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Comment by vabmit | Hacker News Reader

Try to relax a bit. It is good for your health. :) Both of those features are under development. If you would like to see them sooner rather than later, perhaps you know some great programmers that you could recommend to careers@protonmail.ch? Or, you could share ProtonMail's Careers page: https://protonmail.com/careers

ProtonMail is hiring!

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Protonmail fan and user here. Guys, honestly there are better ways to respond to customers and potential customers, without the patronizing tone. That can't possibly help.

It actually didn't seem idiomatic... I suspect that english is not their first language and they might not have realized they were being rude.

Funny, I thought about that too right after I wrote my comment.

Looks like parent is not a ProtonMail employee. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032948)

This is a great example of how not to interact with customers.

Telling a customer who's been waiting on a feature for over a year to relax is just insulting.

I picked Fastmail due to their excellent support reputation, you all could learn from them!

Sometimes the customer is either flat wrong or at least an asshole. ProtonMail sends yearly surveys to paying customers asking for help prioritizing development efforts, so suggesting they don't listen to their customers is asinine. IMAP support is in beta as a result of customers prioritizing it in those surveys. As they are likely limited primarily by funding and developer bandwidth, I see nothing wrong with their response above and will continue paying for their service.

Fair point, but exporting email? These aren't crazy ideas from one person's wishlist. These are actual features that should be standard for any company providing an email service.

(Genuine question, haven't used it in the last few years.) Does Gmail support exporting email, other than using IMAP which I understand Proton also has in beta?

Yes, Google Takeout: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

I remember reading that they have committed to letting you download all you data from all their properties, and the list on that page is certainly long, but I can't tell if it's complete.

Exporting e-mails was one of the most requested features as far as I remember (https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/export-import-...) and I can understand people getting angry about this. I think Protonmail will have to move a bit faster on this now as holding your customer data "hostage" will no longer be an acceptable practice starting from next year (May 25) due to EU GDPR. So if they want to keep selling to EU customers they will have to implement a mechanism to allow people to get their data out of their system in an automated way.

And honestly, e-mail is not only about communication but also about archiving of data, and what good is an archive if you can't even get the data out of it when you need it? I've been a Protonmail premium subscriber and I would have loved to stay on their service, but the fact of not being able to get my e-mails out of there in case I needed them made it totally unsuitable as a business e-mail account.

We are working hard on import and export--they are top priorities, and we are fully aware that they are core features we are currently missing.

Keep in mind that pretty much everything is more complex with encrypted email, and that includes import and export. It will be done as soon as we can manage.

You could provide users the option to give up their encryption on the content they wish to export. Chances are, if someone is trying to export their entire account, they are moving away from PM. In that case, encryption is probably not their first concern.

Furthermore, even though PM keeps user emails in encrypted form, virtually all of those emails are unencrypted on one or more servers related to the recipients of those emails. So unfortunately, the encryption is less valuable than we would like.

That is exactly what we are doing, but it has to be done client-side of course, so it's not as simple as having a download link.

Looks like parent is not a ProtonMail employee. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032948)

And now I'm closing my account. Not the way to respond to a valid customer concern. Good to know this is how you treat customers on a premium service. I'll share it with other customers so they know.

@vabmit means well but he is not an employee of ProtonMail.

Bet writing that made you feel a real big man.

I was a visionary paid member when that option became available, and I used the service heavily for a year (until the performance, particularly search and email-list-paging became unreasonably slow... as in multi-second delays).

While performance was going down, I noticed new features being announced. However, one key feature (exporting emails in bulk) was never done. I can assure you that is not rocket science, or rather is not a technical challenge that the brilliant minds who started PM could not overcome.

As for careers, I even made an effort to contact them. Whether I was up to par or not, I suspect my resume and two decades of experience were worthy of a reply, particularly given the quality of bug reporting I had provided during my use.

So honestly, the takeaway feeling was that the company was not well run or organized, which ultimately brings long-term reliability into question. And long-term reliability is very important to anyone doing real work and real business.

Maybe they should also be hiring some sort of customer interaction expert as well.

https://protonmail.com/careers#technical-support-specialist

Looks like parent is not a ProtonMail employee. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032948)

You're charging people for a service, you're in no position to treat anybody like that.

Translation: please don't be a dumbass.

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