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Comment by vertis | Hacker News Reader

I tried really hard to move to protonmail and detach from a Google ecosystem, but really struggled to import my existing emails (their import/export tool was incredibly prone to breaking).

You're also locking yourself into an ecosystem without open apis. If you want mail on your phone you have to use their client, if you want it on the computer you need to install the protonmail bridge (which seems to restart itself and overlay over the top of whatever you're doing)

The apps don't seem to behave well on MacOS either, something about how the windows are designed means that they won't show up in the Mac cmd+tab switcher.

All this means that their security model is irrelevant to me, if I can't do the basic things that I need to do.

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The ProtonMail app is open source: https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-mail-android

As is the bridge, and others.

I moved over ~6gb of emails without issue. I set up the bridge and transferred everything from Google to ProtonMail.

I don’t have that much emails and faced lots of issues with the import tool, moving from a gmail account.

After more than 10 attempts and 3-4 exchange with their support I still have a few emails that haven’t been imported successfully.

Other than that I’m a happy user. But I think that they should invest more in the bridge and importer/exporter tool, the user experience really isn’t that great.

Could be a matter of the client I use. I use Outlook; what are you using?

yes, very interested in the emails you can't import. I don't work for ProtonMail btw, just have quite bit of experience with smtp and email. Just curious from a tech perspective what kind of email you are having trouble importing.

I had tons of issues with mailman added headers causing entire HTML messages to be interpreted as plain text, rendering their encoding tags visible. I think they fixed this. I was still a bit surprised that this was an issue 1+ years into the IMAP bridge.

Big plus is that if you complain about this to their support things actually seem to get fixed? That was kind of a shocker, I'd suggest sending them a note if you have issues. Though this particular IMAP transfer between accounts has worked between my other email accounts (exchange and some linux server long ago) and gmail since I first tried it so it's a little sad. But a smaller team I guess? But paying for it so...

Mixed feelings for sure.

I’m not exactly sure, I didn’t identify a clear pattern. One thing I noticed is that emails with French or German accents/umlauts in their subject line fail to be imported. But others don’t have that characteristic.

I can't remember now, and there is a chance that it was the emails that were problematic. The behaviour of the import/export tool was just unforgivable though. It wouldn't handle the emails it couldn't import gracefully it would just hard fail.

You could try a third party bridge: https://github.com/emersion/hydroxide

We have been working on improving the Import/Export tool, and have deployed some fixes and improvements requested by users. For example, we've: - Increased the number of supported mail providers by changing the way folder structures are handled - Improved the handling for unstable internet and pause/resume behavior - Fixed the rare cases where the application freezes when starting/stopping imports - Improved the manual update process

The Import/Export tool will be exiting Beta with these improvements this month. If you try the production version, we're optimistic it'll work a lot better.

I stand corrected on this.

Agree on the detaching from Google. I found FastMail to be a good middle ground until ProtonMail catches up with usability and stability.

Same for me. I went from Google to ProtonMail and then (due to mentioned issues) I moved to Fastmail and I am very happy. I don’t miss Gmail at all.

I like fastmail, but the Australian Government has anti-encryption laws that are just a dealbreaker.

Australian companies (of which Fastmail is one) can be forced to handover user data silently[1].

"At its core, the legislation allows law enforcement agencies to compel companies to hand over user information, even if it’s protected by end-to-end encryption. If companies do not have the ability to intercept encrypted information, they can be forced to build tools to do so."

So fastmail can be compelled to hand over user data[2], and if that data is encrypted, can be compelled to build tools to subvert that security (this is a shame because Fastmail itself is anti that bill).

[1]:https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/7/18130391/encryption-law-a... [2]:https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/

They're a Melbourne-based company, but their servers are in other countries. Does ASIS' reach include data stored in other countries? (NYC, Amsterdam, Iceland)

Yes it does, because they can compel the company employees. A previous company that I worked for used to have data centres in Amsterdam and Sydney (pre-cloud), but it was an Australian company with Australian engineers, so it wouldn't matter very much in this context.

It's the old xkcd "million-dollar cluster to crack encryption VS wrench"[1]

If you or your engineers with production access live within a jurisdiction then your security and laws are impacted by that jurisdiction.

[1]:https://xkcd.com/538/

I agree, I've been with them for years and haven't been able to fully transition yet. I did try finally copying over old emails via their IMAP bridge but it had bugs even after all this time and now a bunch of my old emails have permanent defects. At least they're old emails I guess.

Their technical support has been prompt at least. But my email also doesn't arrive at most google hosted email domains when delivered via a mailing list so it's been a mixed bag. Apparently that one is unsolvable because Google improperly uses DKIM signatures for spam detection.

I'd probably go with something else if I were starting again, I still can't customize swiping left and right to move forward and backwards in my email box, which really seems like a pretty basic feature that all the other clients use. It is odd that it is still missing after 2+ years of development. I really can't recommend it other than that I probably won't switch again for a while and misery loves company.

> I still can't customize swiping left and right to move forward and backwards in my email box, which really seems like a pretty basic feature that all the other clients use.

I just updated the app on Android today and got a notification that they added this feature

Speak of the devil... that's some amazing timing.

Edit: Version 1.13.10? That's the latest I see on the play store, I have it installed, but it does not have the ability to go to the next message while swiping while a message is open. I looked around a bit but I don't think they just added it unless the play store version didn't change globally or I can't find the feature to turn it on. They do reference swiping in the config page and in their update changelog from June but they're talking about marking messages in a folder, not navigating.

Oh sorry I was mistaken what you meant :/

For me the killer was search. I use email search daily to look up old orders or events, not being able to search on proton mail made it doa for me.

On ios Protonmail I use search regularly and it appears to work. Which platform were you on?

You can’t search email bodies only subject lines.

Encrypted search is on our roadmap. It will be coming to all platforms, most likely in 2021 after we release Proton 4.0.

> I tried really hard to move to protonmail and detach from a Google ecosystem, but really struggled to import my existing emails ... The apps don't seem to behave well on MacOS either,

I moved my emails and docs to iCloud, native apps, no problems.

I had no issue exporting/importing serveral Gmail inboxes about a year ago when I made the transition.

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