Paul O'Brien Proton Mail Free Plan (2026): What You Get and Where It Stops Proton Mail’s free plan is one of the few free inboxes that isn’t paid for with your data. It is also tightly capped. Here is exactly what you get, the limits you will hit first, and when it is worth paying. Email Providers12 min read Paul O'Brien PHP2Shell: What Website Owners Need to Do Now Two critical flaws in PHP, the language behind WordPress and most of the web, were fixed on 21 October. Here’s what they are, how to check your site, and what to ask your host. Infrastructure5 min read Paul O'Brien KT8 Mail vs Fastmail: Own Your Email, or Let Someone Else Worry About It? KT8 Mail puts your email on your own Cloudflare account. Fastmail looks after everything for you. I help develop one and I earn commission from the other, so here's an honest look at what owning your email really gives you, what it costs you in responsibility, and who should pick which. Email Providers10 min read Paul O'Brien Link Inspector: Find every broken link on your website Links quietly break over time, so I’ve helped build Link Inspector, a tool that checks your whole website and shows you exactly where each broken link is. Updates2 min read Paul O'Brien What’s New in KT8 Mail: Masked Email, Smarter Spam Checks and More A personal catch-up on what’s changed in KT8 Mail since launch, and a couple of side projects I’ve been helping with alongside it. Updates3 min read Paul O'Brien KT8 Mail: Private Email on Your Own Cloudflare Account KT8 Mail is a new email service that you own outright: your own domain and your own Cloudflare account, with no mail company in the middle. It starts from Cloudflare’s Agentic Inbox, improves on it and makes it simple to install. Members can request an invite code today. Email Providers6 min read Open all 76 posts Hi, I'm Paul. I've spent more than 25 years working hands-on with email, DNS and the internet, from dial-up mail clients to DMARC reports.
Here I test email providers and privacy tools for real, then tell you honestly what they're good at and where they fall short. No hype, just the trade-offs.
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X-Experience:25+ yearshands-on with email, DNS and the webX-Posts:76reviews, guides and explainersX-Sponsored:0sponsored posts, everX-Frequency:1 emailwhen I publish, nothing elseEvery review is written by someone who has used the thing for real, and every limit and price says when it was checked.
Not a weekend test account. Real domain, real contacts, real receipts.
"I ran Fastmail as my primary email for a long stretch. Not as a weekend test, not as a review account I logged into twice."Fastmail Review 2026: Pricing, Privacy and Features Rated
Proton Mail's free plan, from my review:
| Mail storage | 1 GB |
| Sending | 150 a day |
| Folders and labels | 3 + 3 |
| Custom filters | 1 |
| Custom domain | No |
Some links earn me a commission. They're always marked, and they never change what I say.
The rules that decide whether your mail arrives today were written while I was working with it.
POP3 + dial-upMail meant one desktop app and a modem.GmailA free gigabyte changes what people expect.SPFDomains start saying who may send for them.DKIMMessages get a signature you can check.DMARCDomains tell inboxes what to do with fakes.Sender rulesGoogle and Yahoo make it all required for bulk senders.
Tools for the problems I keep running into with email and websites.