Anyone likely reading this right now knows I'm a fan of playing around with applications in various "productivity" realms. I also like to revisit things I've used in the past to see how/if they've progressed. I'm never one to shy away from switching things up. After listening to the CTO of Proton on the Decoder podcast from theverge.com I thought I've give Proton Mail and Calendar a shot again for a month just to see where things are.
A couple days in and I've got to say that I'm pretty impressed with the basics. Proton has been doing some significant performance work in Mail and Proton Drive and it shows. They've also been busy adding new features like Newsletter handling with auto-categorization of emails on the way (overdue actually, really looking forward to this one and hope it shows up soon).
Some other noticeable things:
- Proton Mail Bridge seems to be faster. I'm not sure if they've spent significant time on that or not but it certainly seems to be faster and more resilient than in years past.
- Proton Drive is significantly more performant from the few tests I've done so I'll be using that more over the next month.
- Proton Calendar seems useful enough at this point to be able to use it for my regular day-to-day stuff and they are doing significant work on it with a rewrite.
Part of the problem I've had with Proton in the past is the lack of progress on their main applications while introducing new products like Proton Pass and Proton Wallet. Browsing through their updates on their blog it seems they've gotten a handle on that.
The other thing is that encrypted systems like Proton are hard to build and update because the end-to-end encryption always limits what can be done compared to an email system like Gmail or Fastmail where everything happens on the server. Things like search indexing for full text search are easy in those systems, for Proton it's all got to be in the web browser. Security considerations also have to be taken into account for every single update so the time to develop new features just takes a lot longer.
Proton Mail Bridge mostly addresses that problem on the desktop because it allows using a regular email application like Apple Mail while still ensuring that things are fully encrypted. Proton really needs a Calendar Bridge to support third party calendar applications too but that doesn't appear to even be in their plans.
At any rate I'm impressed so far just a couple of days in especially with adjusted expectations based on past usage. I know the spots where Proton's apps just won't match their unencrypted counterparts and will make adjustments.