The past 6 months have been intense for SimpleLogin, with many new users, many new features, and many new technical challenges. I’m now happy to share this news with you: SimpleLogin is now part of the Proton family.

SimpleLogin was started in 2019. After more than a year of coding, we launched a beta version in 2020 and a public version at the beginning of 2021. SimpleLogin’s mission is to protect your online identity and we follow a transparency model since the beginning: the code is 100% open source and product development decisions are discussed openly with the community. SimpleLogin has received a lot of positive feedback from the privacy community and with your help, we have built many new features while maintaining high reliability and stability.

Proton is a Swiss privacy company best known for Proton Mail (the world’s largest encrypted email service) and Proton VPN (one of the world’s largest VPN services). Proton has been an inspiration for SimpleLogin. We like Proton’s mission and its transparency, open-source nature, and user-first culture. Many of you also like Proton, as quite a few SimpleLogin users are also using Proton Mail.

What this means for the community

In terms of values and philosophy, Proton and SimpleLogin are well-aligned. Because of this, not much is changing:

• SimpleLogin’s current model will continue (100% open source)
• SimpleLogin stays email provider agnostic (SimpleLogin remains compatible with all email services)
• SimpleLogin will continue to develop (but now with additional resources from Proton)

SimpleLogin will continue to operate as an independent service and SimpleLogin SAS will continue to be based in Paris, France.

What’s improving

SimpleLogin will benefit from Proton infrastructure and expertise of running an email service that’s been battle-tested. With a 24/7 team, SimpleLogin infra will also have a better uptime and incidents (if any) will be solved much faster. SimpleLogin will also be able to leverage Proton’s expertise in email and application security, and benefit from Proton Mail’s anti-abuse and anti-spam technologies in order to solve increasing challenging abuse issues at scale.

By working together, we have already hardened SimpleLogin’s infrastructure, performed a security audit of SimpleLogin’s code, and improved our monitoring to ensure we can quickly act in case of attacks. With more people in the team, feature development is also faster, so look for more announcements in the coming days.

Proton users can expect to have an optional integration in the next coming months between Proton Mail and SimpleLogin that will come with an improved user experience. SimpleLogin support team is now doubling in size with Proton help, so expect a faster time if you have a question.

Staying user first

This move does not in any way diminish our vision of staying user first. Since the beginning, SimpleLogin has been built to be a sustainable company with a small team. However, as privacy has gone mainstream, email alias services are also becoming more complex. In order to meet this challenge, we needed to make a choice: either go through a fund-raising process or to join forces with a bigger company.

As Geneva is just 3 hours by train from Paris, we’ve been able to visit the Proton office, meet the Proton leadership team and we can feel a similar culture and work ethic. Due to our shared vision, there have been a number of informal contacts over the years and Proton has stood out to be the best fit. We are convinced and want to be part of the Proton mission which is to build a better Internet that respects privacy. It’s exciting to know what we can do with Proton experiences and resources.

Transparency is a big part of SimpleLogin and we will continue asking your feedback on our social media and our forum. As a start, what would you like to see next from SimpleLogin + Proton? Just ping us on Twitter, Reddit, GitHub with any ideas you have!