Author: johnk
I have been listening to Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, and Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine, so I’m extra paranoid these days.
I’m moving my work to Proton and Cryptpad.fr.
This document describes how well it’s going.
What’s migrating?
- Contacts
- Files
- Calendar
ProtonMail provides built-in importers for both Gmail and Outlook.com (the web-based version, not the Exchange Server client). Both importers worked perfectly, automatically labeling each message so I could easily distinguish between emails from different sources.
After importing, I set up forwarding in each original service to forward messages to my ProtonMail account. This ensures ongoing email delivery during the transition.
For desktop email clients like Thunderbird, I installed the Proton Mail Bridge. This Linux application creates a bridge between Thunderbird and ProtonMail, presenting an IMAP and SMTP server that Thunderbird can connect to.
On mobile, I tried both the ProtonMail mobile app and the web app, both of which work reasonably well.
One limitation I encountered is that I don’t know how to migrate existing email filters. However, this isn’t really a criticism of ProtonMail since I couldn’t easily transfer filters between services before either.
Contacts
Protonmail also copies the contacts from Gmail and Outlook.com.
If you’re using the Proton Mail Bridge, it does not synchronize contacts. So saving any contacts via Thunderbird won’t work.
Contacts are part of the Proton Mail mobile app, and the Proton Mail web app, so you can save your contacts through that.
Files
The files are pretty rudimentary. It comes with support to back up photos from your phone, but I haven’t used that.
I tried to share some folders to the public, and it worked well. It seems a little simpler than Google Drive.
The Files web app will show previews or play media, but there’s some size limit that I hit a few times.
I downloaded old files from Google Drive, and deleted them. I found that many files were shared with me, and I started to download and delete these as well.
Calendar
Calendar importation was a little complicated and confusing. Basically, you need to find the shared ICS file, which is one of the many ways to publish your calendar on Google Calendar.
The sync interval seems long, making it hard to alter your calendar, and see it reflected in Proton Calendar.
The Proton Calendar mobile app is pretty good, but has fewer features than Google Calendar.
Conclusion
Overall, the importation process was smooth.
The mobile and web apps work okay for me. I’m not a power user.