Electron Mail – Proton Mail Alternative

Electron Mail is an Electron-based unofficial desktop client for ProtonMail. The app aims to provide enhanced desktop user experience enabling features that are not supported by the official in-browser web clients. It is written in TypeScript and uses Angular.

Electron Mail – Download

The download page with Linux/OSX/Windows installation packages is here.

The way of verifying that the installation packages attached to the releases have been assembled from the source code is being provided.

Some package types are available for installing from the repositories:

	Maintainer
	@vladimiry since v5.1.8 (@joshirio before)
	@vladimiry since v5.1.8 (@joshirio before)
	@vladimiry
	@hiddeninthesand
	@vladimiry
	no specific maintainer (community)
	no specific maintainer (community)

Electron Mail – Features

Open Source.
⚙️ Reproducible builds. See details in #183.
⚙️ Cross platform. The app works on Linux/OSX/Windows platforms. Binary installation packages located here.
🔎 Full-text search. Including email body content scanning capability. Enabled with v2.2.0 release. See the respective issue for details.
🔎 JavaScript-based/unlimited messages filtering. Enabled since v4.11.0 release. See the respective #257 for details. Requires local store feature to be enabled.
📦 Offline access to the email messages (attachments content not stored locally, but emails body content). The local store feature enables storing your messages in the encrypted database.bin file (see FAQ for file purpose details). So the app allows you to view your messages offline, running full-text search against them, exporting them to EML/JSON files. etc. Enabled since v2.0.0 release.
📫 Multi accounts support including supporting individual API entry points. For example, you can force the specific email account added in the app connect to the email provider via the Tor only by selecting the Tor version 3 address API entry point in the dropdown list and configuring a proxy as described in this message.
🔓 Automatic login into the app with a remembered the system keychain remembered master (keep me signed in feature). Integration with as a system keychain is done with the keytar module. By the way, on Linux KeePassXC implements the Secret Service interface and so it can be acting as a system keychain (for details, see the “automatic login into the app”-related point in the FAQ).
🔓 Automatic login into the email accounts, including filling 2FA tokens. Two auto-login delay scenarios supported in order to make it harder to correlate the identities, see the respective issue.
🔓 Persistent email account sessions. The feature introduced since v4.2.0 version with the experimental label, #227. The feature enables the scenario when you to enter the account credentials on the login form only once, manually or automatically by the app, and then you never see the login form anymore for this email account even if you restart the app (unless you explicitly dropped the session in the admin area or it got dropped by the service due to the inactivity/expiration). If this feature is enabled for the account, manual credentials filling is the preferred option as a more secure option since you don’t save the account credentials anywhere (credentials are encrypted though even if saved, see settings.bin file description in the FAQ).
🔐 Encrypted local storage with switchable predefined key derivation and encryption presets. Argon2 is used as the default key derivation function.
⚙️ Switchable accounts handle buttons positioning (top , left, left-thin). See details in #36 and #175. Demo screenshots placed in the images folder (specifically this image).
📦 Batch emails export to EML files (attachments can optionally be exported in online / live mode, not available in offline mode since not stored locally). Feature released with v2.0.0-beta.4 version, requires local store feature to be enabled.
🔐 Built-in/prepackaged web clients. The prepackaged with the app proton web clients assembled from source code, see the respective official repositories. See 79 and 80 issues for details.
⚙️ Configuring proxy per account support. Enabled since v3.0.0 release. See 113 and 120 issues for details.
🌔 Dark mode support. See details in #242.
🔔 System tray icon with a total number of unread messages shown on top of it. Enabling local store improves this feature, see #30.
⚙️ Starting minimized to tray and closing to tray opt-out features.
🔔 Native notifications for individual accounts clicking on which focuses the app window and selects respective account in the accounts list.
📆 Calendar notifications / alarms regardless of the open page (mail/calendar/settings/account/drive). The opt-in feature has been enabled since v4.9.0. See #229 for details.
😎 Making all email “read” in a single mouse click. Enabled since v3.8.0. Requires local store feature to be enabled.
😎 Routing images through proxy. The opt-in feature has been enabled since v4.9.0. See #312 for details.
😎 Batch mails removing bypassing the trash. Enabled since v4.9.0. Requires local store feature to be enabled.
😎 Batch mails moving between folders. Enabled since v4.5.0. Requires local store feature to be enabled.
😎 Per-account custom CSS injection (per-account styling). Enabled since v4.10.0. See #355 for details.
📝 Spell Checking.

Electron Mail – FAQ

You got it here.

Electron Mail – How to build your own installation package from source code

Building on Continuous Integration server

The reproducible builds idea is respected by the project. So the simplest way to prepare your own installation package from the source code is to clone the project. The respective GitHub Actions CI config file comes with the project.

Electron Mail – Building locally

Regardless of the platform you are working on, you will need to have Node.js v16/lts installed. You might want to use Node Version Manager to be able to switch between the Node.js versions:
- Install NVM.
- Run nvm install 16.
- Run nvm use 16.
Make sure you are using npm v7+, not the v6 (run npm -v to see the version).
Some native modules require compiling process to be involved and for that Python and C++ compiler need to be installed on the system:
- On Windows: the simplest way to install all the needed stuff on Windows is to run npm install --global --production windows-build-tools CLI command.
- On Linux: python, make and a C/C++ compiler toolchain, like GCC are most likely already installed. Besides keytar needs libsecret library to be installed.
- On macOS: python and Xcode need to be installed. You also need to install the Command Line Tools via Xcode, can be found under the Xcode -> Preferences -> Downloads menu.
ProtonMail’s WebClient requires yarn to be available on your system. Additional setup is required if you run Windows, see.
Clone this project to your local device. If you are going to contribute, consider cloning the forked into your own GitHub account project.
Install pnpm.
Install dependencies running pnpm install --frozen-lockfile (setting PLAYWRIGHT_SKIP_BROWSER_DOWNLOAD=1 environment variable might speed up the process).
Build app running pnpm run app:dist.
Build a package to install running pnpm run electron-builder:dist command to build Windows/Mac OS X package and one of the following commands to build Linux package:
- pnpm run electron-builder:dist:linux:appimage
- pnpm run electron-builder:dist:linux:deb
- pnpm run electron-builder:dist:linux:freebsd
- pnpm run electron-builder:dist:linux:pacman
- pnpm run electron-builder:dist:linux:rpm
- pnpm run electron-builder:dist:linux:snap
The assembled installation package comes into the ./dist folder.

To recap, considering that all the described build requirements are met, the short command to build let’s say Arch Linux package will be pnpm install --frozen-lockfile && pnpm run app:dist && pnpm run electron-builder:dist:linux:pacman.

Data/config files created and used by the app

If you want to backup the app data these are only files you need to take care of (files localed in the settings folder):

config.json file keeps config parameters. There is no sensitive data in this file, so unencrypted.
settings.bin file keeps added to the app accounts including credentials if a user decided to save them. The file is encrypted with 32 bytes length key derived from the master password.
database.bin file is a local database that keeps fetched emails/folders/contacts entities if the local store feature was enabled for at least one account. The file is encrypted with 32 bytes length key randomly generated and stored in settings.bin. The app by design flushes and loads to memory the database.bin file as a whole thing but not like encrypting only the specific columns of the database. It’s of course not an optimal approach in terms of performance and resource consumption but it allows keeping the metadata hidden. You can see some details here.
database-session.bin file is being used in the same way and for the same purpose as database.bin but it holds the current session data only. The data from this file will be merged to the database.bin on the next app unlocking with the master password.
session.bin file holds the session data of the email accounts. The file is used if the Persistent Session feature is enabled for at least one account (the feature introduced since v4.2.0 version with experimental label, #227). The file is encrypted with 32 bytes length key randomly generated and stored in settings.bin.
log.log file keeps log lines. The log level by default is set to error (see config.json file).

Electron Mail – Removing the app

It’s recommended to perform the following actions before uninstalling the app:

If you had the Keep me signed in feature enabled (see screenshot), click Log-out action in the app menu (see screenshot). That will remove locally stored master password (done with node-keytar). You can also remove it having the app already uninstalled, but that would be a more complicated way as you will have to manually edit the system’s keychain.
Remove settings folder manually. You can locate settings folder path clicking Open setting folder app/tray menu item (see screenshot) or reading app.getPath(name ="userData") related app.getPath(name) section here.