Proton Mail gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar | Hacker News Reader

Proton Mail gets a desktop app for encrypted email and calendar

theverge.com

90 pointscendenta98 comments

I love Proton, I use them for my business. Sure they are missing some things. The calendar is too basic, no widget. Drive does not have a Linux client and no rsync support or anything useful. And now there is no desktop app For Linux (it's not electron?). BUT, I love the webapp and they bring a steady stream of nice improvements, and what currently exists works very well. They are a company with the right values so I love paying them and look forward to what's coming.

I rather their app not be Electron not much would have needed to be done just mostly point it at their website at that point…

On Linux it’s often: it’s electron or you’re left out.

I wonder if anyone tried repackaging electron apps to use alternative runtime, maybe Tauri?

Tutanota has got a Linux app, and the Android app is available on F-Droid.

I love what both companies are trying to achieve with building private ecosystems, but for me Linux must always come first. Everyone who loves privacy has switched to Linux by now.

I use Linux as a litmus test, is that the term, to see how serious a company is about privacy. Without a Linux presence, it's privacy marketing or just lip service. I might still use the product on another OS simultaneously, but I need to know that the control point exists.

They have a way to run thunderbird by running a local bridge. I don't really want their desktop client anyway. I do use their android app which is decent.

I only use Linux and I am happy with proton.

You can use Proton Mail on Linux already via our Proton Mail Bridge: https://proton.me/mail/bridge. We plan to make the Proton Mail Linux native app available in early 2024.

Tutanota also supports notifications on non-GCF phones like GrapheneOS, while ProtonMail unfortunately does not.

FYI, it's fairly easy to have Proton Drive on linux using rclone [0], for push/pull/sync.

[0] https://rclone.org/protondrive/

That's cool but it's hacky (reverse engineered from the open source app), would be cool if they had an official API!

We're happy to hear this. We're planning to make the Proton Mail Linux app available early next year.

While I will appreciate the Proton Mail Linux app when it is eventually released, I refuse to pay for a Proton Unlimited, Proton Family, or Proton Business subscription until Proton Drive has a free and open source client for Linux.

There are currently 3,609 people on your user feedback forum requesting a Linux client for Proton Drive: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/932839-proton-drive/...

Linux support is essential for cross-platform privacy-oriented services. I hope your company is able to provide a specific timeline for when Linux will be supported in Proton Drive, instead of ignoring Linux completely like your company is doing in your product roadmap (https://proton.me/blog/proton-drive-roadmap).

This reeks a bit of misplaced entitlement. Proton, as any company, has limited resources, and they focus it where it counts for their business.

This means that for almost anything, be it gaming, office suites or video editors, we are a minority. And we have to live with less attention. It's just how it is.

Sure we can make requests and provide feedback, but we have no rights. If you ask me we don't even have the right to responds with slight annoyance.

We may just hope that even though we are a minority, perhaps companies may recognize the following things in us:

- they do earn enough directly of off us to justify support

- they trust that us techies take the tech we use at home to work

- We are superior bug finders and reporters and may earn our support that way

We are not entitled to anything though, and companies must also realize that in the end we too will vote with our wallets.

It's not "entitlement" to share my purchasing preferences with Proton. I am glad to pay for Proton Mail subscriptions, but I am unwilling to pay for Proton Drive subscriptions (including Proton subscription bundles) until Proton releases a free and open source Proton Drive client for Linux. This is a perfectly rational position to take, since nobody wants to pay for things they aren't able to properly use.

I'm not the only one who is demanding a Proton Drive client for Linux. On Proton's user feedback forum, this feature is the second-most highly voted suggestion for Proton Drive: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/932839-proton-drive/...

While you're certainly able to communicate with Proton however you like, it's not anyone's place to tell me and other Linux users what we can say to Proton on an online forum or whether we're allowed to express annoyance. There's no better way to let Proton know how I will vote with my wallet than to tell them directly.

I didn't realize you were already a customer.

Fwiw, I agree with you, a good Linux client (or better, an API, so we can get Nautilus and Dolphin etc integration) would be great and I'd also pay more for a subscription, since now it can be a backup for my pictures.

Maybe this will turn out to be a very good thing, but with the degraded quality of their mobile app and the languishing state of the web app, I can't help but feel like a desktop app for Proton Mail is a distraction at this point. Granted, there is a rewrite of their mobile app in progress to fix serious performance issues, but that should be finished first before even thinking about a brand new desktop app.

At the same time, the idea that we need vendor-specific email applications really sucks. In decades past, we had email applications that could support multiple email accounts from multiple vendors. Proton Mail is a bit of a special case in that regard, which results in it needing to provide a bridge application and now apparently a desktop app, but it really shouldn't be. If independent email applications aren't adequate for peoples' basic needs in 2023 and can't provide straight forward support for things like Proton Mail, then those applications should be fixed.

But that's just crazy talk, I know. Nothing can be interoperable.

The teams behind the desktop application and the Android rewrite are probably not the same. I would guess that developing the desktop app didn't impact the development of the mobile app

Thank you for your feedback. Note that different teams are working on the Android and desktop apps, so we can develop them simultaneously. We have, in fact, in the last quarter only, shipped 38 different improvements to the Proton Mail and Calendar mobile and web apps: https://proton.me/blog/mail-calendar-improvements-2023. We are working hard on the re-written Proton Mail Android app (we have just started the rollout of the latest version on the Google Play store). We recommend that you check it out and provide feedback - all feedback we receive helps us improve our services.

The same applies to the Proton Mail web app - feel free to report any issues to us at: https://proton.me/support/contact.

Out of curiosity, what makes people prefer desktop apps for mail over just visiting the browser version? The idea of downloading a desktop app for something I can do in the browser makes no sense to me. At least on mobile, the ergonomics of apps tend to make the experience better than the mobile-web version.

While the gap has closed over the years, with high quality web apps and the ability of the browser to send you notifications, I still prefer to use Thunderbird to check my multiple accounts, and only notify for my primary folder, while lots of relative junk gets filtered down to sub-folders, where I do not want notifications.

I use a mail client for offline access, backups, and faster search

I stopped using Proton largely because the bridge was unreliable - this may have kept me around

My browser does too much already, too. I appreciate actual applications that have an identity beyond a favicon

Same. I love the idea of ditching the Proton Mail bridge app on my Macs. It's been a frequent source of configuration and update headaches for me.

It seems if you're on a higher tier the mail client is available - otherwise people must wait...

I hope you find it helpful, the bridge truly is dreadful!

I ultimately gave up on 'private email' and simply moved to Zoho. Proper SMTP/IMAP is nice.

Weird - bridge has worked flawlessly for me for the last couple of years. I use Thunderbird with it. They had clear instructions on how to configure it in just a couple of clicks and I haven't had to mess with it since then.

My ONLY complaint is that if I launch Thunderbird before Bridge has finished, it won't connect. That can be fixed by waiting first, or opening the app on a schedule, or just closing and re-opening it. (I choose to use a scheduled app open)

I also use Thunderbird - setup/controlling the startup order was the easy part.

Sometimes getting messages is where it fell apart for me. I'd be connected, the bridge would be, yet I wouldn't see messages every now and then.

Weird indeed!

I don't think that's a normal experience. It may be worth contacting Proton about it and asking for support, assuming you still pay for service. May be an easy fix. Or it could be on TB's end.

I'd also check if you have any unusual network configuration (PiHole, router settings, etc) and see if those could be interfering somehow.

Though since it's intermittent it may be hard for them to track down.

Thank you for the suggestion - if I were still a customer I likely would reach out with your guidance.

I didn't investigate much... it was happening at a bad time where I really needed to stay on top of active conversations for a move.

Webmail requires an active Internet connection. A desktop client lets me work in more environments/situations, and acts as a kind of local backup/cache of my communications.

It also makes focusing on email easier. I dislike having to dive into tab sprawl to read/write email.

webmail works fine without an internet connection, gmail does it. You need to write a PWA.

But do I have a local backup if my webmail provider deletes my account?

https://proton.me/support/export-emails-import-export-app

PWA does indeed let you cache plenty of data, but I am not familiar with if gmail does this at all or not.

Gmail also spies on everything you do, whereas desktop clients like Thunderbird do not.

I should clarify that I meant "webmail" in general, and meant to answer the spirit of the broader question about why people prefer thick clients over web clients. Most web clients aren't great offline, but a "YMMV" does seem necessary here.

With that said, while I don't know much about the particulars of the Proton web client and how it handles offline access, I'd still prefer a client that treats all mail the same way, regardless of provider, and that I can manage locally/migrate to a new computer/back up to my own NAS, etc.

No thanks on the gmail, it's not really email.

It's faster, easier to alt-tab to (installed PWAs might address this), but also easy to manage in other ways: window positioning, custom shortcuts, custom UI; then offline use, local backup of your very important data, and a bunch of other things that don't pop into my mind right now. You could also call most of these "ergonomics"

Less tab clutter, enhanced ability to use OS app/window management facilities, no space eating browser chrome, works without a browser being open (yes that does happen on occasion).

It doesn’t apply to Proton’s desktop app specifically but generic email clients also allow management of multiple accounts in a single window without the messiness of forwarding.

Pretty happy here with Apple Mail. It uses MacOS' Spotlight for indexing. It's just more applike, quick and responsive than the web version.

Fast and reliable, don’t update without me knowing about it, keep copies locally (pretty important for emails imho)

I feel the opposite. The desktop app makes the data – my data – local. If it's a web app, the data and access to it is controlled by the service provider. If you stop paying, if they decide they don't like you, if they go bankrupt or something else happens on their end, your data is gone. And no connection to the internet means no data. I prefer to keep truly personal stuff such as (some) emails and other messaging, pictures and passwords local. Of course, not everyone is as technical and for many it might be a better idea not to worry and rely on the cloud.

Being able to read mail offline, not waiting on emails to load, and I am sure others have clients they prefer.

In theory performance but modern software has kind of destroyed that argument.

But desktop software SHOULD be more performant.

Regardless of all the work done in browsers, native UI's still feel better in terms of latency and performance.

I am in control of the update roadmap of applications that run on my system.

For me, I generally prefer dedicated apps to a browser if possible. They tend to be more functional and less burdened down by being general-purpose software.

It's also a more controlled environment. I tend to run a lot of custom browser settings, mountains of addons, etc. I know that my desktop mail app won't be affected by those.

Same,fyi, chrome's --app combined with --user-data-dir is amazing for this without having to install a bunch of different electon apps.

Let's hope it's not just another Electron-based abomination.

Of course it is*

*I'm writing this comment before looking it up because i am that sure.

Don't worry, they don't say it in the article.

But the "Screenshot" does sure look like one

CEO at Missive and proud developer of an electron based email client, I would love for you to try it and judge it's speed. It might change your opinion.

There is no performant snappy Electron app. Period.

The problem is not when everything is written with web as the main central point, the problem is when you compare that with a previous version that was a desktop client first, then in a rush to make it cross-platform they fuck it up. Hence the hate for Electron, because 99% of Electron apps out there are like this.

I am a very happy Missive user and have no qualms about their desktop client. I kind of knew it was likely Electron, but it is so performant that it really didn't cross my mind that it was non-native. People bashing Electron apps is just a trope these days; like anything else, there are good ones and bad ones.

It probably is. Since they already have a working web app, why would they throw all that away and start a new project from scratch targeting 3 platforms (MacOS, Linux and Windows) and triple the maintenance burden?

I'm assuming they have reworked their current web app into an electron (or similar) desktop application and going forward they can make changes and immediately push out to both web and desktop.

We should ask people who complain about Electron apps if they're willing to pay an extra $20/month to pay for a team of developers to make and maintain a native app for each platform.

I'd bet they say no. If they say yes, they're lying.

I'm on Linux and elecron apps are always good news for me, because I know I won't be left out ;)

Unless you're using Evernote. Private Beta for Evernote for Linux and afterwards..... An email saying they are stopping the development of Evernote Linux :)

PS: Electron, AFAIK.

Damn, that's some low effort for Linux people. Well I’m using Obsidian. They’re on some old version of electron. Which is annoying but it works well other than that it requires some exception in my Nix config.

That ship has sailed. If I look at my Dock right now, from left to right I'm running:

- Nautilus

- Brave (Chromium)

- Gnome-terminal

- VSCode (Electron)

- Telegram Desktop (̶E̶l̶e̶c̶t̶r̶o̶n̶ QT)[1]

- WhatsApp (web wrapper in Electron)[1]

- Discord (Electron)

- Spotify (Chromium Embedded Framework)

- Betterbird (Gecko, might as well be Electron)

- TickTick (Electron)

- Steam (Chromium Embedded Framework)

In a way it is very interesting to me, Chromium has pretty much become a "kernel" of sorts that all web technologies run atop. And I don't really buy the "Chromium gives Google power over the web", as it is permissively licensed, and there is at least one other giant stakeholder in the form of Microsoft.

Kind of makes me wish GNU and Apple would do what Microsoft has done, integrate a Chromium-based WebView into the OS and optimize it to the gills. The battle between Blink (Chromium), WebKit and Gecko has already been lost, might as well give your users the best UX they can get.

[1]There is work being done on native GTK clients by third parties, namely

- Paper Plane for Telegram: https://github.com/paper-plane-developers/paper-plane

- Whakarere for Whatsapp: https://github.com/tobagin/whakarere

> Kind of makes me wish GNU and Apple would do what Microsoft has done, integrate a Chromium-based WebView into the OS

It’s not Chromium based but Apple does have exactly this in the OS. Given both Chromium and WebKit target the same web standards there should be a solid crossover. The reality isn’t there but it wouldn’t take much (except for willingness on Apple’s part, which is hard to come by)

Yeah I know Apple has their own WkWebview (maybe they were even the first? not sure). But as you pointed out, it requires devs to look out for any edge cases / missing features it has in comparison to Chromium's Webview.

The nice thing about a universal Webview is that devs no longer have to spend time testing across web engines. All they would have to do is test against a few generations of Chromium.

I know that's not a thing free software stans like to think about or hear because its already been happening in slow-motion, with less and less devs testing against anything but Chromium, but I feel there are strong benefits to it.

In a way its the SystemD debacle all over again. Centralization like that feels spooky and very un-unixy, but it brings such an enormous host of benefits.

Telegram Desktop is fortunately not an electron app. It's Qt.

Thanks, edited!

I must admit it / its performance feels very "webby"

That's strange. It's by far the snappiest, modern IM app that I've used.

How is telegram Electron if it's https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop C++/QT?

Thanks, for letting me know, edited!

Its performance has always felt very "webby" to me. Goes to show native is not a silver bullet for all our UI responsiveness woes :)

It's very snappy for me on Plasma. One of the fastest apps actually.

The official Telegram client is Qt on Windows and Linux and AppKit on macOS, not Electron.

> Kind of makes me wish GNU and Apple would do what Microsoft has done, integrate a Chromium-based WebView into the OS and optimize it to the gills.

For MacOS, you can almost always get high quality native apps. I don't know why this isn't the case on other platforms.

Strangely enough, it is mostly the mega-corps that insist on not making native apps, even though they should have all resources for it: VSCode, Spotify, YouTube, WhatsApp. Through and through laggy garbage apps if you don't have the latest machine.

>laggy garbage apps if you don't have the latest machine.

Does not describe Youtube.com or VSCode in my experience.

If you're on an Intel MacBook, using YouTube Music is a miserable experience. As for YouTube.com itself, it's okay, but FreeTube is significantly more responsive.

VSCode was more laggy than native competitors on my machine. Especially when selecting text. Maybe our tolerance for lag is different? I know a ton of people swear by VSCode, but when an app has bad latency on basic interface functions it just throws me off. People with higher lag/latency tolerance may be right, that it's worth the trade-off to get an otherwise better app. But I will always go for non-lag native apps.

>VSCode was more laggy than native competitors on my machine.

VSCode has become really fast in the last year or so. Previously, I sometimes used other text editors for a quick edit, but now any lag that VSCode may still have has fallen below my personal sensory threshold.

I dread the situations where I have to resort to Xcode. It's native, but it's unbelievably slow and crashes more often than any software I have used since Windows 3.1.

Maybe it's time to give it another try, then. It was about two years ago that I gave it a test ride.

> VSCode was more laggy than native competitors on my machine. Especially when selecting text. Maybe our tolerance for lag is different?

This is interesting because when I measured that a couple years ago it was one of the fastest options, right up with the native apps. I wonder whether there’s something like display scaling or an extension responsible for the difference.

> And I don't really buy the "Chromium gives Google power over the web", as it is permissively licensed, and there is at least one other giant stakeholder in the form of Microsoft.

Google completely controls Chromium, it is their project, they decide what patches are accepted into the code. Microsoft Edge just like Brave and the other forks all depend on Google for the actual code, all they do is add some minor features. Google does not care about Microsoft's opinion regarding Chromium's direction.

You have a deep misunderstanding of what "control" means.

So we need to to better optimise Electron to lower memory usage and CPU resources.

A simple XSS turns into RCE with Electron desktop apps. I don't understand how technically competent people can in good faith accept this outrageous risk.

It is. And like a typical Electron app, it installs automatically in a user-writable location, ignoring basic security standards.

At least then we could say "A Proton got an Electron".

And they could therefore call their app "Hydrogen", to make it more nerdy.

Sorry that was useless.

I wish they had a real IMAP/SMTP support and not some kind of unreliable service you have to run locally that does a bridge.

GPG key management is also a disaster. So they made it easy to communicate with others using proton fine, but communicating with non-proton users with GPG is a horrible experience.

Is it worst that other GPG solutions, or is it a bad experience due to GPG being… let’s say complicated? I’ve been using proton a lot because I like their products but don’t have a use case for GPG.

In thunderbird it was super easy for example. In mutt as well but required a tiny bit of initial setup (but then 0 maintenance).

I've been using Proton for my businesses for years. I have a legacy visionary plan that is _very_ generous based on current limits/prices. I don't have any plans on going anywhere else!

My only gripe has been searching email is a pain.. you need to download/index the data locally (due to encryption on the server), and the search quality isn't great. I am confident they will improve the search algorithm/filters in time... but you'll still need to download all of your mail to search (no way around it I know of unless some clever crypto people can figure that one out...).

They now have an option to enable searching message body text if you click the search bar in the web client.

yes, and to use it:

> ”you need to download/index the data locally (due to encryption on the server)”

I didn't realize that since I never clicked "Enable." That's unfortunate.

Link: https://proton.me/support/mail-desktop-app

"The system has received too many requests recently. Please try again in a few moments." It might be getting hugged to death.

I used the bridge for years without problems, still nice to see them investing more in user experience!

I just bought a few years of Proton Mail and moved my domain there using their Black Friday offer, great timing.

"Proton is restricting access to its paid “Visionary” tier for legacy users at first (though the company is reopening subscriptions to that tier through January 3rd, 2024)" I cannot find any info on how to purchase the Visionary tier.

I'm able to purchase Visionary via:

https://account.proton.me/mail/signup?plan=visionary2022&bil...

I must be logged in to see it. I don't know how long you have to have a paid account to be considered legacy.

I wish Fastmail had a desktop app. Or a mobile app that works when offline, for that matter.

Fastmail has good imap and jmap support. If which there are a great many clients that work offline.

IMAP sure, but are there really many jmap clients to choose from?

It's just another bloated web framework application sucking up all your memory.

Proton + CLI mail client = Meh.

With Proton Bridge running on macos, mutt could fetch & read mail but mutt's "e" command would not work. My editor would write out the message but the changes would not "stick" at the server: the message was always left unchanged.

Was I doing something wrong ?

Can we please stop regurgitating "encrypted email" as if it's some virtuous accomplishmenet?

Anyone can encrypt something. The challenge is keeping authentication to that encryption valid, accurate and secure.

As far as I can tell, PM does not in any way innovate on that. They just prey and capitalize upon laymen who foolishly equate encryption with security. In fact expecting any privacy from email at all is outright delusional.

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