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Comment by almet | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that bugs me with Proton is that it's still very complicated to integrate with thunderbird (or any mail app?), which makes it practically unusable for my needs.

Having a tab always open in my browser for my mail seems so wrong.

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Their mobile apps are also very lackluster and devoid of basic features. I understand that they are unable to open up to other mail apps due to the encryption, but for the past few years there have been little to no updates to their iOS suite.

They did a facelift of their iOS mail app six months ago and this week.

I agree it's not perfect but they have some pretty great instructions. I've been using the Bridge with thunderbird for multiple accounts and it works awesome.

Yep, me too. I have Thunderbird running in the background essentially as an email backup, but I wind up using the web version more. However Thunderbird and Bridge work extremely well that I forget they're running in parallel.

I'm a recent Google GSuite refugee, so it's hard breaking the habit of web based mail I suppose.

Genuine question, how is a browser tab different than thunderbird? Besides storing a local copy of mail (which is obviously a huge win), I don't see a big difference. If anything I like the web UI better.

However, for my uses I simply installed proton bridge + apple mail. It just works with all email services I use.

> Genuine question, how is a browser tab different than thunderbird?

Different protocols for one thing - HTTP vs IMAP and/or POP/SMTP.

Each webmail app does things it’s own way. Webmail conflates the app and the protocol and the provider. Some people prefer to have mail from different providers in a unified app.

I find it works very well using the bridge on my Manjaro desktop, and was fine on Debian before that.

I have the same experience, for me it works flawlessly with the bridge, but the bridge itself is a complication. I would prefer a straight imap option (in addition to the bridge option). My 2c.

But then you wouldn't have E2EE anymore, and that's kind of their flagship feature.

I'm very happy with the Bridge integrated with Neomutt on Fedora Linux.

I agree with that; all I am saying is that I think a fair number of users would be happy with the IMAP access even though it does not provide E2EE benefits, which should not affect those who want to run with the bridge.

I think Protonmail started with a privacy-focused business case (for which E2EE is a key feature), but is now expanding into the broader pool of people who want to pay for an ad-free, no-data-scanning email, but are not concerned about targeted spying and prefer the simplicity of a convenient setup. For that crowd, IMAP would make more sense. My 2c.

I use it with Thunderbird. There is an initial step (you need to set up ProtonMail Bridge) but after that it's seamless. And they have really good instructions for how to do that initial setup.

You just need to install the bridge locally, the rest is similar to what you would do for other email providers. What is complicated about it?

fwiw, there's an unofficial desktop app: https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail

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