Proton Mail Free Is 1GB and No IMAP. Here Is the Trade.

Proton Mail's free plan costs $0 and includes 1GB of storage, one address, 150 messages a day and 50 an hour, 25MB attachments, three folders or labels, one filter, encrypted sending to non-users, and no custom domain. IMAP and SMTP are not available on any personal plan, because the Bridge client requires Mail Plus at $4.99 a month.¹

The storage figure moves. A new account starts at 500MB and reaches 1GB after completing a short onboarding checklist, which is why you will see both numbers quoted and neither is wrong.

The rest of the limits are fixed and unusually specific. Understanding why they exist makes them easier to live with than they first appear.

What the free plan actually includes

The free account also arrives inside Proton's wider free bundle: Proton VPN on one device, 5GB of Proton Drive, Proton Pass with two vaults and ten aliases, and Proton Calendar.

No IMAP is the limit people discover last

This is the one that ends most free trials, and it is structural rather than commercial. Proton encrypts mail so that the server cannot read it. Your private key is opened by your password in the browser or the app, and it is not sitting on a server for a mail client to fetch.

Ordinary IMAP assumes the server can hand a client readable messages. Proton cannot, so it ships a Bridge application that runs on your machine, decrypts locally and presents an IMAP server to your mail client. That Bridge requires Mail Plus.

The consequence: no Apple Mail, no Outlook, no Thunderbird, no Gmail app pulling Proton mail into a unified inbox. You use Proton's own apps, on the web, desktop and mobile, or you pay.

For someone whose workflow depends on a single inbox in a native client, that alone decides the question, and $4.99 a month is the price of the answer.

The daily send limit is generous until it is not

150 messages a day and 50 an hour is not a limit a person reaches by writing emails. It is a limit that matters when something is sending on your behalf.

A mailing list, a newsletter, an automated notification system or a cold outreach tool will hit 50 an hour immediately. It is also a spam control, which is the point: free accounts with unlimited sending are an abuse vector, and Proton has priced that in.

If you are migrating a personal archive, note this is a send limit, not a receive limit. Importing old mail is unaffected.

Three folders and one filter is very small

Three folders or labels, and one filter, is the tightest constraint on the free plan after storage.

It forces a flat inbox with almost no automatic sorting. You can tag three things and route mail on one rule, which covers a single high-value case such as moving receipts into a folder, and nothing else.

For anyone who runs a filtered inbox, this is the second reason to look at Mail Plus, and it arrives sooner than the storage limit does.

1GB of storage in 2026

1GB is roughly a few thousand text emails or a couple of hundred with attachments. It is enough for a personal address used for correspondence and not for one used as a shopping address where every order sends a receipt.

Proton is not alone in this. 1GB sits in the same range as most privacy-focused providers, where storage is a paid feature rather than a loss leader.

Attachments count against it, and 25MB per message is the per-email ceiling shared with the paid plan. A single large file can eat a visible slice of the total.

What does not change on free is the encryption. End-to-end mail between Proton users, zero-access storage for everything else, Swiss jurisdiction and an audited no-logging posture are all present. Mail Plus buys capacity, client support and custom domains, not a stronger guarantee.

When the free plan is enough

A second address used for signing up to services, kept separate from a main inbox. A person who writes a few dozen emails a week, reads them in Proton's own app, and does not need a desktop client.

It is also enough to evaluate whether Proton's apps work for you, since every privacy feature is present. The same bundle includes Proton VPN on one device, which is the free alternative to Mullvad's refusal to offer a free tier at all.

When the free plan stops being enough

The first time you open Outlook or Thunderbird expecting your mail to be there. Or the first time storage fills. Both point at Mail Plus, which is the cheapest upgrade in this whole series at $4.99 a month, and cheaper still yearly at $3.99.

If the answer instead is a second address with no privacy requirement, a free tier from a mainstream provider costs nothing and carries more storage, at the price of the encryption Bitwarden's free vault assumes you are protecting.

Frequently asked questions

Is Proton Mail really free?
Yes. The free plan has no time limit and includes 1GB of storage, one address and full end-to-end encryption.

Why is my Proton Mail storage 500MB?
New accounts start at 500MB and reach 1GB after completing the getting-started checklist in the app.

Does Proton Mail Free support IMAP?
No. IMAP and SMTP require the Proton Mail Bridge, which is included with Mail Plus and above.

What is the Proton Mail daily sending limit?
150 messages a day and 50 an hour on the free plan.

Can I use a custom domain on Proton Mail Free?
No. A custom domain requires Mail Plus at $4.99 a month, or $3.99 billed yearly.

Plan contents, storage tiers, sending limits and Bridge availability verified against Proton's plan documentation and pricing page on 20 October 2026.

Sources

1. Proton plans explained: proton.me/support/proton-plans. Used for: Storage tiers, the 150/day send cap and Bridge availability.

All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 20 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.