For a long time, some members of our community have been asking us for a shorter, easy-to-share email address. Part of this comes from the difficulty of spelling out P-R-O-T-O-N-M-A-I-L over the phone. Even back in 2015, we started looking into how to support this. It was not an easy task, since the domain name needed to be short, obtainable (not ridiculously expensive), memorable, not confusing, and related to ProtonMail somehow.

Why pm.me

Domains that were tried, but ultimate rejected included pmail.com (too easily confused with Gmail), pm.co (too easily confused with .com), pm.com (unobtainable), pm.ch (the Swiss government wouldn’t give us this one), and proton.ch (not quite short enough). Finally, this led us to pm.me.

We like pm.me for several reasons, and ultimately we think it’s a good choice. First, at 4 letters long, it is pretty much as short as you can make a domain. Furthermore, it is a clever word play, as PM is the universal abbreviation for “private message”, and keeping your messages and communications private (as they should be) is precisely what ProtonMail does. Thus, we like to think of pm.me as “private message me” or “ProtonMail me“.

It also helps that .me domains are starting to become more popular and visible (for example, fb.me used by Facebook, paypal.me used by PayPal). In obtaining the pm.me domain name, we are happy to have the support of domain.me, the company that manages the .ME TLD for Montenegro. ME domains typically are between 3 and 63 letters, but thanks to their support, we were able to obtain a two-letter domain.

How to use pm.me

As a company, we will continue to use protonmail.com as our main domain name. However, every ProtonMail user will be able to activate a separate pm.me email address at no cost (if you are a new user, you can do it after you sign up). For example, if your username is john, you can activate john@pm.me to go with your existing john@protonmail.com address. All users can receive mail at their @pm.me email address, but sending from @pm.me addresses will be limited to paid users (however, if you are a free user and get an email at username@pm.me, you can still reply using username@protonmail.com).

We hope that by making ProtonMail email addresses easier than ever to share, it will contribute to the increased usage of ProtonMail and help to fulfill our vision of an internet where everybody can benefit from the security of encrypted email.

Activate your pm.me address

First, you need to be a ProtonMail user. If you’re not, you can create an account here. Afterwards, log in using the web version of ProtonMail at mail.protonmail.com, and follow these two simple steps:

1. Go to Settings -> pm.me

2. Click on the “Activate @pm.me” button

For more details, you can visit our pm.me support page.

For those who have been waiting for years for this feature, thanks for your patience! With your support, we look forward to adding even more features in the near future that will continue to make ProtonMail the best encrypted email service.

Best Regards,

The ProtonMail Team

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