The need to send secure email has seemingly never been greater than today. As 2020 draws to a close, it has, on more than a few occasions, shown us why we need encrypted email now more than ever.
The COVID-19 pandemic, racial and police brutality protests in the United States, and, most recently, the presidential elections in the US have all reminded us just how important it is to communicate securely.
Unfortunately, there are few genuinely secure ways to protect your message from prying eyes until it gets to the receiver.
One such secure way is encrypted email.
Why You Should Use Encrypted Email?
Popular free email services like Gmail, YahooMail, Outlook, and the rest are often excellent targets for hackers.
The problem is that the average user doesn’t overthink their email security. Instead, they are more concerned with convenience. However, many realize far too late that security needs to trump convenience when it comes to sensitive data.
Do you need to use encrypted email?
The answer to this question depends on three other questions:
- Am I sending any information that can personally identify me or someone else?
An average Internet user has 70-80 passwords, according to 2020 research by NordPass (via NewsWire). If we say that one password = 1 online account, that’s a lot of online accounts.
Many websites you sign up to are overly curious about your personally identifiable information (PII). This includes anything that can be used to identify you, such as your name, phone number, where you live, where you work, bank account number, credit card number, Social Security, and more.
- Am I sending valuable, sensitive, proprietary, or otherwise confidential information?
When sending information through email, it shouldn’t be just your personal information that you will need to worry about getting into the wrong hands, but also any information that belongs to other people.
Do you need to send sensitive or confidential files belonging to your company, clients, or employees? Perhaps you need to send a document securely to your lawyer? If so, you need to use an encrypted email.
- Can the information I send be used in any way against me?
The information you send via email can often be used against you and be exploited by bad actors.
What can this information be? It can be anything. It can be your travel plans, online passwords, proprietary information, confidential business plans, medical records, bank account numbers, etc.
All of these and more data you freely send over email can be used against you and lead to identity theft.
What is the Best Free Way to Send a Secure Email?
If you answered “yes” to the three questions above, or even to just one or two, there is no doubt. You need to use a secure email.
But that opens up a new question. What encrypted email service to use?
The good news is that no options are available today regarding email encryption. Ever since Edward Snowden released the NSA documents in 2015, people have paid much more attention to secure email.
However, as people have started to pay more attention to their email security and to take action to regain their privacy, so have the governments of different countries sought ways to end this.
For instance, in the US, the EARN IT Act and the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act were created to introduce a backdoor to encryption.
And that’s the United States government we are talking about. If this is happening in a democratic country, imagine what is going on in a country with a totalitarian regime like Russia or China, for instance.
We think all of this should give you ample reason to start thinking about ways to make your email more secure, and encrypted email is the best way to do this.
The only problem is finding an excellent free email service that can do this.
We have already established that Gmail is not it. So, what does an encrypted email need to have?
Although there are different email encryption protocols, PGP or “Pretty Good Privacy” stands out as the most secure way to send and receive sensitive data via email.
How does PGP encryption work?
Let’s say you need to send sensitive files to someone but don’t want a third person or entity to know about this. What they’ll need to do is to generate two keys – private and public.
For now, the recipient will keep the private key to himself and share the public key with you. Once you have the public key, you can encrypt an email message and share it with the recipient.
At this point, the recipient can use their private key to decrypt the message. Since no one else has that private key, the recipient is the only one who can do this, even if someone else manages to obtain the public key.
If this sounds complicated and you think it’s not worth the hassle, don’t worry. Dada Mail: Armored Email is a secure email solution that makes it easy to send an encrypted email that will keep your data safe from prying eyes.
Dada Mail uses 100% audited and open-source code and has a strict no-data-retention policy, meaning that it’s immediately and permanently deleted when you delete something.
The platform also supports zero-knowledge password protection technology, keeping your private key password secure, and has a built-in web browser kill switch that can protect you against Man-in-the-Middle and other malicious script attacks.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you are ready to take back your privacy, sign up now for your secure email account, and we’ll give you a 14-day, no questions asked, full money-back refund.