API for sending emails through ProtonMail similar to AWS SES
I am looking to send emails from my monitoring service using the domain I have set up on ProtonMail. It would be easier/more secure to have email for my domain sent through ProtonMail's servers. I am not looking for a high volume of email, just a handful of nightly status emails (~5-10). Rather than misappropriate the ProtonMail Bridge software, I'd like to use an API so that I can programmatically send emails on the terms the ProtonMail team deems to be reasonable for API-based mail sending. API-based mail send allows for a more intelligent approach to sending email as an API-based solution should be able to respect the boundaries set by the API in terms of rate limiting and general usage. An API would also be a more secure solution than simple SMTP transmission.
Dan DeRemer
shared this idea
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Micha Mailänder commented
Providing an API also allows 3rd party business tools like Calendly to integrate with ProtonMail and Calendar which is highly needed to use Proton as a Microsoft or Google Alternative in Business..
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Mathieu Ledru
commented
This had 3 of my votes.
I agree to get a reasonable SMTP Api access for non Business customers.
For my case, I subscribed to Mail Plus Individual Plan to get a dedicated custom address and this fits my need for now. Going to Business plan is not the same in terms of usage and expenses !Documentation can be found here : https://proton.me/support/smtp-submission
Others organisations as Google Workspace or AWS SES got paid plan but are free for limited usage.
As @alex said, we are tight to Protonmail Bridge because specific of encryption logic. So I can't use other SMTP providers so I had to install Protonmail Bridge on my server to get this work programmatically. Then I have to allocate server ressources to run proton mail bridge, install the bridge explained here (official) https://proton.me/support/mail/bridge/installation-linux and here (install as a service) https://gist.github.com/pakokrew/55e8e1226b36eebb7ac9f2464f62844c, ensure the service is constantly up and running (no downtime) on my server, have to maintain the service up to date and in therms of security have to ensure the service is not accessible to public and only locally.
Theses reasons I would have preferred use the token based proposal by Proton but only available for Business.
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Nic Estrada
commented
This is absolutely necessary for me to convert my business to use protonmail. I have a personal account, but I need to be able to programatically send emails through protonmail or I will find a different service.
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Alex
commented
This is pretty much my 10 vote worth issue with your service and the reason why I might look for alternatives and do not prolongate my subscription as I cannot cancel for this reason unfortunately.
I just tied the ProtonMail bridge that can be hacked to use it as a poor man's email relay with just little work for ProtonMail:
Please provide a CLI version of the bridge. The auth, incl. 2FA can be done on the desktop. ~/.config/protonmail/bridge can be inserted into a service container to serve as an STMP@localhost. Still, to sleep well, I would like to constrain the bridge that is deployed in such a way to just sending (SMTP) but not receiving (IMAP) any emails.
@ProtonMail staff
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Alex
commented
Programmatic email delivery is pretty much a hard-blocker for every organization to switch to Protonmail. I've used the Gmail API to send emails programmatically which is not possible now. What prevents me from doing this now is that I cannot authorize any Gmail account to send emails on my behalf. I cannot authorize Gmail do send emails on my behalf because I cannot specify any SMTP server which would be used to send emails.
Providing SMTP should not be that difficult. I understand that the encryption voodoo won't work but I do not care and as a paying customer I want to be able to accept this disadvantage.