt fönster)

Verification options

CAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA is a short online test that confirms you’re not a bot. We don’t save CAPTCHA data.

Email or SMS

We’ll send a verification code to your phone number or secondary email address.

We don’t store your email address or phone number, only a cryptographic hash.

This means we can detect if an email or phone number is being reused repeatedly, without seeing or storing your actual details.

Troubleshooting

If you can’t get past CAPTCHA, try email or SMS verification instead. If that doesn’t work, or if no verification options appear, contact our support team.

If you’re having another issue creating your Proton Account, check out our signup troubleshooting guide.

Why can I only see email or phone verification options?

Several factors determine which verification methods are available. You’re more likely to see only email or SMS verification if you:

• Try to create multiple accounts
• Use the Tor browser(nytt fönster)

Why Proton uses human verification

To protect our email reputation and prevent misuse.

If spammers have easy access to Proton Mail addresses and use us to send emails, other email providers could start blocking messages from our IP addresses. This would make it harder for Proton Mail users to send and receive emails.

All Proton Accounts include access to Proton Mail. So even if you’re creating an account to use Proton Drive, Proton Pass, Proton VPN(nytt fönster), or another Proton service, you might still be asked to prove you’re human.