An encrypted email service widely used among journalists and political dissidents just got several new sick features, including, let’s be honest, the only thing we really care about: a shorter domain name.
Image: ProtonMail
ProtonMail users can now activate a @pm.me domain name and use it with the same @protonmail.com email account they already have.
“Ever since ProtonMail launched, people have asked us for a shorter domain name since some feel that ‘protonmail.com’ is too long,” the company said in a blog announcing the updates. “On our user feedback forum, thousands of people have voted for this. We’re excited to finally make this possible.”
This is biggest update to ProtonMail, which uses end-to-end encryption and open source cryptography, since December, when it rolled out a new bridge tool that allowed users to integrate with Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail, a change the company hoped would bring many new users into the fold — mostly those who haven’t learned PGP but remain interested in the security strong email encryption affords.
“No longer is email encryption limited to just the tech-savvy and advanced users,” ProtonMail co-founder Dr. Andy Yen said at the time.
ProtonMail’s new merge contacts feature in action.
ProtonMail has also rolled out new calendar event previews, meaning users won’t have to download calendar event attachments to see what’s in them; you can also now merge contacts if, say, you have two contact entries for the same person and want to clean up your address book; and they now support right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, and others.
To top it off, ProtonMail now has a quick command palette (accessible via Shift + Spacebar) that allows users to type in commands like “open composer” or “mark as read”. It looks pretty nifty.
ProtonMail offers free secure email accounts and also runs a VPN service, which unlike Facebook, promises not to log your browsing history.