For years, I, like many users, didn't really mind the lack of CalDAV/CardDAV support or two-way sync with external clients. The Proton apps (web, desktop, mobile) were good enough that I lived comfortably inside the Proton ecosystem, and I accepted the interoperability trade-off in exchange for end-to-end encryption. Fair enough.
But the landscape has changed, and I believe Proton needs to revisit this priority.
With the rise of AI agents and assistants, access to calendar and contacts via standard protocols has gone from a nice-to-have to a critical requirement. A personal AI agent running on my own machine, with full respect for my privacy (which is exactly the Proton philosophy), should be able to:
Read my calendar: view today's events, check availability, prepare me for upcoming appointments.
Create and modify events: book a doctor's appointment when I ask for it in conversation, reschedule a meeting, block time for a task.
Read and manage my contacts: look up someone's details, add a new contact extracted from an email signature, keep the address book consistent with correspondence.
Today, this is simply impossible with Proton Calendar and Proton Contacts. The Mail Bridge gives local agents full IMAP/SMTP access to my mailbox, which is fantastic, but there is no equivalent for calendar or contacts. The only options are:
the read-only ICS subscription link (delayed by hours, no write access), or
unofficial third-party bridges that rely on Proton's internal API (fragile, unmaintained, and at odds with the security-first spirit of Proton).
Neither is a real answer.
What I'm asking for is a calendar and contacts counterpart to the Mail Bridge: a locally-running, officially supported way (CalDAV/CardDAV on localhost, or any equivalent mechanism) for trusted, user-controlled applications and AI agents to read and write my calendar and address book, while keeping end-to-end encryption between Proton clients.
This would be entirely consistent with Proton's model: the agent runs on the user's own machine, with the user's own credentials, exactly like the Mail Bridge does for email. It wouldn't weaken encryption, and it would make Proton Calendar and Proton Contacts genuinely usable in the way people increasingly manage their lives: through conversation with an assistant.
Without this, users who want an AI agent to manage their schedule and address book are forced to move this data out of Proton entirely (to Google, Nextcloud, Mailfence, etc.), which is the opposite of what Proton wants and what privacy-minded users want. Please treat local calendar and contacts access as a strategic priority, not a backlog item.
jwmfr
For years, I, like many users, didn't really mind the lack of CalDAV/CardDAV support or two-way sync with external clients. The Proton apps (web, desktop, mobile) were good enough that I lived comfortably inside the Proton ecosystem, and I accepted the interoperability trade-off in exchange for end-to-end encryption. Fair enough.
But the landscape has changed, and I believe Proton needs to revisit this priority.
With the rise of AI agents and assistants, access to calendar and contacts via standard protocols has gone from a nice-to-have to a critical requirement. A personal AI agent running on my own machine, with full respect for my privacy (which is exactly the Proton philosophy), should be able to:
Read my calendar: view today's events, check availability, prepare me for upcoming appointments.
Create and modify events: book a doctor's appointment when I ask for it in conversation, reschedule a meeting, block time for a task.
Read and manage my contacts: look up someone's details, add a new contact extracted from an email signature, keep the address book consistent with correspondence.
Today, this is simply impossible with Proton Calendar and Proton Contacts. The Mail Bridge gives local agents full IMAP/SMTP access to my mailbox, which is fantastic, but there is no equivalent for calendar or contacts. The only options are:
the read-only ICS subscription link (delayed by hours, no write access), or
unofficial third-party bridges that rely on Proton's internal API (fragile, unmaintained, and at odds with the security-first spirit of Proton).
Neither is a real answer.
What I'm asking for is a calendar and contacts counterpart to the Mail Bridge: a locally-running, officially supported way (CalDAV/CardDAV on localhost, or any equivalent mechanism) for trusted, user-controlled applications and AI agents to read and write my calendar and address book, while keeping end-to-end encryption between Proton clients.
This would be entirely consistent with Proton's model: the agent runs on the user's own machine, with the user's own credentials, exactly like the Mail Bridge does for email. It wouldn't weaken encryption, and it would make Proton Calendar and Proton Contacts genuinely usable in the way people increasingly manage their lives: through conversation with an assistant.
Without this, users who want an AI agent to manage their schedule and address book are forced to move this data out of Proton entirely (to Google, Nextcloud, Mailfence, etc.), which is the opposite of what Proton wants and what privacy-minded users want. Please treat local calendar and contacts access as a strategic priority, not a backlog item.