When email was first invented in 1972, few, including its creator, could have envisioned the magnitude and importance that it would reach. Today, there are 4 billion email users worldwide, with an average user having 1.75 email accounts, and they send around 300 billion emails daily.
Many doors are closed if you don’t have an email account today. Email has become a necessity in online business and personal communication. It’s:
- Convenient (it’s easy to send and receive messages from any device connected to the Internet).
- Universal (most other online services, including social media like Facebook or Twitter, require you to have an email address first to open them).
- Accessible (Gmail, YahooMail!, Microsoft Outlook, Hotmail, and other popular email providers are free).
The problem is that that’s not all you need from it, and there’s one important thing that popular email providers won’t give you.
That is privacy.
For that, you will have to turn to private email service providers.
How (Not) to Find a Real Private Email Service?
But how do you find a good private and secure email provider?
Email, as you see, is 48 years old, but it’s only in the last decade or so that people have started to demand more privacy from it.
Dozens of privacy email services have sprouted on the market, promising to “protect your online privacy.” The truth is, only a few of them do what they say. The rest are just full of empty promises.
But how do you tell one from another? How do you find a real private email service?
Well, I’ll tell you first how not to do it, or at least what not to rely on too much.
Reviews and “best” lists.
Wait a minute. That’s how you find anything on the Internet. You type “best email privacy service,” read a few lists (or see who’s on the top and voila! A decision is made!
But was it your decision, or was the decision skewed?
The problems with such best or top lists and reviews (of anything, not just email services, mind you) are many:
- Often, very little research is put into them (many reviewers copy from other reviewers).
- They might be paid for by the provider being reviewed or otherwise incentivized to get a positive review or the top position on the list.
- Lists are often incomplete and only cover the most popular 5-10 services while ignoring some newer or less known (but not necessarily worse) services.
Because of all this, while reviews and lists can give you some idea, it’s not something that you should rely on. If you want to make an informed decision on the most private email service, you need to dig deeper.
This is how.
How to Find the Best Private Email Providers?
When choosing a private email service, there are a few things that you need to look carefully to know if you can truly trust them:
- Do They Log Your Data?
For one reason or another, an email service provider might choose to log the data they route for you.
They might log it for any number of legal and illegal reasons, from being requested by the authorities to selling the information to 3rd-party advertising agencies.
At the very least, it’s your right as a user to know what information on you they log in and for how long. If a provider doesn’t want to reveal that, how can you even begin to trust them with your private information?
For a private email service, go for one that explicitly says they do not keep any logs.
- Where are the Servers?
Where the email provider keeps its servers plays a big role in how much they can protect your privacy. Remember, these are businesses that must adhere to the laws of the country they are in.
Internet freedoms are going down in the world. According to a Freedom House report, Freedom on the Net 2019, of over 3.8 billion Internet users worldwide, 71% were arrested or imprisoned for posting content on political, social, or religious issues.
That’s not just in countries where you’d expect online freedoms to be suppressed, like Russia or China. The same thing happens in the supposedly “free” countries in the West.
The worst culprits here are the so-called “14 EYs” countries, which spy on their citizens and each other. If a provider has servers based in one of these 14 countries, you can’t hold much hope that they won’t knock on their door demanding to see the contents of your emails.
The 14EYs include the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium. If you’re looking for a private email service, look for one outside these countries’ jurisdiction.
- Is There an Anonymous Payment Option?
Although many email privacy providers offer their service for free, most would like you to pay them for it.
The problem is that this leaves a trace back to you, and the anonymity is gone from the start. Someone can see that a transfer from a certain bank account was made to the provider and easily connect you to it. The same thing is true with PayPal and similar online payment services. This is why you shouldn’t use them to pay for an email privacy service.
Instead, look if they have an anonymous payment option. Can you pay with crypto or gift cards, for example? The less information that can be recorded about you, the better.
- What Kind of Encryption do They Use, and are They Open-Source?
A private email provider should secure your messages and other data in transit and at rest. This is done with encryption.
Encryption protects a message from point A to point B, typically by scrambling it so that only someone with the right decryption key can read the message, while someone intercepting it can’t.
There are several email encryption protocols, such as SSL/TLS, PGP, and S/MIME, and all have pros and cons to get into them here, but the most important thing to remember is to use open-source versus proprietary protocols.
This is because open-source protocols are available to anyone to audit and improve, and any vulnerabilities are usually fixed quickly. In contrast, you can never be sure of that with proprietary ones.
What is the Most Private Email Provider?
As you can see, there are many factors you should look into when choosing a privacy email provider. The most important one, however, is trust. Can you trust an email provider with your information and data?
The answer can’t be ”maybe” or “it depends”. It has to be a strong YES.
An encrypted email provider that does this is Postorius. This is a relatively new service provider on the market. Still, one that is fully dedicated to protecting your email privacy from prying eyes and offering security features such as a strong offshore jurisdiction (servers based in Iceland), payment anonymity, strong end-to-end encryption, instantly deleted emails and more.