Proton AG acquires SimpleLogin, an email alias service

Proton AG, the Swiss company behind the popular privacy-friendly products ProtonMail and ProtonVPN has acquired the SimpleLogin email alias service.

Simple Login is an open source email alias service that has free, commercial, and enterprise plans. Email alias services act as proxy servers that protect users’ email addresses online. Users register online using an email alias provided by the service to protect their own email address. All communication is forwarded to the user’s email address automatically. Options to reply from email alias and other features are supported by many services, including SimpleLogin as well.

Email spam and other unwanted content can be blocked by an email alias service, as it is usually just a push of a button to deactivate an alias and block any further communication.

We mention SimpleLogin as a great alternative to Mozilla’s Firefox Relay service as it offers more features at a lower price.

The acquisition by Proton AG has no effect on the SimpleLogin service as announced on the Simple Login Blog. The current open source model will not change and users can use the email alias service with all email providers as before. Proton AG will provide additional resources for the development of SimpleLogin.

SimpleLogin mentioned the following improvements coming to their service in the near future:

• The service will benefit from Proton’s infrastructure and experience in “running a battle-tested email service.”
• Uptime and incident handling will improve thanks to a 24/7 team.
• Ability to leverage Proton’s “email and application security expertise” and benefit from “ProtonMail’s anti-abuse and anti-spam technologies.”

SimpleLogin’s code has already been audited and the infrastructure has been hardened. Development will be faster thanks to the increase in development team members.

Proton AG plans to better integrate the SimpleLogin service into its ProtonMail email service.

closing words

ProtonMail users can already use SimpleLogin, but the service’s upcoming integration will make things easier and the whole process smoother. ProtonMail benefits from the move in several ways: it adds capabilities to its service in the short term that weren’t as good as its competitor’s services, and it’s reaping another source of revenue.

Now you: do you use SimpleLogin or ProtonMail? What is your opinion on the acquisition?

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