Secure Email Based in Switzerland

protonmail.com

25 points·zemanel··7 comments

One downside of protonmail is that they don't provide access via IMAP, so once you migrated it would be hard to back up your emails or leave them for another vendor.

They apparently now have a beta of IMAP access though: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-feedback/sugg...

And I don't understand how they manage to make it "easy" for the user to make both their "special" emails encrypted by the user and unreadable to their server and at the same time allowing users to send the "normal e-mails" to other e-mail servers/users that have to be unencrypted.

Anybody knows?

Edit: can fully unencrypted e-mails be sent and received via their services at all? And how did they solve that?

It's described here: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/encrypt-for-ou...

Apparently, you have to have shared a password with the end recipient through some other channel before you send them an email.

Unless email is E2E encrypted from all the sources I care about like banks and stuff I don't see the point.

My question is always the same (as a protonmail user): why don't they open-source their android app? There aren't reasons not to do so. For example I wanted to improve their app adding a feature in the past, but I can't

Because then you could open a protonmail competitor easier.

While they are hosted in Switzerland they are staffed from the US iirc so if you are worried about state survielence don't count on geography to save you.

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