Most free email providers give you a free service by invading your privacy — tracking your every move online to sell your personal data to advertisers. You pay for the “free” service with the intimate details of your life.
We explain how to create a genuinely free email account with Proton Mail, the world’s most popular encrypted email service that puts your privacy first.
The best free email with no ads, no tracking
At Proton, our vision is to provide privacy and security for everyone, everywhere. Our business is to protect your privacy, not violate it. That’s why we offer Proton Mail free.
We do not spy on you, target you with ads, or sell your data to anyone. All our funding comes from paying members of the Proton community.
With Proton Mail, your messages and other data are protected by end-to-end and zero-access encryption, so no one but you can read them — not even Proton. With Proton Mail, you can:
- Control access to your data
- Easily import your mail and contacts from Gmail and other providers in a few clicks
- Access your inbox anywhere on any device
- Protect your information with Swiss privacy laws
- Verify our open source and transparent apps
Get a free Proton Mail account and you’ll also get free access to all Proton’s privacy-by-default services: Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, and Proton VPN(new window).
Sign up for a free email account with Proton Mail
Signing up for Proton Mail is easy and only takes a few minutes. You can usually sign up anonymously without giving an email address or phone number, although we may require human verification in some cases.
To sign up for Proton Mail, you must create a Proton Account. You can then use that username and password to log in to all Proton services.
To sign up for a Proton Account:
1. Go to the Proton Account signup page in a web browser on your computer.
2. In the Username box, enter the username you want to use for your free email address.
3. Choose which domain you would like to use for your address: @proton.me or @protonmail.com (@proton.me is selected by default).
4. In the Password box, enter a password at least eight characters long and type the password in again to confirm.
5. Click Create account.
6. Choose Continue with Free to create your free email account (or Mail Plus if you would like to get extra features and support our mission).
7. If you’re asked to confirm you’re human, tick the I am human box and follow the instructions. Or you can choose Email or SMS to verify you’re human that way.
(Note that if you enter your email or mobile phone number, we only save a cryptographic hash of this personal data. It’s impossible to derive your phone number or email from that hash, and it’s not permanently associated with the account that you create.)
8. Enter an optional display name. This is what people will see when you send them an email. Click Next.
9. Enter an optional email address or phone number that you can use to recover your account if you ever forget or lose your password.
10. Click Save selected or Maybe later, and you’re done!
Choose Proton Mail to go straight to your new secure email account. Or try the other privacy-by-default products that you also get free with your new Proton Account: Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, and Proton VPN.
Get started with your free encrypted email
When you first sign in to Proton Mail, you’ll see our Welcome message.
Click Next to customize the look of your Proton Mail.
Click Next to start using Proton Mail and Proton’s other privacy-by-default services.
Learn more about getting started with Proton Mail
Learn more about how Proton’s privacy services work together
