Using git send-email with Protonmail

I haven’t set up an email server on this VPS yet, so I continue to use ProtonMail. Of course I know that it’s not actually private.

One really annoying thing about using it is not being able to use standard tools such as git send-email without using their official bridge, which you can only use if you pay for premium. However, there is a solution to this problem: hydroxide, a third-party bridge for ProtonMail. This is a daemon you connect your email client to and it acts as a bridge between your email client and ProtonMail, the only drawback being having to log in every time you reboot your computer.

It’s available in the AUR, so you can just install it using yay -S hydroxide-git (Steps for manual installation in the README). To log into ProtonMail, just run hydroxide auth [YOUR_EMAIL]. This spits out a password which you should save somewhere. Afterwards, you can run hydroxide serve to be able to use IMAP and CardDAV. If SMTP is all you need, then just run hydroxide smtp.

Now it’s time to configure git to connect to hydroxide. This is what you need to put into your ~/.gitconfig:

[sendemail]
	smtpServer = 127.0.0.1
	smtpServerPort = 1025
	smtpUser = [YOUR_EMAIL]
	smtpPass = [HYDROXIDE_PASSWORD]</pre>

Now you can hack away happily!