Tech Friday: Web email and deleting ProtonMail how-to tip
Posted By RichC on August 18, 2023
Proton Mail offers a free email service with limitations … as expected. There is a paid version which over time I’ve contemplated switching to for both the enhanced privacy and ability to use my old original business email domain: whatevername@cppnet.com. The monthly (yearly) subscription price is reasonable, 
but since I already run several Linux servers with email, I use RoundCube Webmail 1.4.12 as my preferred open-source software. I’ve been reluctant to update anything at this point.
That said, my primary “business” email with a usa.net domain preceded hosting servers, or even Google’s gmail or Microsoft’s live.com for that matter and was initially offered to American Express small business clients as a perk of using them with a POS credit card reader. 
That perk disappeared decades ago, but I’ve continued to use the non-transferrable email address as my primary.
As I inch towards retirement and my Consolidated Printing and Publishing Co.business grinds to a close, a two step approach in switching my usa.net address to a cppnet.com address in my control makes sense. I could probably do everything on one of my servers, but like the idea of using Proton for the encrypted emails, iPhone and iPad apps and for overall security.
I’ve been using ProtonMail for a couple of years now and besides being a “different” web interface, it has been pretty good. It is less expensive and offers far more storage and security (encryption) that does my current email … AND permits alias email addresses AND my custom email domain. That last point is something I’m looking for when handling business communications.
As for the elephant in the room, Gmail … I’m not fond of their business practices, politics or even their scanning emails and marketing … but will probably keep using it as a personal email address. It is already helpful to be able to separate business and personal.
That leads me to a tip (or tidbit) that is not published that I know off and I didn’t see it in online forums. BUT … eventually trash builds up in the Proton mailbox and the only way to delete it using the web interface is 50 messages at a time (someone DID write a script to automate). The point being is there isn’t an “empty trash” button at least with the free web interface version … as there is with Gmail. Since I’ve used an alias address to collect a variety of feed emails, it does fill up the free mailbox. What I did noticed was the ProtonMail iPad app (assume iPhone app too?) has an “empty trash” button (below) and it saved me a lot of time and clicking when trashing the pile of miscellaneous email in the trash.
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