socookre
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There are still some rooms of improvements for Protonmail, specifically by grandfathering accounts which is registered before any certain cutoff date (e.g. January 1, 2022, and is not abandoned after account creation) and/or exempting accounts which are formerly paid accounts (again, not abandoned after account creation), by subjecting them to lenient versions of the inactive policy instead, such as the purge of its email data (save for some in Archive folder, subjected to storage quotas which can be increased by fees). Promising users that accounts which had paid subscription at one point will be exempted from the policy, only to backtrack on it, seems like a standard rug pull which Cory Doctorow termed as enshittification.
For inactive accounts, the suspension of the email sending and receiving function might be possible, just like what Yahoo does with its inactive accounts currently. While the receipt function can be restored immediately upon logging in, to prevent abuse by spammers who had stolen the account, there should be time delays before the sending function is restored, with payment of one time fee being an option in order to skip the delay.
The harsh portion of the inactivity policy (account deletion) should only be applied in cases where the account was abandoned after creation or where the owner explicitly chose deletion in the settings in case of inactivity. Furthermore, in the future newly created accounts should be subjected to a probation period where they will only escape account deletion if they are determined to be sufficiently active during the period.
Ultimately, I think Protonmail needs to implement a function to allow users and their next of kin to decide how to do with their accounts once they're deceased, such as the two main choices of suspension/archiving/memorialization and deletion. Those choices can be put in user account settings as buttons.
In fact, the former choice can be one of the great ways to conduct informal census on Proton accounts so that those which should be spared from the harsh portion of the inactivity policy, are identified. Another potential way is to check if the account has enabled additional types of email addresses (such as @pm.me and/or @proton.me for those with main @protonmail.com addresses) during the free periods on or before 2022, predicating on the conditions that those account aren’t abandoned after account creation and had showed any signs of usage activity in any point of time.
A further option can be provided where they can select people to receive their email messages upon death. For users, the best methodology to get their choices honored is to configure the settings themselves and writing a legally-bindable will which would be sent to Proton in the event of user's death. For those without next of kin or even friends, perhaps if the memorialization function is selected, their accounts can be archived after 120 years of inactivity, which is extremely long period which most humans in the current era can’t live beyond that.
Once again, it's also time to use notification panels to deliver announcements and newsletters, instead of them being email messages, because just as in 2022, ironically a significant fraction of the contents in my mailbox are those messages that come from... Protonmail!
While understanding that sustainability is behind the implementation of the policy after all, I want to caution that sudden rug pulls such as the breaking of the promise that formerly paid accounts will be spared from the policy, would alienate users instead and if the latter feel cornered enough, it might one day lead to intrusive regulations by governments out of the belief that social networks and email services constitute essential utilities on the Internet. Unity tried to pull the rug on game developers by unilaterally changing the contract to a way that will excessively burden the developers, and that almost resulted in EU regulatory intervention. In the end governmental regulations done hastily out of emotional circumstances such as public backlashes tend to be half baked than one done in calmer situations, the former which could create cascade effects which can make everything worse. A recent example is KOSA which is criticised as too intrusive against privacy.
I’m sorry that I neglected to take part in the community process to draft a more sensible and humane form of the inactivity policy because I spend lesser time on Reddit these days due to a soft-boycott following the controversial API pricelist changes, as someone who had passionately participated in the discussion about the policy back in 2022.
After all I endorse the calls to make the option of "keeping account while deleting data" to become an overall default method for dealing inactive accounts, although once again some contents in the Archive folder should be spared, subjected to storage quotas which can be increased by fees.