TL;DR
When I switched to Proton Mail, some emails looked broken — images missing, layouts garbled, white boxes where content should have been.
Proton had stripped the tracking infrastructure. For some emails, that infrastructure was so deeply woven into the design that removing it partially collapsed the layout.
The broken emails were proof. Not a bug — evidence of exactly what the old system had been doing all along.
I didn't switch to Proton Mail expecting anything dramatic. I was expecting a slightly different inbox that happened to be private. Set up the account, add it to the app, done.
What I wasn't expecting was for some of my emails to look broken.
Something Was Different
In the first week after switching, certain emails were coming in looking strange. Not all of them — most looked completely normal. But a handful, particularly from online retailers and marketing lists, had missing images. Some had garbled layouts. One email I recognised from a subscription service was essentially just a white box with a small fragment of text in the corner.
My first thought was that I'd set something up wrong. Maybe a display issue.
Then I opened the same email in Gmail. It loaded perfectly — full design, vivid colours, clearly a lot of design work had gone into the layout.
So it wasn't a display issue. Something else was happening.
What Was Actually Going On
Proton Mail strips tracking content from incoming emails before they reach you. This includes tracking pixels — invisible images designed to fire back to the sender with your IP address, location, device, and open time. It also includes certain tracking redirects embedded in links.
For a standard email — a message from a person, a simple notification — stripping tracking content leaves the email looking completely normal, because the actual content was always the email itself.
But for heavily designed marketing emails? The tracking infrastructure wasn't incidental to the design. It was woven through it. Some of those beautifully laid-out promotional emails were built so that substantial parts of their visual structure loaded from the same servers doing the tracking. Strip the trackers, and the design partially collapses.
The "broken" emails weren't breaking because Proton was doing something wrong. They were revealing, visually, how much of their architecture had been devoted to watching me open them.
⚠️ What tracking infrastructure in emails can include:
- Invisible 1x1 pixel images that ping back your open time, device, and location
- Images hosted on tracking servers that log every load
- Links that redirect through tracking servers before reaching the destination
- Unique identifiers embedded in image URLs to fingerprint your specific device
For simple emails, these are small additions. For sophisticated marketing emails, they can be deeply integrated into the visual structure itself.
The Inbox Afterwards
After that first week, something else shifted.
My Proton inbox was quiet in a way my Gmail inbox had never been. Not just because there were no ads — though that was part of it. It was because the emails I received in Proton were the ones I'd actually given my Proton address to: people I wanted to hear from. My financial advisor. Friends. A couple of services I trust enough to give a real address.
There were no "just checking in" emails from companies I'd bought something from once. No re-engagement campaigns from services I'd forgotten I'd signed up for. Those were still arriving in Gmail — which I hadn't closed, just stopped giving to people.
The contrast was stark enough that I started thinking about Gmail differently. Not as an email account, but as a public-facing front door — useful for things that need a login or forms that want an address, but not the place where my actual correspondence lives.
The Moment It Clicked
A few weeks in, I got a perfectly ordinary email in Proton from a friend. Just a note.
And I thought: this is just a message. From a person. To me. Nobody else processed it on the way here.
That should be unremarkable. For most of email's history, it was. But after years of using services built around scanning your email to sell you things, having a message arrive that was genuinely private felt genuinely different.
The broken emails had been the proof that something was wrong with the old system. The quiet inbox was the proof that something was right about the new one.
See What Your Emails Are Actually Doing
The simplest way to find out how heavily tracked your inbox is: switch to Proton and watch which emails change.
The ones that look identical were probably fine — the content was always the email, not the tracking wrapper. The ones that look different are showing you, visually, how much of their architecture was built around watching you open them.
Proton Mail is free to start. You don't need to close Gmail — just use Proton for what matters and see what you notice. The proof will be in your own inbox.