ProtonMail has launched Protonmail Bridge. This single application adds ProtonMail end-to-end encrypted email on all desktop email clients including Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail. The app does not require installing plugins, managing keys, or changing user behaviour to achieve PGP encryption.
ProtonMail Bridge is an innovative application designed to revolutionize encrypted email. After nearly two years of research and development, the company has solved one of the longstanding obstacles that has prevented the widespread adoption of encrypted email, that is, the need for end-user retraining and email behavior changes that usually lead to a loss in productivity.
“The ProtonMail Bridge is literally a bridge between the unencrypted and encrypted worlds in the sense that it allows your average user to benefit from the added security and privacy of end-to-end encryption without having to make any changes to their email usage behavior.” says ProtonMail co-founder Dr. Andy Yen, “This means email encryption is no longer limited to just the tech savvy and advanced users.”
The software acts as a layer between desktop email clients and ProtonMail’s encrypted email servers, handling all aspects of encryption, decryption, and key management in a way that is completely transparent to the end user. For the first time ever, it is possible to use encrypted email with Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail without needing to install plugins, extensions, or make other modifications to users’ desktop email clients. The power of this approach is that users can continue to use email as they always have, without needing to make any changes to their existing workflow in order to use end-to-end encryption.
By conducting the encryption and decryption in a middleware between email servers and the user’s email client, the ProtonMail Bridge also enables full-text search of encrypted messages for the first time ever, as the native search capabilities of desktop email clients can be used without compromising the encryption.
“Over the past 3 years, we have built some of the world’s most useful encryption technologies that protect millions worldwide, but the ProtonMail Bridge is certainly the most innovative one, and the one that will have the most far-reaching impact,” says Dr. Yen, “Today’s launch accomplishes one of our long-standing goals of bringing security technology to the mainstream.”
For now, the ProtonMail Bridge officially supports Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, although it can work with any IMAP/SMTP email client. The ProtonMail Bridge is currently available for Windows and MacOS, with a Linux version coming in early 2018.
(Press release)
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