Be like Gmail? Proton Mail will soon offer email categorization, message scheduling, and more • TechCrunch

protonsSwiss company behind a set privacy-focused products including email, yes provocative a pretty substantial upgrade to its flagship proton letter and calendar service.

Although Proton has expanded to cloud storage and VPN over the years, encrypted email remains Proton’s bread and butter – and that’s arguably the most exciting aspect of its latest reveal.

Indeed, while Protons often position themselves as Google’s antithesis, at least from a privacy perspective, the company has revealed a busy roadmap in the coming months that will usher in a bunch of new features that are a bit reminiscent of Gmail. And that’s not a bad thing.

On schedule

Google has gone to great lengths to make its ecosystem of products as engaging as possible, and for the most part it has worked, with Gmail among the most widely used email services in the world. The earth.

From a consumer perspective, Gmail offers great convenience, includes an email classification system automatically group incoming emails by type in separate tabs, helping users find specific email types (for example, “social” or “promotional”). While this system may not be right for everyone, and users can opt out, it represents one of the many promises Google makes to keep users coming back: “we’ll make life easier.” make your life easier,” is the general idea.

With that in mind, Proton Mail in the future will provide similar sorting functionality. This may raise some questions about how Proton will achieve this without compromising user data privacy, where classification certainly depends on scanning the content, but the company says it’s working on doing this in a “completely private way” using the sender directory. In Proton’s words, this could prove to be a popular feature, one that could help facilitate the transition from Gmail.

Elsewhere, Gmail provided message scheduling has been around for several years, allowing users to configure emails to be sent at a specific date and time, quite possibly while they are asleep. Again, this is something Proton is currently working on as well, bringing it closer to the Gmail-like feature.

Proton Mail: Schedule sending Image credit: Proton

Other new features coming soon include email reminders, whereby users can set alerts to remind themselves to reply later, and they can also “snooze” emails for the same purpose. This is similar to a feature that Gmail has offered since 2018.

And one more in line with Proton’s focus on privacy, the company says it will add new features to block email tracking, so that companies or bad guys can’t tell when an email was opened, thus rendering the data unusable.

Proton Mail: Email tracking protection Image credit: Proton

As it stands, searching by email in Proton Mail has limitations. For those on the web, message body search is reserved for premium paid users, but on mobile it’s not really an option beyond metadata such as the subject line . In the future, Proton says it will expand search for all messages to mobile apps, with emails downloaded to users’ devices so they can use keywords to search. message content through the locally stored index.

It’s a date

However, the upcoming changes are not limited to Proton Mail. The company is gearing up to launch its native Calendar app for iPhone in the next few weeks, almost a year after its launch. has arrived on Android. On top of that, it will also implement a new 3-day and 7-day view (similar to Google Calendar) in the Proton Calendar app, and will also have a “whole agenda” view showing the plan. of a day. activities in a chronological list complete with infinite scrolling.

Finally, Proton will also allow users to create to-do lists and turn tasks into pop-up reminders inside the Calendar app.

Proton Calendar: Views Image credit: Proton

integrated

As Proton continues to expand its product line, with the Proton Drive cloud storage service recently available in beta on the web, the company is now planning to roll out deeper integrations across its product suite. me. For example, email attachments that exceed Proton Mail’s 25MB limit are automatically uploaded to Proton Drive, with the recipient able to access the file via a secure link — again, this is what Google provided since 2013.

And in April of this year, Proton purchased email alias service SimpleLogin, a platform that allows users to shield their real email address when signing up for online services. Proton says it plans to build tighter integrations between the SimpleLogin and Proton Mail email aliases.

Finally, Proton also revealed that it is bringing single sign-on (SSO) to mobile devices, meaning users of Proton’s various apps will only have to sign in once to access each service. individually — this feature is currently available but only through a web browser.

As for the timeframe, Proton has yet to reveal any specific dates for anything, although it has been announced that Proton Mail’s email tracking and email scheduling blocker will be rolling out in the next month, as well as a new app. Use the new iPhone Calendar and the 3 -Day and 7-Day Calendar view.

Everything else will land at different times throughout 2023.