Users may not remember it, but it is possible they may have some receipts, tax invoices, photos, or important documents stored in their email account. If a user hasn't accessed their account for over a year, isn't that an irrelevant account? Does it matter if it gets deleted? Yes, it does. Does it matter if a dormant account gets deleted? A three-month limit would have drawn a lot of complaints from users, I think they made the right call by sidestepping that land mine. Proton AG originally planned to deactivate accounts that were inactive for three months, but says it extended the grace period to 1 year, after listening to feedback from users.

We mustn't forget Proton AG makes money from its premium services, so this move could theoretically be purely be executed from a business' perspective. I think it is also possible that more people could be signing up for using the free VPN service that the company provides. Maybe ProtonMail is picking up more free users than they expected, which in turn costs server storage. To users, it may seem like a pointless move.

Cost of proton mail