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From the show notes from this week's Security Now podcast (haven't listened to it yet, it's 2 hours long :-( )

Introducing ProtonMail Bridge, email encryption for Outlook, Thunderbird & Apple Mail
https://protonmail.com/blog/thunderbird-outlook-encrypted-email/

"I FINALLY have truly good news about eMail encryption.

"Today we are officially launching ProtonMail Bridge, which brings easy-to-use email encryption to desktop email clients.

"Ever since the day that we first got the idea to create ProtonMail, one of the most enduring
challenges has been how to do email security right while simultaneously making encrypted email easy enough to use for normal people. Since our early days working from the CERN cafeteria, we have been working tirelessly to address this specific problem.

"In the years since, we have made many great strides towards creating usable encrypted email, first with ProtonMail’s webmail interface and then with our award-winning iOS and Android secure email apps. However, one of our goals has always been to bring easy-to-use encrypted email to desktop. The problem is formidable. Desktop systems encompass multiple operating systems with dozens of popular email clients with their own adherents, and virtually none of them natively speak PGP, the email encryption standard upon which ProtonMail is built.

"Around two years ago, we created a small task force to tackle this challenge. Today, we are
finally ready to present ProtonMail Bridge.

"Later...
"Furthermore, after the technical documentation of the ProtonMail Bridge code is done, we will be releasing the source code of the Bridge, so that you can even compile it yourself instead of
getting the binaries from us, so there is even less need to trust us. This is an important step in our work to eliminate ProtonMail itself as a threat vector.

"Currently, the officially supported email clients are Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and Outlook, on
both Windows and MacOS (Linux is coming in Spring of 2018). However, in theory, any IMAP
email client can work with the Bridge, and in our beta testing, many were shown to work. If you
are a paid ProtonMail user, you can immediately get started here"
--
Angus Scott-Fleming
Sent from my phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse any brevity & typos.

Angus,

  I have been receiving Protonmail email messages from a user for about a year now, without problems or special setup on my machine. Further I have been able to email him without special handling, though I suspect that the message is in cleartext. Then it is being stored at Protonmail server to be picked up by a paid subscribed user. That final leg from Protonmail server to recipient will be encrypted.   The ProtonMailBridge seems to be supplying the first part of the outbound journey from my PC to Protonmail, and will be encrypted. As such it is acting as a PC mail client.  I installed ProtonMailBridge and it works fine as a mail client, but it is separate from Pegasus Mail.  I have not tried to use ProtonMailBridge to send IMAP from my PC, as it would be just the same as current Pegasus mail, which actually uses SMTP to do IMAP mailings.

So in summary I cannot see a major advantage of ProtonMailBridge over the current Pegasus Mail PGP extension (which does not need a paid up subscription).

Regards

Martin  

P.S Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year