• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, July 18, 2024

Proton Mail, the secure email service based in Switzerland, has a new tool -- a writing assistant that it says is privacy conscious.  

The genAI offering, Proton Scribe, helps teams compose drafts while protecting sensitive data, the company says.   

It’s not clear whether this would help in the writing of marketing emails. But Proton says writing is a simple process in any case.  

A blog post on the product advises the user to “type in what you’d like to write about, and it will create a draft for you.” 

From there, it says, users can utilize the Shorten or Proofread options to clean up their drafts, then improve the tone with the “Formalize” command.

 “Your emails will be professional and polished — even if your first language is not English,” Proton advises.

This sounds like any number of AI-powered writing programs. But Proton claims it has also developed “internal AI models for improving the answer quality and response times of customer support, while preserving privacy by not sending data to third parties like OpenAI.” 

The trick is that the data never leaves the device. In addition, “Scribe does not train on your inbox data — it cannot because of Proton Mail’s zero-access encryption.” 

Again, this tool is not necessarily of use in email marketing. But it’s not hard to imagine. At some point, maybe Scribe will mimic ad copy that makes a human connection — if Proton allows it to use copy for training.