ProtonMail User Experience

I’ve been invited to use ProtonMail, and my account has now been active for a little over a day. I’m busy converting all my online accounts’ contact email address to my new ProtonMail address. Something that has made the process easier is that my former provider has a way to automatically forward all emails to a different email address. There’s also an easy way to export contacts from my former provider and then import into ProtonMail.

The designers and developers at ProtonMail have obviously put a great deal of thought into the user experience of working with email. The interface is slick feeling, has an appealing color palette, and every button feels like it’s placed smartly. All your folders are conveniently located along the lefthand panel, along with storage and messages/month quotas (which are quite generous, as far as I’m concerned). The folders that are included currently are: Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Trash, Starred, and Spam. The Compose button is also found on the lefthand panel, at the very top.

Along the top are buttons which become disabled/enabled depending on whether messages have been selected or not. These include options such as mark read, mark unread, mark as spam, or trashing the selected messages. Above these button is a search box, which will be very useful once I’ve collected a number of emails.

Located in the main content pane, you’ll find your list of emails in the currently selected folder. It’s easy to select all, none, or multiple emails at one time using this interface. A very nice feature is the ability to tell at a glance which emails were received encrypted (from other ProtonMail users), and which were received unencrypted. Now I just need to get my friends and family to sign up for a ProtonMail account so that our communication will be end-to-end encrypted!

The only major feature I find missing in ProtonMail currently is the ability to create custom folders and the ability to set up filters that will automatically send certain emails into those folders. I’m hoping that the good folks at ProtonMail are working on this in a future version of the application.

The user experience, however, is top-notch. Even if I can’t convert my friends and family over to PM, they’ve included a way to send encrypted messages to outside email addresses, via a password that you share with each other through another channel. It’s very clever. Still though, I’m hoping that my contacts will also sign up for ProtonMail, and will no longer give away so much of their privacy.

I’m excited to see what the folks at PM come up with next, but they’ve already built an excellent tool for dealing with email.