any update on this feature availability?
Also will adding this feature weaken proton mail security?

I am a customer who is unable to send emails that are encrypted even though I click on the lock button before I click on the send button.

A couple times the word in large letter Decryption happened on the top of my page.

I sent an email from that site to the support address given this afternoon.
I tried to send thru my gmail account and it would not take the address saying invalid,
so hoping to send through here so that in case there is a bug I make sure you are getting
the message that I require help ASAP.

Thank you.
Maraine

p.s. I am giving only my gmail address as not sure if my Proton one is protected here.

If I understand the back-end correctly, basically email in your ProtonMail box is encrypted using PGP, and your mailbox password is the pass phrase to your private key. IMAP access would require access to the encrypted mail messages, which would then be decrypted by your IMAP client (for example, Thunderbird with the Enigmail extension). This would require users to be able to assign their own PGP keypad instead of using the ProtonMail-generated one. It's not impossible, and the key assignment feature would be good to have regardless, but it does require some thoughtful changes to the trust model. (This all assumes I've guessed the nature of the ProtonMail "innards" correctly.)

You guys hiring? :-)

A much needed feature!

I am second to this request. The lack of IMAP access is the only reason why I did not sign up yet, as I use Outlook and Android mail app for emailing. I am not sticking to the encryption but at least your wholly privacy oriented zero-log and zero ad email service... Plus we can use OpenPGP as well

That would require either a plugin for Thunderbird or the ability to export the private PGP key. Plaintext POP or IMAP defeats the concept of ProtonMail.

Please hurry!

Hope to use existing e-mail client applications software such as Thunderbird.

I can trust a client running on my own computer, like mutt, Gnus, Evolution, KMail or Thunderbird, a lot more than I can trust ProtonMail’s web interface. There are ways to pin the JavaScript code used by the ProtonMail web interface, but doing encryption in a browser and pinning the JavaScript code with an extension seems like a hack that shouldn’t be necessary. Furthermore, I don’t see the web interface getting as powerful as a real client any time soon, or ever, and being able to use any of the many clients that support IMAP and SMTP gives me a lot more choice than being restricted to a specific web interface.

I don’t care too much about the “zero access” made possible by the web interface, because it’s not very convincing. Even if we admit that the JavaScript code is safe (and I’d trust the venerable GnuPG installed on my computer more than the .js files served by ProtonMail), ProtonMail will have access to all the unencrypted mail received. So the only mail ProtonMail has “zero access” to is the mail sent between ProtonMail users, or using the password and web page system, which is very inconvenient.

We can’t expect the whole world to move to ProtonMail, and the password and web page system is an inconvenient hack that does not use open standards. However, since IMAP, OpenPGP, SMTP, S/MIME and TLS are all open standards, they have many implementations and we can always expect more software and people to use them than ProtonMail’s system.

So for all these reasons, I’d like simple IMAP and SMTP access. If something can be created that would work with ProtonMail’s system at the same time, but that would still work with all email clients that have or can have OpenPGP integration, that would be even better in some regards. But I would prefer to have IMAP and SMTP access now, rather than never have them or not be able to use ProtonMail from some email clients (I’m fine with not supporting clients that can’t handle OpenPGP).

Addd a Plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird for ecive and decrypt mails and such!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thunderbird is a free software too... so it fits perfectly ;) if u wnt i should progmm some startup plugins pls contact me

Any progress with this feature? I do not see it with the new 2.0.6 version released today

It would be great if I could use thunderbird to access my proton mail. Is something like this being considered?

We are looking into how to successfully implement IMAP/SMTP with ProtonMail's encryption.

We are planning on releasing this feature in the future: https://support.protonmail.ch/knowledge-base/imap-smtp-and-pop3-setup/

It would be great to have access to Protonmail through IMAP on my BlackBerry device. I primarily use Hushmail as it's compatible with my phone. When Protonmail introduces a way to access my inbox from the BlackBerry hub, then I'll use PM exclusively. I like the idea of being able to see my emails, have the option of sending a basic reply, and then going to the browser for further encryption if necessary

of course, imap should be very nice, but I wonder how it coud be possible...

I use Mozilla Thunderbird to send and recieve emails mainly because it's easy to use and it can handle multiple email accounts like gmail and hotmail in the same program so you don't need to log in to different email providers. It would be really nice if Protonmail could be used with thunderbird in the future! But if it is not even possible because of the security of Protonmail, then I guess it is not happening :(

Thunderbird support!!

Being able to use this email service with Apple Mail is my number 1 request for proton. Data management is made much easier outside of the browser, please elevate enabling third party access to the top of your feature development list. Thank you for a great service.

How in the world would IMAP be able to work and still have a secure system? They store your email encrypted *without* the key needed to decrypt. You would need a special IMAP reader that was able to decrypt these messages on its own, no?