So how did our friends, Alice and Bob meet their private email needs?
Alice polled her friends and discovered a number of them were already Proton Mail users, so she selected Proton Mail as her private email service. She purchased a business account for her IT consulting business, provided her business associates with Proton Mail accounts, and encouraged her clients to also use the service. Some clients did, and some did not. For those clients who chose not to use Proton Mail, she sent sensitive emails using a secret key she exchanged with them using Signal.
She took advantage of the capability to have multiple email addresses in the same account, and used several for her personal email. For her personal email, she created separate email addresses for sensitive communications, newsletters, shopping, and odds-and ends. Over time, she migrated emails from her legacy Gmail account to Proton Mail, starting with sensitive accounts to include her bank, credit cards and healthcare providers. She was aware that emails sent from sensitive accounts were not encrypted in transit, but appreciated the fact that they were encrypted at rest, and therefore could not be viewed, aggregated or shared with third parties by Proton Mail. She had some concern that the subject line of her emails were not encrypted, and took care not to put sensitive information in the subject line.
She kept her Gmail account open. She had had it so long, she was not quite sure what was connected to it, and did not want to miss any notifications or emails from old friends.
Alice also purchased a subscription to SimpleLogin. This anonymous email service shielded her primary email accounts from spam and also gave her maximum control over the anonymous email addresses.
Bob opted for Tuta Mail given it’s superior encryption approach. He migrated every legacy email account over to Tuta Mail, using multiple email addresses to keep his communications separated in his inbox. He tried, quite unsuccessfully, to convince his bank to communicate with him over Tuta Mail. When they declined, he sulked a bit and got over it.
Bob also established a free account on Burner Mail which he used to confuse and irritate spammers.
It’s now time for your to choose. Protect your emails. Keep Dr. Evil at bay.
Information provided in this post is subject to the disclaimer in the first post of this series.