Protonthe Swiss company behind a range of privacy-focused products, including email teased a fairly substantial upgrade to its flagship Proton post and calendar Services.
Although Proton has expanded to cloud storage and VPNs over the years, encrypted email remains Proton’s bread and butter – and that’s perhaps the most interesting facet of its latest reveal.
Indeed, while Proton often positions itself as the antithesis of GoogleAt least from a privacy perspective, the company has unveiled a busy roadmap for the coming months that will usher in a slew of new features that are a bit reminiscent of Gmail. And that’s okay.
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On schedule
Google has gone to great lengths to make its ecosystem of products as tacky as possible, and for the most part it has worked, with Gmail being one of the most used email services in the world.
From a consumer perspective, Gmail offers great utility, including an email categorization system that automatically groups incoming emails by type under separate tabs, allowing users to find specific types of email (for example, “social” or ‘promotions’). While this system may not be for everyone and users can opt out, it represents one of the many promises Google makes to keep users coming back: “we’ll make your life easier” is the general idea.
With that in mind, Proton Mail will provide similar categorization functionality in the future. This may raise some questions about how Proton will achieve this without compromising users’ data privacy, as categorization certainly relies on content scanning, but the company said it’s working on doing this in a “completely personalized way”. implement using the sender category. If we take Proton’s word for it, this could prove to be a popular feature, one that could pave the way for those looking to transition from Gmail.
Elsewhere, Gmail has offered message scheduling for a few years now, allowing users to configure emails to send at a specific time and date, possibly when they’re deep asleep. Again, this is something Proton is working on now as well, bringing it closer to feature parity with Gmail.
Proton Mail: Send schedule Image credit: Proton
Other new features on the way include email reminders, where users can set an alert to remind themselves to reply at a later time, while also being able to “snooze” emails, which serves a similar purpose. This is similar to a feature that Gmail has been offering since 2018.
And a little more in line with Proton’s focus on privacy, the company said it will add new features to block email tracking so that companies or malicious parties can’t know when an email has been opened, exposing the data become unusable.
Proton Mail: Protection against email tracking Image credit: Proton
As it stands, searching emails in Proton Mail has its limitations. For those on the web, searching for message content is reserved for premium paid users, but on mobile, it’s not an option at all except for metadata like the subject line. Going forward, Proton said full message search will be extended to mobile apps, downloading emails to a user’s device so they can use keywords to search message content through a locally stored index.
It is a date
However, upcoming changes are not limited to Proton Mail. The company is gearing up to launch a native Calendar app for iPhone in the coming weeks, almost a year later arrived on Android. In addition, it will also roll out a new 3-day and 7-day view (similar to Google Calendar) within the Proton Calendar app, while there will also be a “full agenda” view that displays the day’s scheduled activities in a chronological list full of infinite scrolling.
Finally, Proton also allows users to create to-do lists and turn tasks into reminders that appear in the Calendar app.
Proton Calendar: Views Image credit: Proton
Integrations
As Proton continues to expand its product range, with its Proton Drive cloud storage service recently in beta on the web, the company now plans to roll out deeper integrations across its product suite. For example, email attachments that exceed Proton Mail’s 25 MB limit are automatically uploaded to Proton Drive, with the recipient accessing the file via a secure link – again, this is something Google has been offering since 2013.
And in April of this year, Proton acquired the SimpleLogin email alias service, a platform that allows users to hide their real email address when signing up for online services. Proton said it plans to build tighter integrations between SimpleLogin and Proton Mail email aliases.
Finally, Proton also revealed that it’s bringing single sign-on (SSO) to mobile, meaning users of Proton’s various apps only need to log in once to access each individual service – this is currently available, but only through a web browser.
As for timelines, Proton is not disclosing specific dates just yet, though it did say Proton Mail’s email scheduling and email tracking blocker will arrive within the next month, as will the new iPhone Calendar app and the 3-day and 7-day updates. -day calendar views.
Everything else will land at different intervals in 2023.
