'If you are or have been a paid Proton subscriber at any point in time, your account will permanently be considered active. This is the most important information on the support page, Or, you could use the VPN app too, since activity across services is also counted. All you need to do to protect your account, is to log into it from your web browser or the mobile app, once a year. ProtonMail has published a support page on its website that explains more about the inactive account policy.

ProtonMail announces a way to prevent inactive accounts from being deactivated

These can be crucial data that may not be recovered once the account is deactivated. Users may not remember it, but it is possible they may have some receipts, tax invoices, photos, or important documents stored in their email account. If a user hasn't accessed their account for over a year, isn't that an irrelevant account? Does it matter if it gets deleted? Yes, it does. Does it matter if a dormant account gets deleted? A three-month limit would have drawn a lot of complaints from users, I think they made the right call by sidestepping that land mine. Proton AG originally planned to deactivate accounts that were inactive for three months, but says it extended the grace period to 1 year, after listening to feedback from users. We mustn't forget Proton AG makes money from its premium services, so this move could theoretically be purely be executed from a business' perspective. I think it is also possible that more people could be signing up for using the free VPN service that the company provides. Maybe ProtonMail is picking up more free users than they expected, which in turn costs server storage. To users, it may seem like a pointless move. Note: ProtonMail's original article has been edited, and the warning about the inactive accounts has been silently removed.

This news caused a bit of commotion amongst users, and even a couple of comments on my previous article raised concerns about the rule.

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