Other email providers expect users to do all of the work of encrypting emails themselves which a tiny fraction of a percent of users actually do. I have read others criticize ProtonMail for not supporting IMAP and SMTP standards used by ordinary email providers (gmail, Outlook, Zoho) but I believe this argument is flawed. With Proton, incoming email is the main vulnerability as this is the only point in the chain where it remains unencrypted in relation to their servers. My primary reasoning behind paying a premium for their service is my email is all stored encrypted on their servers in the unlikely event anyone broke into their infrastructure, all the villains would find readable are the recipients and the subject of my emails (neither of which concerns me.) As I occasionally receive tax and other financial information through email, this grants me some peace of mind. ProtonMail has come along far enough now that I believe I'll stick with them for the long term. I have been hopping back and forth between and ProtonMail for a couple of years.

In Thunderbird delete the account from step 7-8.

Permanently store the certificate when the scary message pops open.

Open Thunderbird and setup a new account using account information from Bridge.

Follow steps 2-5 but this time only change the IMAP port to 1025.

Bridge will automatically close and reopen.

Change the IMAP & SMTP ports to a random number like 11 respectively and then click 'Okay.'.

While ducking around ( ) I discovered this is a known bug that will be fixed in an upcoming release of Thunderbird but I want to use it now!!! 🙎🤣 While setting up the ProtonMail Bridge with Thunderbird 78.3.2 today I discovered that Thunderbird's standard self-signed certificate dialog no longer appears before sending the first message making sending emails impossible.

Protonmail smtp