Proton Bridge vs Superhuman
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Proton's IMAP gateway is in deep maintenance, hardening fixes only.
Proton Bridge — the local IMAP/SMTP gateway that lets standard mail clients talk to Proton's encrypted backend — has settled into a hardening-and-fix rhythm. Recent releases are dominated by certificate validation fixes, mailbox conflict resolution, label/unlabel endpoint regressions, and OS compatibility work (macOS 26). No directionally new capabilities have shipped in over a year.
Cadence is steady at roughly one minor or patch release per month, structured around mistakes that bit users: a Drafts-to-Trash deletion regression in 3.23.x, the unlabel endpoint reversion in 3.24.1. The team is reacting by adding feature flags so risky logic can be toggled post-release, and by expanding Sentry instrumentation around mailbox sync and auto-update failures.
Expect more incremental protocol hardening — mailbox conflict cases, IMAP IDLE behaviour, certificate handling — gated behind feature flags. No directional product change is signaled in the changelog.
Inbox becomes an MCP endpoint — agents now drive Superhuman alongside humans, in your voice.
Superhuman ships at very high cadence, mixing mobile polish (Quick Reply from notifications, calendar widget, Split Inbox reorder/hide) with category-shifting AI work. The April MCP launch turned Superhuman Mail into a callable surface for Claude, ChatGPT, and other assistants, with 'uniquely Superhuman' actions (Smart Send, Read Statuses, Split Inbox triage) exposed as tools. Draft Sync with Gmail/Outlook bridges the agent ecosystem further: assistants can draft anywhere, you review and send in Superhuman.
The product is moving from 'fast email for power users' to 'AI-and-humans share the inbox.' Personalization, Write with Voice, and MCP form a clear stack — voice in, agent action, voice out — with the original power-user keyboard-shortcut audience preserved through continued Split Inbox refinement. Mobile gets weekly polish to keep that surface from rotting while the AI direction takes the headlines.
Next likely move is delegated-inbox MCP actions for executive assistants (act-as-on-behalf permissions) and recurring agent tasks tied to Personalization rules. A cross-app demo — Superhuman + Granola + a calendar tool, all via MCP — is the obvious narrative the May 21st virtual event has been set up to deliver.
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