Four years ago, over 10,000 people contributed to our crowdfunding campaign and jumpstarted our mission to create a more secure and private Internet for all. The job is far from done.

In the summer of 2014, we shared our vision of a better Internet and invited you to join us. Over 10,000 of you answered the call, and together with over $550,000 in donations, ProtonMail was created.

With the overwhelming success of our crowdfunding campaign, you showed us you wanted ProtonMail to be more than just another email company. You wanted a community, united in a common vision of online privacy, security, and freedom. These principles still guide us. Four years later, the community is still the main financial supporter of ProtonMail, and community input guides most of our major product decisions.

In recent months, we’ve been charting a roadmap that will help us stay true to these ideals while multiplying our positive impact on the world. Today, we’re happy to share some of these ideas with you and reflect upon some of the lessons that we have learned along the way.

Why make email better?

When the ProtonMail team first met at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Physics) back in 2013, focusing on email seemed like an odd choice. After all, email is even older than the World Wide Web, which was not created until 1991 (also at CERN). However, despite its age, email has become the world’s most successful communication technology.

Today, there are over 3.8 billion email users, more than half the world’s population, sending over 280 billion emails a day. It is the primary method of paperless communication. These numbers have been increasing, and as the world goes digital, securing email is becoming more and more important. Even if you don’t use email for communication, email remains the main form of online identity needed to sign up for most online services. Four years on, email still forms the core of our vision, and even as we broaden our focus in the coming years, we’re convinced email was the right place to start.

Scaling privacy

As former physicists, understanding how to apply existing cryptographic techniques towards protecting emails was not too challenging. Where we met our first challenge was actually in infrastructure scaling. When ProtonMail launched in public beta on May 16, 2014, we expected potentially a couple hundred signups per month — not the 10,000 we received over the first weekend. We learned our first scaling lesson the hard way when our single server hit the redline and we had to halt new user registration after just three days.

We realized we were going to need a bigger arsenal. This was when we decided to ask for help directly from you, our users. It turned out to be the right call. By the end of our crowdfunding campaign, against all expectations, we had raised over $550,000, allowing us to get ProtonMail off the ground. We are proud to still be community supported to this day, and able to put your interests first.

Today, ProtonMail operates on a different scale. We now support millions of new users every year, at a cost of millions of dollars. Scaling challenges have grown as our community has grown, and we still work night and day on building infrastructure, maintaining high reliability and performance, and ensuring the highest level of security. It’s fair to say that building (and securing) an infrastructure that can someday support hundreds of millions of users is harder than it looks, and there is still a lot of work ahead.

In many ways, we are still learning our first lesson about scaling, but it is an important lesson to master to achieve our vision of providing privacy to every citizen worldwide.

Going mainstream

While we have managed to bring online privacy to millions of people around the world in the past four years, we still have a long way to go. To truly succeed in our mission, we need to reach hundreds of millions, or even billions of people. Thus, before we even get to technology, a fundamental part of our work is bringing privacy to the mainstream consciousness.

Despite all the cyberattacks and privacy-related scandals that have hit the headlines in the past four years, the majority of the world’s Internet users still don’t have a real understanding of the risks to society posed by Google or Facebook’s business model.

We have done a lot of public outreach to change this in the past four years. In March 2015, our TED Global about ProtonMail’s mission was published and has since accumulated over 1.6 million views. We also featured in both Season 1 and Season 3 of the hit TV show Mr. Robot, as the secure email provider of the main character. Our community has been steadily growing, with users such as the Hulk, New York Times reporters, and everyone in between.

However, the concepts of why privacy matters, or why privacy is under attack, have not yet become part of the mainstream discussion in a way that would allow most users to give truly informed consent when they check “I Agree” on most terms and conditions of service. To change this, we need your help. Now more than ever, it’s essential to spread the word and advocate for more privacy and security online.

Providing a better ProtonMail experience

The core of ProtonMail is security and privacy. Better security, however, always comes with trade-offs. From a product standpoint, our core mission can be understood as minimizing these potential tradeoffs, because ultimately the strongest security tools are useless if no one can use them.

For the past four years, we have been working toward achieving feature completeness: we want ProtonMail users to have encryption, but we also want you to have access to all of the other features that existing email services currently provide. Since we launched in 2014, the gap has closed considerably.

Today, ProtonMail is also on iOS and Android, and we have added core functionality, such as filters, labels, folders, IMAP support for third-party desktop email clients, an encrypted contacts manager, and much more. For advanced users, we have added custom domain and multi-user support, so now entire organizations can use ProtonMail to protect their email communications. In the near future, we will be launching additional features, such as encrypted full-text search and other improvements so that better privacy will no longer require making sacrifices.

What the future holds for ProtonMail

The main lesson of the past four years is that bringing online privacy to the world is a lot harder than we expected. On email itself, our work is still far from finished. We’re working on a redesign that will make the ProtonMail experience more user friendly. We also remain committed to building Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, Proton Docs, and much more, so that we can provide a more private alternative to what exists today. This is where we will focus our energy and efforts in the coming years.

Accelerating our progress will not only require more resources, but also more focus, and better ways of operating our teams. The growth of the ProtonMail community in the past four years has made us realize that together, we have an important role to play in the future of the Internet. With your support, we are resolved now more than ever to rise to these challenges and build a world where privacy is not only an option, but the default. We look forward to making the Proton ecosystem bigger, better, and even more secure.

From all of us on the ProtonMail Team, our sincere thanks.

Best Regards,

The ProtonMail Team