ProtonMail first impressions

WereCat · June 20, 2014

Hi, It was not long ago when closed BETA for ProtonMail encrypted email service was launched. I registered and requested for the BETA and recently I got accepted. I want now to share my first impression with this e-mail service.

When you register you have two types of passwords for your account. First password is login password which is stored in database and you can change it, it can be restored if you forget it. Then there is mailbox password which will login you into your mail. This password heavily encrypted and it is not saved on ProtonMail servers. You cant change this password and if you forget it then you just lost all of your e-mails.

After getting into your mailbox the first thing that I noticed was very good UI and layout. I am gmail user and even though I use gmail a lot I always struggle with finding things I need in their UI. You should have no problem here.

Sending and receiving e-mail is very fast. But now when you want to send mail, you can choose it to be encrypted or to self destruct after set amount of time and also to password protect it. This is great right? But how it works if I am sending mails outside of ProtonMail lets say to gmail? If you decide to encrypt email and password protect it and you send it to gmail (for example) then the user on gmail wont receive any message. Instead he will receive link with hint for password (if you entered hint, it is optional). After clicking that link he will be redirected to ProtonMail site where he will enter that password and then the encrypted message will open.

This service is really easy to use and intuitive for any user I would say. I definitely recommend you to give it a try at least. But be aware that this is still BETA so dont use it as your main email client as of now because there may be some problems. I already had one problem when I was unable to login and I had to solve this with ProtonMail support. It got resolved really fast, they really seem to care about their service and users. I wish I could say more about how encryption works within this but I am not very good at that. I recommend you to go on their webside and read it there.

Thank you for reading this.