Proton Mail received its initial funding through a crowdfunding campaign, and initial access was by invitation only, but it opened to the public in 2016. There were two million users by 2017[11] and almost 70 million by 2022.[12]
The source code for the back end of Proton Mail remains closed-source,[13][14] but Proton Mail released the source code for the web interface, iOS and Android apps, and the Proton Mail Bridge app under an open-source license.[15][16][17][18]
^Saxena, Kumkum; Rajdev, Dev; Bhatia, Divesh; Bahl, Manav (June 25–27, 2021). "ProtonMail: Advance Encryption and Security". 2021 International Conference on Communication information and Computing Technology (ICCICT). pp. 1–6. doi:10.1109/ICCICT50803.2021.9510041. ISBN978-1-6654-0430-3. S2CID237000409.
^"Proton Mail responds on Reddit". April 2, 2019. Archived from the original on November 14, 2020. Retrieved September 24, 2020. We don't plan to open source the back-end code, because it doesn't add trust (users can't verify what code is running on the backend) and doing so would given away information about how we do anti-spam and anti-abuse.
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