I was offered shortened @pm.me email option.

I have to refuse it.

First reason is, it does not look trustworthy.
Given that I was offered it only after paying for it by default, means only limited amount of people were ever exposed to it, so it does have limited to none brand recognition. If I were to use it, many people would by default think I am trying to scam them. Same goes for "pm" part as well as ".me" part, it sounds cute, until you try to get into shoes of the receiver that is trying to decide if what he is getting is a scam and .me does not sound legitimate. One of my business friends mentioned to me that she had to make herself @gmail.com acc simply because if she doesn't contact some of her clients with gmail.com, they will assume it is a scam and will not reply to her offers. Now shorten already low recognition brand of @protonmail.com into @pm.me and congratulations, people will even more likely ignore you or flag you as a scam. To have to pay for the opportunity to be ignored is just strange.

Second reason is, how you spell that.
So what I do right now when I am communicating my email looks like this:
- ...@protonmail.com (people just know how to write .com and mail)
- what, protonmail.com? How do you spell that?
- I know, not well known, they are about privacy, proton, like in atom, mail, protonmail, together, dot, com.
- protonmail.com?
- Yes, that is correct.
Now how my new conversation would look like:
- ...@pm.me
- Mmm, pi em dot me e or p m dot m e?
- p m dot m e.
- dot m e.
- Yes.
- Ok.
While before it was "you are not well known", it would turn into "how do you spell that?". Ok for me, I just know, not so great for other people. And what you spell means nothing. It could be at least pmail, like gmail or proton.com (I would prefer that), because that would make sense and everyone would just get it, pm is just why google never went @gm.com route, it sounds like a dm (direct message) joke. Even funnier one would be @p.me, now try to say that out loud.

So, I would prefer if I get to shorten email, original one is quite long, probably why there is no @googlemail.com, but it should sound more legitimate and end on one of the: .com, .org or country ending (in my case .si, Germany would have .de, Poland .pl and so on), because those endings sound more legit and people already know how to write them, they are well known. It would ease in-person communication and lower the possibility to be flagged as a scam.