ProtonMail partners with Facebook

ProtonMail is an easy to use email service with built-in end-to-end encryption. With ProtonMail version 2.1, the Swiss start-up offers the first email service to add seamless support for PGP encrypted Facebook emails. “I think this is particularly interesting because it shows that the innovation that ProtonMail is doing in Switzerland is significant enough to attract the attention of the world's largest tech companies like Facebook”, told ProtonMail CEO Andy Yen startupticker.

PGP email messages from Facebook will be automatically decrypted by ProtonMail when users open them in both the webmail and mobile apps. Previously, to use Facebook PGP, it was necessary to install PGP, generate keys, and use complicated plugins. Now, securing communications from Facebook is as simple as using a ProtonMail account. No setup and configuration needs to be done on the ProtonMail side, all that is required is importing the ProtonMail public key into Facebook. Andy Yen hopes to work with the Facebook security engineering team in the future to further automate this process.

The PGP support in ProtonMail 2.1 in fact extends beyond Facebook. Any PGP message sent to a ProtonMail account from any email sender, regardless of whether it is PGP/MIME or inline PGP can now be automatically decrypted. This is one of the great benefits of following open standards and this integration is possible because both ProtonMail and Facebook follow the OpenPGP standard. As this was one of the most highly requested features, the ProtonMail ream is glad to be able to finally launch this. In the coming months, this feature will be extended to also allow automatically sending PGP messages outside of ProtonMail.

More information can be found on the ProtonMail Blog.