• by Jess Nelson , December 8, 2017

As privacy, protection of email content and users and authentication become increasingly important, encryption offers a way to ensure that the contents of an email will not be read by anyone other than the intended recipient.

Founded in 2013 by scientists seeking to create a more secure Internet in light of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations, ProtonMail has taken steps to make encrypted email more readily available since its inception and has since grown to more than two million email accounts. The company and its data center are headquartered in Geneva and protected by Swiss privacy protection laws -- some of the strongest in the world.

Email communication and digital privacy are currently governed in the United States by the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), an antiquated policy that renders any email over 180 days old "abandoned." Thus, companies like Google and Apple can be forced to turn over any communication to government authorities with a subpoena.

A bill to fix this loophole, the Email Privacy Act, has been introduced and passed with bipartisan support in the House of Representatives several times in recent years. It would require a warrant and proof of probable cause before electronic communications providers are forced to hand over the receipts to the government, and that has been the sticking point that has stalled the bill's progress in the Senate. 

ProtonMail extended its end-to-end encrypted email service to desktop email clients this week.

The ProtonMail Bridge is a downloadable application that runs in the background of a desktop or laptop computer, enabling users to connect their ProtonMail encrypted email accounts with desktop email clients. The application installs locally and automatically encrypts outgoing mail and decrypts incoming email messages, so ProtonMail customers can send and receive encrypted email with no interruption to normal user activity.

The ProtonMail Bridge officially supports Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail, but it can be integrated with any IMAP/SMTP email client.  The application is currently available for Windows and MacOS users, with a Linux version expected for release early next year.