proton-bridge VS ProtonMail Web Client

That isn't really fair. If you read the article, protonmail essentially supplied the FBI the recovery email of the account. This is metadata that protonmail must have that isn't encrypted by the user for obvious reasons.

Regarding the "MITM" for every email sent, this is related to their "bridge" software which allows regular IMAP/SMTP software to use Proton Mail. This software must edit the emails to encrypt them in their scheme.

This software is open source and can be inspected and/or built locally. https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge

> This appears to be related to a behaviour that ProtonMail has of dropping all plaintext email if any mime-encoded parts exist.

https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge/issues/26#issuec...

I'm actually more shocked knowing that they drop plain text if there is a mime-encoded part (e.g. HTML). Just verified that all mails imported from GMail and all newer mails I received in PM only have the HTML part now, while GMail shows both HTML and plain text parts in message source. Great, now if I want to use a text-only client to read those mails in the future, I won't be able to.

Now I honestly wonder, how did they think this is something okay to mess up? Is there just no usable email hosting service for someone that want their mails not touched and also stored securely? Like, this is not even going to save storage space for PM - I'm paying for my storage.

Repository here https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge

The privkey is never loaded out of the keychain. Rather, it acquires a handle to the privkey and relies on the keychain to carry out cryptographical operations. (https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge/blob/master/pkg/keychain/helper_darwin.go and https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge/blob/master/pkg/keychain/keychain_darwin.go)

Oh yes. The Bridge shouldn’t have been marketed as stable for the past years because of this issue (see issue #220 on Github, reported 2021-09-29). It’s fixed in Bridge 3.0.

The source code is here https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients

> Finally, in keeping with our long track record of transparency, Proton Pass is open source so anyone can review and verify our security architecture

They sure do enjoy writing that sentence without including any hyperlinks. This (https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/tree/main/applicati...) appears to be the browser extension and https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/tree/main/packages/... appears to look like the backend referenced in the extension's readme, but that directory's readme is zero bytes so (shrug)

Fork the frontend and make your own lightweight option

PS: I hope that we selfhosters will have a modern, efficient, easy to use mail suite one day with modern features like JMAP, good self-learning spam integration, automated checks and validations for SPF/DMARC/DKIM or whether the IP/host suddenly appears in a blocklist and integrated encryption at rest for emails. Something that isn't 30 services in a container image, with 30 different configuration styles. Maybe even with an API integrated that's compatible to the ProtonMail frontend (like the neutron server once intended to be). Anyway, I'm sorry for dreaming. ;)

And if you want to customize it further you can use Stylus to add custom CSS, Tampermonkey to add JS, or even modify the whole thing yourself from source (if you run it locally it syncs with your actual account).

There are lots of useful End to end encrypted webapps such as Protonmail, cryptpad, cryptee and many others. And part of why we trust them is that the client side code is open source, so we can see that end to end encryption is really going on and is really secure. Its impossible to verify what code they are running in their server, but if the data we send them is already encrypted we can rest easy.