Proton Technologies has announced that ProtonMail Bridge support is finally available to users on the Linux platform. The Bridge functionality enables people to connect their ProtonMail account with a desktop e-mail client. This app is necessary due to the way ProtonMail is built.
In order to use the ProtonMail Bridge desktop app, you’ll need to be a paying subscriber of the service. With this app, you get ProtonMail’s privacy and security features, such as zero-access encryption and end-to-end encryption, with your preferred desktop e-mail client. Bridge is compatible with all e-mail clients that support the IMAP/SMTP protocols but comes with special optimisations for Thunderbird.
Discussing the new feature Roxana Zega from ProtonMail said:
“Bridge delivers your ProtonMail messages to your favorite desktop email app by encrypting and decrypting the messages on your computer.
Your client stores a copy of the emails on your computer, enabling you to search their content. This also allows you to load emails for offline reading and processing. We are working on launching encrypted, full-text search and offline reading soon for the web and mobile applications.”
The Bridge app for Linux is available for download right now. Once you’ve installed it just add your ProtonMail account to Bridge and then configure your preferred e-mail client to use Bridge. You can use this guide to connect your e-mail client to Bridge.