A representative of the company on reddit cleared things up by saying that your alias is reserved to your account. The company's blog post was not clear about this, and drew flak from users for the possible risks. Let's say your email ID is If you don't activate the free address now, could someone else could sign up for ? If a person were to email you, would they not assume that both accounts belong to you? Could result in misuse of your ID, aka identity theft, impersonation or mistaken identity? The company has made it clear that will become a paid service after April 30th. Activating the free address for your current Protonmail username will not count against your quota.Ĭan other users claim a address with your username? You can manage your addresses, setting the default one to be used, from the same page, using the section at the bottom. That's it, you have claimed your free address that you can use to send and receive mails. You should see an section at the top of this page.Ĥ. You can continue using your regular address normally after activating the ID.ģ. Users who don't activate the free address before the said date, will need to pay for a premium ProtonMail account to get the ID. The only catch here is that you need to activate the ID before April 30th, and you will be able to use it forever. Protonmail announced the news about a week ago, but the option to claim the free address didn't go live until today.

A premium subscription removes this limitation.

So, in theory, you could have 2 accounts per service, which can be handy for signing up for some subscriptions, trials, etc.ĭid you know: Protonmail offers an even shorter domain with addresses, free users can use it to receive emails, but any mails that you send from your account will use your regular address. There is one more advantage, while Proton can recognize that the two IDs are linked to the same account, other websites cannot detect that and belong to the same person. So, having a shorter email domain could help in such cases. If you have an unusually long email address, and use it as the username, there is the possibility that you may not be able to sign up for the site. Also, some websites may have character limits for the username.

Why is this important? Simply put, a shorter name is easier to type.

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