Starting today, the new contacts manager is available to all of Proton Mail’s five million users around the world.

The development and launch of this feature was driven by the feedback that the company received from many of its users in the investigative journalism space. “Last year, we had the unique opportunity to meet with many of our users in the field at the Second Asian Investigative Journalism Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, and one message that we heard over and over again was the need for better ways to protect sources,” says Proton Mail co-founder Dr. Andy Yen, “the new encrypted contacts manager today is the result of over one year of research and development into how we can best meet the needs of the thousands of activists, journalists, and dissidents who rely on Proton Mail to protect their privacy.”

In addition to protecting sensitive contact details with zero-access encryption (meaning that Proton Mail itself cannot decrypt the data, and cannot reveal the private email contact details to third parties), Proton Mail’s new contact manager also utilizes digital signatures to verify the integrity of contacts data.

“Combining encryption with digital signatures provides powerful protection that guarantees not only the privacy, but also the authenticity of the contacts saved in Proton Mail, and reduces the need to trust Proton Mail, as even we cannot access or change this information without your knowledge,” says Dr. Yen. In line with standard company practice, the software behind Proton Mail’s encrypted contacts manager is fully open source.

For more details about Proton Mail’s encrypted contacts manager, please refer to our launch blog post here: https://proton(nueva ventana).me/news/encrypted-contacts-manager

Proton Mail’s media kit can be found here: https://proton.me/media/kit(nueva ventana)

About Proton Mail

Proton Mail is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, near CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) where the founding team met in 2013. Every day, the Proton Mail team, brought together by a shared vision of protecting civil liberties, works to advance Internet security and privacy. Since its inception, Proton Mail’s infrastructure has been located exclusively in Switzerland, under the protection of some of the world’s strongest privacy laws.

Media inquiries: media@proton.me