Rafficer

Hey Andy!

First of all, thank you for creating and leading such an amazing service and fighting for a better online world!

Here are a few questions for you:

1. Is there a benefit in being a particle physicist when providing an Email service? Was there ever a challenge where you noticed that your previous work and experience helped you solve it? If so, what was it?

2. What happened at the most stressful day at ProtonMail and how did you and your team manage to overcome it?

3. What was the biggest challenge (difficulty-wise) throughout the 4 years of ProtonMails existence, why in particular was it so hard and how did you solve the problem?

4. What was the hardest feature to implement and why was it more of a challenge than the other features?

5. Did you make a mistake in the early days of ProtonMail that you wish you would have done differently, because it took a long time to correct? If so, what was it?

6. What's the best/most motivating part of your job?

7. What is the biggest lesson you've learned throughout the years of creating ProtonMail?

Thank you for doing this IAmA and keep up the great work! :)

Best, Rafficer.

Here are some questions that got asked by members from the r/ProtonMail community, which didn't have the time to attend:

by /u/rahjah:

It seems that current encryption options reside at the extemes of a spectrum: user-friendly but somewhat insular services like Protonmail, or universal but archaic and daunting methods like PGP. Can there be a middle ground? Or does trying to federate services impede innovation?

by /u/simooooon

When can we expect a calendar? I think quite a few people struggle to move from gmail due to the lack of a proper calendar.

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And generally there were a few questions about upcoming features, so can you maybe lose a word or two about ProtonDrive and the open-sourcing of the mobile apps, the ProtonMail Bridge and the VPN Client (if you plan to open-source them as well).

Thank you!