Could the title be update to contain the word bridge as the issue is in the Protonmail bridge application and not on Protonmail itself. The entire title is clickbaity, but adding the birdge moves it away from being misleading.
Same way people would refer to "Facebook" meaning the whole of Meta
If no user steps up then it might not be that important issue in the first place.
Compared to the FOSS origin myths, many huge projects, with tons of end users, including very foundational ones, like GTK+ and OpenSSL and such, are understuffed (or just 1-2 base maintainers heavily overworked, who do 99% of the work and can't take it anymore), and nobody cares or has the time to dive in and fix anything.
Other projects that might have some person interested to bugfix, have maintainers that don't like contributions outside a clique, and ignore bugfixes submitted for years or forever.
So, "any user can fix it" is sometimes just in principle, while actual users than can fix and do fix it are thin on the ground, and othertimes it's just an option for external patches, that will not be merged upstream.
I gut feeling is that Protonmail Bridge is such an obscure project that no one really cares enough, and thus it cannot be “important” or “critical”.
Alternatively, users have an option to change to another system if they are unhappy. Protonmail has no monopoly. But complaining about open source maintenance is not going to change anything. Especially complaining on HackerNews is ungentlemanly.
It makes it seem as if using just protonmail could result in deleting a wrong email. This is not the case, you have to be using proton bridge.
People who care about protonmail but don't care about proton bridge have to click the link to learn that.
UIDs get desynced between IMAP client and bridge, as the bridge does not seem to use persistent UIDs for messages.
If you don't use the bridge you won't have issues with mismatched UIDs.
I am slowly migrating everything away from my paid ProtonMail account, and I intend to just go back to using a megacorp email... despite absolutely loathing and detesting megacorps. At this point in life, email is simply too important. Notices from government agencies, my accountant, my lawyers, my various banks... I quit self hosting for these reasons (no matter how good I am, I am not full time keeping my self-hosting pristine), and now I apparently cannot fully trust Proton.
The only durable solution for email is:
1. Have your own domain 2. Have a copy of all your mailboxes locally (easily done with IMAP).
With that setup, migrating email is only a matter of opening a new account and changing the DNS record.
Alternatively, another person in the comments here mentioned mailbox.org and I am thinking about that.
I just know I need email I can rely on a little bit more.
But very opinionated and no IMAP.