Adding IMAP/POP and SMTP support for other email providers in Proton Mail
While I understand that protons first goal is to ensure privacy and emails from other providers like outlook or gmail cannot be as private as emails that run directly through proton it is a hard truth that most of us are still forced to use gmail or outlook.
Mostly because of work, but there are surely even other reasons.
For proton to ultimately become the “main hub” I believe it should allow users to send and receive emails from other providers through SMTP and IMAP/POP
The user is responsible for this and should understand that sending emails through these accounts are less secure. Proton should still allow it, in the end the user bears the consequences of their own decision.
And while Proton cannot ensure the privacy of those emails they can still provider some services like checking trackers and other services with emails from those accounts.
Allowing this would finally let me achieve the goal of using proton for everything.
It would also be easier to convince others to switch to proton as the initial switch would not be so harsh since they can still send and receive emails from their current accounts making the switch more seamless.
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JG commented
I have nearly 20 years of using GMail. I won't be replacing my gmail addresses with Proton address in all the myriad of places and contacts who have it. The "send as" feature where I can configure SMTP settings for my personal domain and then use a single mailbox to send as any of my GMail and personal domain emails is pretty much the one thing that keeps me using GMail instead of Proton. I don't actually have _any_ correspondence with other protonmail.com or proton.me mailboxes, so the E2EE between Proton mailboxes is already a moot point if I'm only really sending emails from Proton to external mailboxes. There seems to be quite a few requests for it, too, if you search over in the Proton subreddit.
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Tyler commented
This is impossible. It completely opens up your emails in plain text to be sent wholesale through IMAP/POP and SMTP. This is why there is a bridge app, so you can open emails on local machine without sending across a network unencrypted. This is not at all important.