trying out the proton ecosystem
I've been using Proton Mail on BearBlog for a few months now to chat with other bloggers and reach out to people about online projects, but don't really get a chance to use the service's perks on that account, as that inbox doesn't get a lot of traffic compared to my Gmail. Today, I decided to download the entire Proton ecosystem onto my iPhone (excluding Drive for now) and import my entire life (Gmail, Google Calendar, etc.) onto it. You might be wondering why I waited until today to finally bite the bullet, and my reasoning is because I'm not super hyped about the idea of my Google Calendar being used for AI training. Also not super hyped about Google have as much information as they do about me in general.
I'll get into how easy it was to switch each service over into its Proton equivalent:
Proton Mail
This service was pretty simple. All I had to do was make a new email account (since I didn't want to mix my blog email and personal email) and log onto Proton Mail on my computer, then import all of my Gmail data from the last 3 months into the service. They added some customizable labels automatically, but I changed them and configured some settings so the app was more to my liking. I enjoyed the ability to change the swipe settings and make color-coded labels that appear under each message. After I got forwarding set up and imported all my data, I went through unsubscribing from promotional accounts that usually got filtered into Gmail's "Promotion" folder and were out of view. In Proton, though, they're all in the inbox from the get-go unless you sort them yourself and label incoming emails as such, but that wasn't an issue for me as I was wanting to declutter my inbox anyway.
Proton Calendar
This service was similar to the first with the ease of import, but I ran into some cosmetic issues I had to find workarounds for since I'm using the free version for now. For example, you can't change event colors, so instead of having a different color for each category of event, I had to make separate calendars with their own colors for each category (Work, School, Life) and just deal with only getting three colors. You can't change the calendar an event is in once you've created it (there's a button on the app to do so, but it doesn't work yet and gives you a "coming soon" message), so I had to delete all my Life and Work events and rewrite them in the correct categories. Thankfully, I didn't have to do a lot of that since most of those events are recurring, but I could imagine how tiresome that would be for someone with a busier schedule. Also, it's worth noting that the free version gives you a 3 calendar limit, so it's a workaround so long as your life is separable into 3 categories. Also, I wish they had a widget for iOS that was in the month-view, but it didn't really bother me. I've read some posts on here about people struggling to use the service when it comes to sharing links, exporting data, and a few other things, but since my calendar is just a glorified to-do list, I didn't experience any of those issues.
Proton VPN
This application was the easiest of them all to set up since I already have an email with them, so all I had to do was download it, sign in, and allow VPN configurations. Did some digging around in the settings and toggled some preferences, but that's it. I use another (paid) VPN for my computer and other devices since Proton's VPN only extends to one device on the free version. Connection has been pretty fast and I haven't noticed any glaring issues yet. I like the widget for this app.
Like I said, I'm using the free version for now until I'm sure I enjoy the service, but it's been pretty smooth sailing so far. Let me know if you've tried switching over your personal accounts before and how it went!