How to and Why you Should Hide Your Emails Under a Mountain

Think about the letterbox in front of your house or apartment. 

Every day the mailman/woman comes past and drops off letters. Imagine if, before he/she puts them in your mailbox, they opened them, read the contents of those letters, and sold the information contained in those letters to advertisers. 

Now imagine the government, tech companies, secret spy agencies, secret satanic societies, and random psychopaths walking past your house, opening your letterbox, and also reading those letters. You wouldn’t like that, would you? 

However, that’s what happens every day, but instead of your letterbox, it’s happening to your email inbox. Can you believe that we are living in a time where the ancient postal service is the safest, and most private, way to communicate with each other?  

In this article, I will show you how you can turn the tables and make your emails just as private as the letters in your letterbox with a service called ProtonMail. 

But first, we need to talk about women in tech... 

The Yahoo Debacle

Under the expert leadership of Marriser Mayer, Yahoo enabled the US government, and every hacker on the planet, to access a billion peoples private emails. 

In 2014, due to the popularity of online encryption methods, the US government was having difficulty reading everyone's emails. Thankfully for them, Marriser Mayer was kind enough to allow the NSA to scan all the email accounts under her control. 

However, compared to industry standards, she's not all that bad. Almost all the tech giants are handing over a set of keys to any government agency that asks. But, It’s not just the US government that Marriser obliged. Just a year earlier, due to what turned out to be lack security on her part, a billion Yahoo email accounts were hacked.  

If there’s one thing we can learn from Marriser, it’s that we have to stop trusting these big tech companies with our private information. 

What About the big 3? (Google, Facebook, Apple)

When it comes to massive tech companies, I think there are a few questions we need to ask: 

What if you use Google or iCloud email? Who is opening up your emails and snooping around? 

Who is reading your embarrassing drunk Facebook messages you sent to Julie at 4 am? 

Are these cloud base services even safe?

Does Jennifer Lawrence think they are safe? 

If you delete an email using one of these services is that email really deleted? Or, is it set up so you can’t see it anymore, but it’s really still there being scanned and analyzed? 

Should we be putting so much of our trust in the hands of these companies? 

I think it’s time to take the power back and start sending our business to companies that actually give a damn about our privacy.

Hiding Your Emails Under a Mountain With ProtonMail

Before we talk about the benefits of using ProtonMail as your email provider, we need to understand a few things about the country of Switzerland. 

Even though the James Bond days of secret bank accounts are over (thanks, USA government), the Swiss spirit of privacy and anonymity lives on. 

Not only is Switzerland arguably one of the most welcoming countries in regard to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies, it is also home to some of the strictest privacy laws on the planet. Furthermore, Switzerland isn’t part of the United Socialist States of Europe (USSE or EU for short). 

Many North Americans believe that Europe is superior to the United States and Canada when it comes to online privacy. Although technically true, the picture isn’t as bright as it would seem. 

USSE member countries can legally monitor what their citizens are doing on the internet. The only difference being, unlike the NSA that can just do whatever they want, law enforcement need permission from the respective countries' courts before beginning surveillance (It’s not hard to get). 

Switzerland has the same setup. If the NSA wanted to read your emails and they were stored in Switzerland, they would need permission from the Swiss Courts (very hard to get). Where Switzerland differs is that that, unlike the USSE, the Swiss law requires the person who is being watched to be notified that they are being watched - making the watching pointless. Furthermore, even if permission was granted, and you were notified by the Swiss courts that you were being watched, ProtonMail doesn’t have, and isn’t required to have (unlike the USSE), the ability to decrypt your private emails.

Who and What is ProtonMail

ProtonMail is an email service provider that was founded by a group of scientist that met while working at CERN. They were drawn together by a passion for online privacy and wanted to create an email solution that was private, secure, and easy to use. 

After a successful crowdfunding campaign, ProtonMail was born. 

The best part about all this is that their servers are located under a mountain that is 1000 feet high and made out of granite rock. The bunker underneath is known as the most secure server farm in Europe, is guarded like a military facility, and can withstand a nuclear attack.

ProtonMail Features

• End to end PGP encryption that only your password can unlock. ProtonMail can’t read your emails even if they wanted to.
• ProtonMail does not keep logs of any information about you such as your IP address. For extra anonymity you can access ProtonMail via their TOR URL (https://protonirockerxow.onion) and, if you wanted a paid account, you could use Bitcoin.
• ProtonMail comes with a self-destruct feature. This means that emails you send can have a timer attached to them. When the timer runs out - the email disappears.
• The interface can be customised to your preference of layout and colors.
• You can access your email from a browser or iOS and Android applications.
• You can organize your emails as you want including archiving them
• If you have a domain, you can set up ProtonMail to work with your own domain URL.
• ProtonMail has a built-in spam filter.
• The ProtonMail servers are protected from DDOS attacks minimising downtime.

The Weaknesses of ProtonMail

• Only your password can access your emails. If you lose your password you’re screwed as ProtonMail doesn’t have password recovery, and proton mail can’t access your account even if they wanted to (kind of a positive, but an important thing to keep in mind).
• End to end encryption and the self-destruct feature only works within the ProtonMail ecosystem. Emails from a ProtonMail user to another ProtonMail user are encrypted with PGP. However, if you are sending an email to a non ProtonMail user, you have two options: Send the email unencrypted or, send the email with a link to open the email in the ProtonMail browser application. If you do this you will need to give the receiver an agreed password which would be an awkward thing to do when sending professional emails. 
• Although there is an app for both iOS and Android phones, access to ProtonMail on a desktop has to be done through a browser. This puts you at risk of phishing and, if Protonmail where ever to become compromised, the site’s code could be changed by law enforcement to capture passwords.

Using ProtonMail

I have personally used ProtonMail (paid service) for three months and haven’t had a single complaint in that time. The setup process is easy, and getting it set up on my iPhone was simply a matter of downloading the app and entering my username and password. 

The email layout can be set up to mimic the way Gmail presents email threads. 

I especially like the ability to create additional burner email addresses that I can use if I want to sign up or subscribe to things that I don’t trust completely. If I start receiving unwanted emails that I can’t get rid of, I can simply delete the burner address. However, this feature is not available in the free ProtonMail service. 

Unfortunately, ProtonMail does lack the productivity management features and connectivity that you can get with Gmail, but since I never really used those things anyway, losing them didn’t seem like a big deal.

 

Conclusion

Sure there are better, more secure ways to encrypt email communications. However, those methods are really only for the super computer savvy. 

For the commoners like me, ProtonMail offers an extremely easy way to avoid mass surveillance, data capture, and targeted advertising.  

You can sign up for a free ProtonMail account here and try it out for yourself.