Gmail in Proton Mail: a great idea, only half-baked

You can now connect your Gmail account to Proton Mail, so you can receive and send emails from that address directly in Proton Mail.

It’s a tempting idea, and I’d been waiting for this feature ever since Proton announced it at the end of May 2026.

My Gmail account goes back to the very early days of Gmail, a now distant time when you needed an invitation to create an account. For years, I received my personal and work emails on that address. Lots of contacts, companies and institutions know it.

As I changed providers, I gradually moved my communications to addresses managed by Proton: a Proton Mail address, a SimpleLogin alias or an address on a domain name I control. Yet many contacts still use my old Gmail address. Old habits die hard, and of course there’s no way to automatically update the address saved in your friends’ and family’s contact lists.

That’s why Proton’s idea of acting as a Gmail client looked so appealing. The goal is simple: receive Gmail messages in Proton Mail, then reply from a Proton address. Over time, most people end up adopting the new address. There will always be a few diehards, but that covers 99% of cases.

What does Proton offer?

In the settings for external accounts, a new Gmail option has appeared. It lets you connect a Gmail account to your Proton mailbox: one account on the free plan, up to three with a paid plan.

The process goes even further, since it also imports your recent Gmail messages along with their labels. So far, so good. The implementation is clean and exactly what I was hoping for. And if I say “so far”, it’s because there’s a catch in this otherwise lovely idea.

Let’s take a closer look at what Proton promises, as presented at launch:

• Reply to your emails from your Gmail address without switching apps.
• Existing and new Gmail messages appear in Proton Mail.
• Emails exchanged between Gmail accounts connected to Proton Mail are end-to-end encrypted, so Google can’t read them.
• Actions taken in Proton Mail (archiving, deleting, folders) are not reflected in Gmail.
• Incoming Gmail messages are stripped of trackers and ads.

You can disconnect your Gmail account at any time.

Honestly, this new feature ticks almost every box on my wish list.

How to connect Gmail to Proton Mail

The connection goes through Easy Switch, the migration tool built into Proton Mail. Here are the steps from Proton’s official guide. They work for a personal Gmail account: Google Workspace accounts and Gmail addresses on a custom domain aren’t supported.

1. Open Proton Mail’s settings, go to Import via Easy Switch and select Google.
2. Click Connect to Gmail to start Google’s authorisation. A checkbox, ticked by default, lets you skip importing your emails.
3. Grant all the requested permissions (Select all, then Continue), otherwise the setup will fail later on.
4. The import starts automatically and the connection is active.

Two settings are worth knowing. By default, Easy Switch imports your most recent messages, using up to 80% of your available Proton storage. To get everything, use More import options once the first import has finished. Conversely, if you’d rather start with an empty mailbox, you can choose Undo import afterwards: the imported messages are removed from Proton, but the connection stays active.

What’s the problem with Proton’s Gmail client?

Replying from your Gmail address without switching apps, finding your old messages in Proton Mail, encryption between connected Proton and Gmail users, removing advertising trackers, being able to disconnect at any time: of the six promises Proton puts forward, five seem excellent to me.

Unfortunately, the sixth one changes everything:

Actions taken in Proton Mail are not reflected in Gmail.

And that’s precisely the point that, in my view, spoils much of the feature’s appeal. Archiving, filing or deleting a message in Proton Mail without Gmail knowing about it quickly creates two different realities for the same mailbox.

In practice, it means you have to keep an eye on the original Gmail inbox. A message deleted in Proton Mail is still in Gmail. A message archived in Proton Mail keeps taking up storage space at Google. Sooner or later, the two mailboxes drift apart and it becomes hard to tell which one reflects reality.

You could argue that it doesn’t matter if you no longer use Gmail. Yet for many Proton Mail users, Gmail is just a transition address. They don’t pay for Google One, don’t necessarily use Gemini and don’t want to manage two mailboxes side by side.

There’s one more thing to keep in mind: everything that arrives in your Gmail inbox is still on Google’s servers, and Google can still read and analyse it. Proton says so itself. Connecting Gmail to Proton Mail is a comfortable way to make the move, not a way to make Gmail private.

A privacy choice

This limitation isn’t an oversight. According to Proton’s troubleshooting guide, a Gmail connection doesn’t sync the status of messages (read, unread, starred) or folder changes, in order to limit what Google can learn about how you use your email. The logic is simple: reflecting your actions in Gmail would mean showing Google what you do with your messages.

I understand that reasoning: it’s consistent with what Proton stands for. My complaint lies elsewhere: I would have liked to make that choice knowingly. Two solutions would seem acceptable to me:

• an option, to switch on or not when you connect, that clearly explains what you gain in privacy and what you lose in convenience;
• or, failing that, automatically deleting the message in Gmail as soon as it has been imported into Proton.

Solving one problem creates another

One day, your Gmail storage will run out, emails will bounce and your contacts will get error messages. That’s generally the kind of situation you want to avoid. To prevent it, you’ll have to delete twice every email that isn’t worth keeping. So you can’t completely ignore the state of your Gmail inbox, even if Proton Mail has become your main app.

To be clear, this article isn’t an attack on Proton Mail.

I’ve been using Proton’s services for years, from Proton Mail to Proton Drive, and I’ve often written positively about them. If this new feature disappointed me so much, it’s precisely because it meets a real need I’ve had for a long time.

The idea is excellent. The interface is well done. Importing messages and labels works well. But the lack of any management of what’s left in Gmail is a real problem.

I sincerely hope Proton will improve this integration in the coming months, because it’s a feature I’d been hoping for for ages. Which says a lot about how disappointed I am.

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