This is Bart, Proton CTO here. For clarity, the issue mentioned here only impacts Proton Mail Bridge, our desktop IMAP/SMTP gateway to Proton Mail encrypted email.<p>The fact that Bridge and its client can become desynchronized sporadically for some users is a high priority issue we have been working on. Bridge is open source, and as a result relies upon open-source components, and the root cause is an architectural issue in a library that Bridge uses to implement IMAP. When there are network issues, this library returns errors to email clients.<p>Unfortunately, there are hundreds of email clients, and some email clients don’t handle errors properly, and this leads to desynchronization.<p>Our error tracking shows this does not happen often (1-2% of Bridge users) and the symptom is usually incorrect display of messages or read/unread status which is fixed with an inbox resynchronization. There are cases where a combination of a desynchronized mailbox and a specific series of user actions can lead to accidental email deletion, but this is far rarer than desynchronization. Our implementation tries as hard as possible to avoid this. If you find you are missing an email, our implementation works around the issue by placing it in a users’ All Mail folder.<p>As Bridge is open source, updates on this issue have always been publicly posted on GitHub. Addressing this issue at the source requires replacing the core IMAP library. Unfortunately, there are no FOSS IMAP libraries that are sufficiently well maintained. Therefore, the solution is to build our own IMAP library called Gluon, which we have been focusing on since this issue was reported to us. You can follow the progress of this open-source project here: <a href="https://github.com/ProtonMail/gluon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ProtonMail/gluon</a><p>We are not refusing to fix the problem. The only possible solution is writing a new open-source IMAP library which we can maintain ourselves to ensure this class of errors cannot occur again. We have doubled the size of the team working on this this year so it is a priority for us.<p>We’re confident that this addresses the main sources of desynchronization and will be available in the beta version of Bridge by the end of the year.
For a bit of context/back-story, Richard, who opened this issue, later also wrote a blog post about the whole ordeal:<p><a href="https://blog.sigma-star.at/post/2022/07/protonmail-adventure/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.sigma-star.at/post/2022/07/protonmail-adventure...</a><p>In short: The idea was to move from a custom mail server to a paid, hosted solution. ProtonMail was chosen, with the bridge being used to get mails into a local mail client. Issues with the bridge eventually cropped up.
I didn't know what exactly is proton mail bridge. This is what I've found:<p>> Proton Mail Bridge is a desktop application that runs in the background, encrypting and decrypting messages as they enter and leave your computer. It lets you add your Proton Mail account to your favorite email client via IMAP/SMTP by creating a local email server on your computer.<p>Source: <a href="https://proton.me/mail/bridge" rel="nofollow">https://proton.me/mail/bridge</a>
I've suffered from exactly the same issues with Protonmail Bridge, and just this last weekend I decided (reluctantly) to move to a more standard mail provider (I chose Mailbox.org).<p>Aside from the UID issue discussed I also had problems with Bridge not supporting my particular use-cases. I created my own fork (see <a href="https://github.com/polaris64/proton-bridge" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/polaris64/proton-bridge</a>) to work around some limitations and to add features, but maintaining this was too much work, especially as paying for a mail provider was supposed to reduce maintenance burden. I have had a pull request open since the 23rd of June to merge these to the upstream version, but so far I haven't received any comments from the Proton team.<p>I like ProtonMail, I just wish Bridge was more standards-compliant.
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.
Yea the bridge is quite a hot mess, really.
I use it with Outlook on Mac and there are always syncing issues, passwords missing and i have to re-sync the whole inbox every 2 months or so.<p>I didnt realise some mail got deleted though, i need to investigate that.<p>I am a proton customer since 3 years and they seemed like a good bunch but now with all the stuff they are offering it seems like they have lost their way.<p>There is also no way of integrating the proton calendar into a 3rd party app like Outlook. This feature has been promised forever…
JMAP is a replacement for IMAP. Unlike IMAP it has immutable IDs[0] but not much support[1].<p>[0] <a href="https://jmap.io/#faq" rel="nofollow">https://jmap.io/#faq</a><p>[1] <a href="https://jmap.io/software.html" rel="nofollow">https://jmap.io/software.html</a>
I've been a paid Protonmail user for a while now, but it seems like if you don't use their webmail site or their mobile app, you don't get a very good experience.<p>The Protonmail Bridge with Thunderbird (the only somewhat supported desktop mail client on Linux) has always been buggy at times, such as archiving not working as expected, or creating a new mail subfolder in Thunderbird creates a parent folder with a "/" in front of it in web mail.<p>I understand there's probably some difficulty keeping everything E2E encrypted on the desktop side of things, but Thunderbird feels crippled if you want to use it with Protonmail/Bridge. For example, calendar doesn't work at all.<p>I love what Protonmail has been trying to do and have done, but all I really want is to be able to use a desktop mail client with calendar, and the Protonmail Bridge is not there yet. My subscription is up in January, so I may switch to something like Fastmail for the time being.
This sort of reaffirms my belief that UIDs are not sufficient for syncing mail. Emails should be hashed and synced by the hash which would solve other issues, like being able to redownload specific messages that may have got corrupted locally.
Proton mail has a great mission and I generally enjoy their solution.<p>But it is one of the worst UXs I have ever paid for.<p>The app rarely works and is slow. Clicking notifications results in an infinite loading screen resulting in you needing to find that email manually.<p>I am sure this is blamed on the encrypted backend, but to me it just seems lazy regarding UX.
Yeah, Protonmail Bridge is my main source of buyer’s remorse wrt. Protonmail. I moved my family e-mail set-up to Protonmail, so I can’t just move away without having to migrate everyone else too. So now I’m just stuck with it. Weird sync issues, random CPU spikes, having to use the web-UI for anything important, etc.<p>Not sure why they can’t make it work, but I guess trying to make their custom encrypted mail set-up simply doesn’t translate well to IMAP’s weird idiosyncrasies.
I'm not surprised. In my experience mail synchronisation with IMAP is fraught with edge cases that cause weird issues (I definitely had weird states happening with offlineimap and Co). I really wish JMAP will take off and give us a much better mail protocol.
I switched to Proton a few months ago, I quite like it. The outage a while back and this do worry me a little bit, but for me it's not enough to switch as I don't use the bridge, it has worked really well for me, and don't really like the alternatives for various reasons.<p>I do think it's relatively early stage. Yes, the email product has been around, but the more business orientated suite of products seems very early.<p>The email app misses some functionality, but what's there works and looks great. Calendar is progressing nicely. Drive is kinda useless beyond file sharing atm, it really needs a sync app to be useful.<p>Another qualm I have is that you can't buy extra storage, custom domains, etc. It makes little sense to me, for now it's fine, but at some point it might force me to find a different solution.<p>They certainly have a lot of work to do, and they need to get a grip on issues like this asap, but I'm willing to wait it out for a bit as I do like the direction, I think there is a lot of potential.<p>That said I am not sure I would move the company over to Proton like the issue raised, idk if it's ready for that.
Okay, rather than just complaining, I suppose we should gather alternatives, right?<p>mailbox.org<p>hey<p>fastmail<p>tutanota<p>mailfence<p>disroot<p>posteo<p>barracuda (for businesses)<p>vivaldi mail<p>mailpile<p>countermail<p>hushmail<p>I haven't used any of these, so if anyone has others or has experience with any of these, please share your experience.
Since I've used this for years, way before this ticket, the bridge has always been problematic (periodic full mailbox downloads even with the QT version for example), but since the version with the new ui it got even worse, emails coming and going.
A good workaround for email hosting is to run an IMAP server somewhere you control, and add it to your mail client. The server doesn’t need 24/7 five-nines or anything. It’s not for receiving mail. It could even be on your local laptop if that is the only place you need old mail, though I keep mine on a dedicated hosting machine in a colo so I can use/search it from my iPhones and iPads and other workstations.<p>You use an IMAP compatible email service like Proton or whatever to receive and check mail like normal. A couple times per month, move all the messages from the service to your own IMAP server’s folders, instead of the “archive” command that moves them to a different folder on the same server that received them. This is pretty straightforward in Apple’s Mail.app on macOS, and I imagine similarly so in most GUI IMAP clients.<p>This gives you the best of both worlds: a single set of maildir folders on your own server you can zip or back up with normal tools like rsync or whatever, as well as 24/7 HA reliable provider servers to receive incoming mail at all times in case your long term mail storage machine is temporarily down. You also won’t bump up against provider storage limits.<p>Self-hosting inbound and outbound email is a drag (though I do it for many of my less critical domains), but a 90% availability selfhosted message storage IMAP service is fairly easy to run. This has the added benefit of a provider hack or legal process presumably affecting only a subset of your most recent messages due to those being the only ones stored there.<p>I am a Proton and FastMail user (and use the affected software) but I regularly move all the messages from these providers to my IMAP storage server (in different folders) so if their systems fail the blast radius is not “all of my emails going back to whenever I started using the provider”.
I am a long time paid user of Protonmail. This isn't the first issue I've seen. It's is really annoying I have to use a bridge at all to be honest.<p>That being said, I've evaluated other providers like Fastmail. While their service is good I am not a fan of reducing my privacy. So people like me are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
If anyone is interested in rolling their own, I have used this since early 2012: <a href="https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda</a>
I stopped using it anyway since "ProtonMail logged IP address of French activist after order by Swiss authorities" (Which thing was against the promise they made to users publicly on their website by that time)
Well looks like Proton invested too much in advertisment.
They also run VPNs and, although they offer setup via confi-files, frustrate their customers by telling them the problem is on their side and demand they install that piece of software of theirs. Switching VPN providers without changing my setup and it was clear as day, the problem does not reside with me but them.
Instable connection, bullshit support telling you it is your fault and you do not know what you are doing...
Immediately quit their service.<p>i do not know how you would want to pay a service from such a company.
>We had to accept that it is not a perfect fit for our use-cases.<p>Rarely have I seen such mastery of the art of understatement.<p>I hope they check out Migadu, which has been excellent for me — and would seem to be a much better fit for them, too.
I had an email account suspended by Protonmail for using single-digit aliases for testing, took me a week to get it back, and that was only after signing up for LinkedIn premium to be able to message a non-robot.<p>It was terrifying enough that it has made me rethink how I manage all of my online accounts. Incidentally, I never had that issue with Gmail in 10+ years.<p>Not a Protonmail fan.
I had a bad experience with ProtonMail support either. When it works it's great, but they suddenly changed my password somehow, and I lost all of the emails as they get hashed. Then they didn't want to help resolving that. I was hoping this was one-off issue but it seems to me that ProtonMail has problems to validate as trustworthy business.
Not specific to this bug, but I recently setup a hosted Protonmail account with a custom domain and got myself and my wife on it because we do not trust G suite and don’t want all our eggs in one basket.<p>We both use the native mobile app and web based mail client.<p>In general it’s useable but the search functionality is useless. I’m hoping they’ll improve it.
My own mail policy is simple:<p>- a hosted service because host one myself is too much work CAUSED by anti-spam measure by some "self-appointed sheriffs" of the net;<p>- mail fetched from remote via fetchmail, no messages left on the server, filtered on my homeserver via maildrop, indexed via notmuch, muchsync-ed over SSH to desktop(s)/laptop.<p>That's is.
Yeah I migrated less than a year ago to proton but it is bug over bug (gpg not handled properly), this UID bug, nagging to pay for a larger plan. I'll probably migrate to fastmail (or if you have other recommended alternatives) at the end of this billing cycle.
> Finally I found the proof that UIDs as presented by ProtonMail Bridge are not stable:<p>Yeah well that's IMAP-compliant. IDs can change between sessions, that's always been part of that terrible standard.
I've been a paying Protonmail customer for years and recently started worrying about having put my eggs into the Protonmail basket.<p>/rant<p>Recent outage issues surfaced some major flaws with the mobile clients, on top of shaking my faith in the infrastructure (though no one can easily stand up to nation state actors so I do not blame PM).<p>And yesterday I was shown ads inside the web portal, along with a big call-to-action button that wasn't there before to go buy a new tier. Have I mentioned that I have been a customer already for years?<p>Never used the bridge, but honestly I am not surprised that it may be broken and not receiving the attention it deserves.<p>It feels like Proton (with its vpn, email and the whole 'suite' they are promoting under the brand) is simply another growth company, focused on adding more and more features rather than on good old fashioned stable products.
Some years ago, I evaluated Protonmail as a replacement for my personal gmail account.<p>When came the steps "can I easily move from this service?", I realized you have to _pay_ to export all your emails from the service. They make it super easy for you to open an account and receive emails, and then makes you pay if you want to get a copy of your own data.<p>I contacted the support to tell them it is likely illegal under European Data Privacy laws. They replied I can still export email for free one by one if I wanted to... (which is obviously not a valid answer when you have 5000 emails)<p>Then I looked in Swiss laws for a similar clause, and found that Swiss laws doesn't give users of online services the right to easily and freely get a copy of their data. It was a law proposal at the time of my research.<p>So yeah... Your data is so secure in Switzerland that you don't even own your data !
They also don’t care about locking you permanently out of your own e-Mail with no warning, for no reason, with no recourse.<p>Honestly - there are far better options out there. They’re not in anyway a responsible enough business to manage an e-mail service. It’s run more like a hobby project than critical infrastructure.
> the reason why we're not putting top prio on this at the moment is that we're doing a significant rewrite<p>The amount of bad, long-lived bugs that aren't addressed because "we'll rewrite it any day now!" in many software organizations is very upsetting
To clarify because comments (so far) seem to ignore what Proton Bridge does.<p>Proton Mail is web mail, like Gmail. That part is fine.<p>You use Proton Bridge as a connector to mail client software.<p>The thing that’s perhaps unclear is, Proton Mail is end-to-end encrypted email. You use Proton Bridge to walk your secure email beyond that enclave into whatever YOU are running in your userland scenario.<p>Part of all this is, you’re completely unclear on the concept of secure email the moment you need to use this bridge.<p>Which begs the question, why would you use Proton Mail if you’re gonna negate its unique value proposition?<p>Proton Mail is fine. It’s this misguided extension that’s the problem here.<p>If you’re fine with web mail then this issue doesn’t matter. If you’re not fine with web mail, maybe Proton Mail isn’t really for you.