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Re:Improved Authentication for Email Encryption and Security by drdaeman on Sunday December 04, 2016 @09:02AM (#13100002)
One downside what totally prevents me from even giving ProtonMail a try is vendor lock-up. You'll be stuck with them with no option to migrate away while keeping historical data. No IMAP, no POP3, not even a proprietary backup format, nothing at all.

One could probably automate a browser to log in, iterate mailbox and dump contents, but that certainly won't be fun.

(Also, no way to use your own pre-existing key, only somehow generating a new one somewhere - not sure how exactly it's implemented and whenever I can trust it all...)

Re:Improved Authentication for Email Encryption and Security by vabmit on Sunday December 04, 2016 @09:49AM (#13100130)
IMAP support is coming very soon. Engineers are working on the code, now. It's a more difficult task than people would imagine because the implementations of the IMAP standards by some clients (like Outlook) is a bit... "interesting".
Re:Improved Authentication for Email Encryption and Security by hobarrera on Sunday December 04, 2016 @11:12AM (#13100388)
How would this IMAP implementation work? Some kind of local proxy that does the decryption on-the-fly?
Re:Improved Authentication for Email Encryption and Security by vabmit on Monday December 05, 2016 @09:30AM (#13105521)
Yes, exactly. The client is able to install and run a local proxy/translator application on their machine (currently, it's called a "bridge"). Their IMAP client connects to it and it interacts with ProtonMail's APIs over HTTPS. Since the bridge runs locally, the private key is locally decrypted with the client's password. The password is never sent to the server. The decryption takes place locally in the bridge software running on the client's computer.
Re:Improved Authentication for Email Encryption and Security by LeoPanthera on Sunday December 04, 2016 @08:52PM (#13102896)
Since they use GPG internally I would imagine it simply presents GPG-encrypted mail to you and relies on the client having GPG support.