“Trust him not with your secrets, who, when left alone in your room, turns over your papers.” Johann Kaspar Lavater.
While email is not quite as venerable as communicating with paper and a quill pen, as a technology, it’s ancient. It’s also fundamentally insecure. So Dr. Evil and his minions don’t need to enter your room and turn over your papers, there are a variety of ways to steal your information if it’s shared in an email. And large commercial e-mail providers use your emails to profile you, and those profiles are sold to others.
Private email services protect your information from prying eyes, and don’t collect and share your information with third parties. Your emails are end-to-end encrypted if sent to another user on the same email service, and are stored encrypted in all instances. Your emails may still be exposed in transit if the sender or receiver is on a public or corporate email system such as Gmail or Microsoft Outlook. However, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Take what actions you can take to preserve your privacy.
When selecting a private email service, here are some features to consider:
- Service provider and servers are located in a good privacy jurisdiction
- Product is open source and features/claims have been verified by third party audit
- Multiple email addresses are supported in one account
- Service provider maintains little or no logs of customer usage and has no access to email content
- Strong encryption is employed for data at rest and in-transit within the service
- User-friendly apps are available for major devices, operating systems and browsers
- Import/export of existing mail and contacts is supported
- Contacts, calendar and inbox search is supported
- SPAM filtering is supported
- Service has a good reputation in the marketplace with responsive support
I recommend the following two private email services: Proton Mail and Tuta Mail.
Both services are in good privacy jurisdictions. Proton Mail is based in Switzerland and Tuta Mail in Germany. Proton Mail is open source in part and has been subject to third party audit. Tuta Mail is open source and has been extensively reviewed. Both support multiple e-mail addresses, log little user data, provide strong encryption, and offer user friendly apps for all major platforms and devices. Tuta Mail can import email messages and securely search on the content of messages. Proton Mail cannot import messages and can only search on the subject line of emails. Both provide tools for SPAM filtering (Proton Mail is more sophisticated) and have good reputations in the marketplace. Proton Mail is a bit more expensive however, both services cost less than $50 per year, and both offer significant first year discounts.
Both services can share encrypted emails with external email services, but a secret key must be shared with the recipient.
Proton Mail is generally thought to have a more attractive interface and does have a larger user base. Tuta Mail is objectively more secure. Proton Mail cannot encrypt the subject line of an email while Tuta Mail encrypts the entire email. And Tuta Mail supports anonymous account registration while Proton Mail does not. That said, both are excellent options.
The link to Proton Mail is: https://proton.me/mail
The link to Tuta Mail is: https://tuta.com/
For extra credit, consider a disposable email service. A disposable email address is a temporary email account that allows users to receive emails without providing their permanent email address. It is used to avoid spam and unwanted emails. These email addresses expire after a certain period of time, making them perfect for one-time use. A related market segment is anonymous email services. They serve much the same purpose purpose, however, email addresses persist until you choose to cancel them.
A disposable or anonymous email service is not the same as using multiple email addresses (sometimes called aliases) in the same account. They sit in front of your primary email service and shield it from spam and third party scrutiny.
There are a number of such services in the marketplace. A representative disposable email service is Burner Mail. A representative anonymous email service is SimpleLogin.
The link to Burner Mail is: https://burnermail.io/
The link to SimpleLogin is: https://simplelogin.io/
In the next post, we’ll see how our friends Alice and Bob met their private email needs.
Information provided in this post is subject to the disclaimer in the first post of this series.