Pricing and Pricing Tiers
PreVeil’s pricing system is as simple as can be—it’s free. Period.
You can use ProtonMail for free, too, but a free Proton Mail account lacks some features and limits others. For example, you can only send 150 messages per day and only manage a single email account. When you pay $47.88 per year for a Proton Mail Plus account, the limit on messages per day vanishes, but there’s still a cap on the number of email addresses you can use.
There’s one more option, Proton Mail Ultimate, which costs $119.88 per year and includes the full pantheon of Proton’s products. This one makes sense if you want your email encryption served up along with fully functional instances of Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, Proton VPN, and the Proton Pass password manager.
Ultimately, everything’s better when it’s free, so PreVeil wins.
Winner: PreVeil
Do I Need a New Email Address?
I’ve had the same personal email address for more than 20 years, and I’ve grown fond of it. I could sign up for PreVeil and keep that address. But if I wanted to rely on Proton Mail to safeguard my email secrets, I would have to pick a new address and share it with all my contacts.
On the flip side, my 20-year-old email address has accumulated quite a collection of spam. It’s been revealed in dozens of data breaches and captured by who knows how many data brokers. If you want to level up your security game by using email encryption, you might prefer switching to a pristine new address, too.
Here’s the thing. You can do the same thing with PreVeil. Just set up a new, clean email address before you start using PreVeil. But you simply can’t use Proton Mail with your existing address, except in one rare case. If you own your own domain, and if you host your email on that domain, and if you're up for such domain-management tasks as changing MX records and reconfiguring settings for DNS, DKIM, DMARC, and SPF, then you can use your own email.
PreVeil wins on flexibility.
Winner: PreVeil
Authentication and Security Options
It doesn’t matter how thoroughly your email is encrypted if an evildoer gains access to your encrypted inbox. Proton Mail offers multiple levels of protection, starting with using a strong password and an optional account recovery email. On top of that basic password protection, you can optionally configure it for multi-factor authentication (MFA) using Google Authenticator or a compatible authenticator app. You can advance to expert-tier authentication by configuring Proton Mail to require a hardware security key.
(Credit: Proton/PCMag)PreVeil doesn’t use passwords at all, presuming that the security of your email account is sufficient. Yes, an attacker would need access to both your email account and a trusted device, which fits the definition of MFA, barely. But you can only use an authenticator app or hardware key to authenticate your email account, not PreVeil itself. When it comes to actively protecting access to your encrypted email system, Proton Mail takes the prize.
Winner: Proton Mail
Cloud Storage and File Sharing
If you want to share a file or picture securely with someone, you can add it as an attachment to an encrypted email message. That’s a workable solution, but it’s not always the most convenient. Proton Mail and PreVeil both go beyond simple attachments by allowing you to store files in the cloud and share them securely.
Your PreVeil account comes with 5GB of encrypted cloud storage that’s easily accessible from Windows Explorer. You also get the option to securely share folders (but not individual files) and to set each recipient’s permission level, from full Edit & Share permission down to View Only, which merely lets the recipient peek at the file’s content in a browser window.
(Credit: PreVeil/PCMag)Proton Mail users at all pricing tiers get access to the separate Proton Drive app for cloud backup. Non-paying customers get a tenth of what PreVeil offers, just 500MB. However, at the commercial Plus level that storage rises to 15GB, and if you go all out with Proton Mail Ultimate, you can store 500GB of files. If you’re keeping score, those storage figures are three times and 100 times what PreVeil gives you.
Proton Drive lets you share files directly with other Proton users and control their level of access in much the same way you do with PreVeil. You can also create a public link, optionally setting a password and an expiry date. PreVeil’s similar links only work for someone with whom you’ve already shared the folder.
It’s true that PreVeil offers more storage than Proton Mail’s free tier, but there’s no easy path if you want more from PreVeil. And Proton Mail’s full backup app has more flexibility. This one goes to Proton Mail.
Winner: Proton Mail
Email Client Integration
Even if you’ve grudgingly switched to a new email address, you can at least keep the email client that you’ve used for years, right? Well, not necessarily. To get your Proton Mail messages into Apple Mail, Outlook, or Thunderbird, you must install a separate “bridge” app and go through a configuration routine that can get complicated. It doesn’t work with the latest Outlook because it requires access to IMAP and SMTP. And you don’t get full access to encryption features in your old familiar email app.
(Credit: PreVeil/PCMag)With PreVeil, integration can be as simple as installing a plug-in for Gmail or Outlook. The plug-in adds a few handy controls, like an encryption on/off switch for the messages you compose, and clearly separates encrypted messages from those you’ve sent without encryption.
Winner: PreVeil
Temporary Email Addresses
I mentioned earlier that being forced to spin up a new email address can be a blessing in disguise, as doing so frees you from any spam and baggage associated with the old address. But if you use a temporary email address service, you can avoid accumulating those problems in the first place. Using such a service lets you communicate with online merchants and other possibly shady connections without ever revealing your actual email address. You see and respond to the messages in your normal inbox, but they see only an email alias. And if one of your connections sells you out to a spam cartel, you just delete the corresponding alias.
Sounds convenient, right? The Proton team agrees. At the Unlimited subscription level, you get full access to SimpleLogin, a four-star temporary email service. Yes, that’s the most expensive level, but PreVeil doesn’t offer email aliases at any level. (Don’t feel too left out if you’re using PreVeil or haven’t opted for the expensive Proton Mail Unlimited. You can supplement your email encryption for free with email aliases from ManyMe or Bulc Club.)
Winner: Proton Mail
Advanced Security Features
After going to the trouble of switching to encrypted email, you’d feel pretty dumb if you lost your login and couldn’t get access to your important messages. Proton Mail encourages you to save a recovery key in the form of a lengthy code and a QR code, but that recovery key itself now becomes a weakness. Someone who acquires your code owns your account.
PreVeil offers a similar recovery code system, but encourages you to use its Recovery Group system instead. This is a high-tech solution more commonly seen in Enterprise-level security. With PreVeil, your recovery key resides with multiple friends, and the recovery process requires participation by several of them. For example, you might enlist six friends to hold your secret and require any three of them to activate recovery.
PreVeil’s wrapped keys encryption system is proprietary, but Proton Mail relies on the venerable and widely used PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption system. Proton Mail users can set up encrypted communication with users of other encryption tools that rely on PGP, such as Private-Mail and StartMail. For those with the tech chops, using PGP opens up immense possibilities.
(Credit: Proton/PCMag)Proton Mail also actively protects your privacy against tracking that relies on images. When your email client displays an image, it necessarily requests that image from a server. From that request, the sender can learn your IP address, among other things. Proton Mail wipes out web beacons, which are images that have no purpose beyond penetrating your privacy. And it acts as an intermediary for normal images, so the sender gets the IP address of a Proton Mail server, not your personal address.
Both services have clever, high-tech features. And in both cases, most users won’t use or pay attention to these features. I call this a draw.
Winner: Tie
Features Beyond Email Encryption
I’ve already mentioned that both services offer encrypted file storage and secure sharing. For PreVeil, that’s about it.
Proton Mail, on the other hand, offers several other significant security features. These include the already-mentioned Proton Drive, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, and the Proton Pass password manager.
(Credit: Proton/PCMag)Like Proton Drive, Proton Calendar and Proton Pass are available to free users, but with limitations. Free users of Proton VPN can use it to protect one device at a time and can’t choose which country the VPN connects through. Paying for Proton Mail lifts some of these limitations. And if you choose Proton Unlimited, you get the maximum from all the Proton apps.
Winner: Proton Mail