ProtonMail Bridge is now open source

“ ProtonMail Bridge is a desktop application that allows you to fully integrate your ProtonMail account with any IMAP and SMTP email client, including Outlook, Thunderbird, or Apple Mail. Open sourcing the code lets anyone verify how the encryption process takes place through Bridge as the emails are transferred between your ProtonMail account and your desktop email app.”

For anyone else wondering what this is, looks like it downloads encrypted mail from ProtonMail, decrypts it and exposes the unencrypted mail to your email clients as an IMAP server.

And to think I was going to cancel my subscription because the bridge wasn&#x27;t open source...<p>Not to mention that I missed the Linux support announcement: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;protonmail.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;proton-bridge-linux-launch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;protonmail.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;proton-bridge-linux-launch&#x2F;</a>

This is really cool to see.<p>Hopefully I can debug why the Bridge pegs two cores and writes out 10gb+ of a single log line over and over when I try to transfer one particular email through it overnight. :-)<p>(same thing happens in the dedicated mailbox migration program, which is probably using the same shared libraries)

I emailed them a while ago, to encourage pursuing an open standard for their protocol, such as through the IETF.<p>Open sourcing Bridge is helpful, and perhaps a step towards that.<p>Perhaps, with this reference, some other mail providers will implement the server-side protocol to Bridge, and some MUA developers will implement&#x2F;integrate the client-side protocol.

It would be great if someone forked this to allow it to function as an XOAUTH2 IMAP proxy for other providers.<p>This would be particularly useful with big e-mail providers (Google, Microsoft) looking at retiring password based authentication in the near future.

The new book “The Infinte Game” has an idea of ‘Just Causes’, an idea that means business, organizations, or individuals have a long term and often not totally achievable goal, that is to benefit customers and society.<p>I think that ProtonMail has the Just Cause of protecting privacy.

Nice to see!<p>I&#x27;m on Gnome Linux and ProtonMail only mention Thunderbird in their docs, but I&#x27;ve made the bridge work with Geary too. Geary is a bit more simple and modern looking email client alternative. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.gnome.org&#x2F;Apps&#x2F;Geary" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.gnome.org&#x2F;Apps&#x2F;Geary</a><p>Still I normally end up using the web interface for ProtonMail as it fits my workflow better and only need to have one tab open in my browser. They even have a nicer looking beta which also has an in-built dark theme at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beta.protonmail.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beta.protonmail.com</a>

Dang. That is encouraging that they can peruse an open source model.

It looks like you still have to have a paid account to use this?

I applause ProtonMail services and initiatives, it can only be good for us.<p>However why did they develop anything specific? SMTP &#x2F; IMAP already support secure connection (i believe). Or it could be encapsulated in a secure lower transport protocol.<p>Also I thought there were tons of GPG&#x2F;PGP extensions for email clients already to read encrypted emails