[mi100hael]

Sometimes the customer is either flat wrong or at least an asshole. ProtonMail sends yearly surveys to paying customers asking for help prioritizing development efforts, so suggesting they don't listen to their customers is asinine. IMAP support is in beta as a result of customers prioritizing it in those surveys. As they are likely limited primarily by funding and developer bandwidth, I see nothing wrong with their response above and will continue paying for their service.

[Accacin]

Fair point, but exporting email? These aren't crazy ideas from one person's wishlist. These are actual features that should be standard for any company providing an email service.

[jbg_]

(Genuine question, haven't used it in the last few years.) Does Gmail support exporting email, other than using IMAP which I understand Proton also has in beta?

[mseebach]

Yes, Google Takeout: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

I remember reading that they have committed to letting you download all you data from all their properties, and the list on that page is certainly long, but I can't tell if it's complete.

[ThePhysicist]

Exporting e-mails was one of the most requested features as far as I remember (https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/export-import-...) and I can understand people getting angry about this. I think Protonmail will have to move a bit faster on this now as holding your customer data "hostage" will no longer be an acceptable practice starting from next year (May 25) due to EU GDPR. So if they want to keep selling to EU customers they will have to implement a mechanism to allow people to get their data out of their system in an automated way.

And honestly, e-mail is not only about communication but also about archiving of data, and what good is an archive if you can't even get the data out of it when you need it? I've been a Protonmail premium subscriber and I would have loved to stay on their service, but the fact of not being able to get my e-mails out of there in case I needed them made it totally unsuitable as a business e-mail account.

[bartbutler]

We are working hard on import and export--they are top priorities, and we are fully aware that they are core features we are currently missing.

Keep in mind that pretty much everything is more complex with encrypted email, and that includes import and export. It will be done as soon as we can manage.

[blunte]

You could provide users the option to give up their encryption on the content they wish to export. Chances are, if someone is trying to export their entire account, they are moving away from PM. In that case, encryption is probably not their first concern.

Furthermore, even though PM keeps user emails in encrypted form, virtually all of those emails are unencrypted on one or more servers related to the recipients of those emails. So unfortunately, the encryption is less valuable than we would like.

[bartbutler]

That is exactly what we are doing, but it has to be done client-side of course, so it's not as simple as having a download link.