Once done, your messages will be downloaded from ProtonMail’s servers, decrypted, and indexed locally in an encrypted state. Confirm that you want to Enable the ability to search your messages’ contents. When searching the contents of your emails with the ProtonMail web app for the first time, you will see a pop-up asking if you want to search message content. Your emails remain private and secure, as the emails are searched locally on your device.ġ. When you perform a content search in the web app, ProtonMail goes through the index of your downloaded emails and highlights all matches, so your emails do not need to be searched on our servers. We achieve this in the web app by creating a local index of your emails and storing it using your browser’s web storage. If you have a paid ProtonMail plan, you can search the contents of your encrypted emails without giving ProtonMail access to those messages. Searching email contents with the ProtonMail web app To preserve this level of privacy, we have created a search function that allows you to search your emails without giving our servers access to your messages.īelow are the steps for the different methods you can use to search your messages privately so you can find specific emails whenever you need to. This is good for privacy because it means we cannot read the content of your emails.
ProtonMail uses zero-access encryption to store all emails at rest, and emails sent between ProtonMail users are fully end-to-end encrypted.