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Now that I have got myself a paid ProtonMail plan, I want to know how get myself maximum benefits. After all, it is a rather expensive service (USD 48/year). Never heard about ProtonMail? It is a secure email service that promises zero-access encryption (meaning, only the user can read the data).

One of the perks for paid users is the ability to use your own mail client on the desktop. Because of the way ProtonMail set up its encryption, it can’t support SMTP and IMAP out of the box like Gmail, Outlook.com or others. If you prefer your own email client to webmail or mobile app, you have to install an intermediary program: the ProtonMail bridge, which is only usable for paid accounts.

Right now ProtonMail bridge is only available for Windows and macOS users. Linux version is still in beta stage, and I have to ask for it by email (bridge@protonmail.ch).

The installation is not quite painless. The developers offer deb and rpm packages, but you still have to do extra steps. Also, you need to make sure you have gnome-keyring installed on your system, even though you don’t use GNOME.

After installing ProtonMail bridge, the next step is to open the program and log in. You enter your credentials, like on the webmail version. If the app is successful to authenticate you, the bridge is ready to, er, bridge your desktop client to ProtonMail servers. To the desktop client, the bridge acts as both IMAP and SMTP server.

You need to create IMAP and SMTP accounts with 127.0.0.1 (localhost) as the server address on port 1143 for IMAP and port 1025 for SMTP. Your email client may warn you that “the site attempts to identify itself with invalid information” or other similar messages, but you can override it with security exception. You also need to set username and password, and this is different from your ProtonMail password. You can read these information from ProtonMail bridge application, in Mailbox configuration.

The ProtonMail Bridge officially only supports Thunderbird on Linux, but I find it runs without problems (so far) with Kmail on KDE Neon (a distro based on Ubuntu).