3 Email Privacy Options
Following on from my post on How to Support Independent Media
I’ve been looking at alternatives to Google’s services. Likewise since the Cambridge Analytica scandal I’ve made a decision to migrate away from Facebook and other mainstream social media platforms in preference for alternatives that support
- freedom of speech
- privacy
- general protection of their users/customers.
I’ve been on this journey for a month now and whilst there is still a lot of options to review and test, I have at least landed on an email service. Therefore I thought I would summarise my findings below.
I’ll carry on testing and reviewing other options and will provide more detailed overviews later. In the meantime I would certainly be keen to hear from anyone else on products/services that they are using that tick the boxes above.
FastMail is an easy and proficient free email service. It provides effective security features and is great for someone looking for a secure email service without the bells and whistles.
FastMail has a spam filter, phishing protector and virus scanner; and if spam happens to slip through you can easily report it. FastMail includes an HTML and plain text composer. Additionally, it has IMAP access. Although FastMail does not have black/white lists you can easily customize up to 100 filters to keep unwanted mail out of your inbox.
FastMail only allows 10 MB of inbox storage, which is considerably less than most email providers. Although FastMail includes online storage, they only allow you about 1 MB of space. This is the equivalent to a few emails and maybe an attachment.
FastMail is great if you are looking for a no–frills email service with strong security but is fairly limited in terms of storage and lacking in a friendly User Interface in my opinion.
More details here:
While Hushmail is a secure solution for email communications, the free side of the service lacks many of the features and functionality that make other web-based email clients so appealing while being just as secure as Hushmail.
As part of its security features, Hushmail scans incoming email for viruses, and the service is equipped with a spam filter, as is standard for free email services. This service also gives you the basic function to create blacklists and whitelists to secure your email inbox even more. This means that you can tell the service which senders you trust and which domains you do not wish to receive email from. You can block domain names as well as individual email addresses. This is also commonplace for basic email accounts.
Hushmail doesn't have its own mobile app available from Apple or Android, but you can point your browser to M.hush.com to access the service's mobile site.
Hushmail also requires you to sign in at least once every three weeks just to keep your account active which might not matter to most people but could be a pain in the ass if you went on a long holiday for example!
More details here:
ProtonMail is a basic email service that is easy to set up because it doesn’t ask for any personal information. You just pick a user name and password, and you’re set.
Note that some features – such as mail collection and the ability to sync across multiple devices – are only available with its paid email service. But the free version does have email encryption, which is important if you send messages with sensitive information you want to protect. ProtonMail automatically unencrypts the message when it reaches the recipient’s inbox and is opened.
To further protect your messages, ProtonMail has a secure password recovery process. Although you can reset your password if you forget your old one, ProtonMail won’t allow access to the messages you received in your inbox or saved in folders before you reset your password. This means you will lose all emails, both sent and received.
ProtonMail lets you attach multiple files at once to outgoing messages, up to the maximum attachment size of 25MB. Once they’re attached, you can’t preview the files without downloading and opening them again. You also have only 500MB of inbox storage, which is enough to hold about 1,200 messages.
Whilst I found their security features appealing, in the end I found Fastmail and Hushmail too limited in features, storage and user experience.
Therefore, I have gone with Protonmail. The setup process is straightforward, the UI on the Apps and Web Portal is great, and the security encryption is the best I’ve come across. The fact that they are Swiss based and governed under Swiss law is also appealing. Let’s face those guys aren’t going to relax their privacy policies anytime soon!
I went with the Plus pricing plan (€ 48.00 /yr) as I wanted to integrate my account with Apple Mail and you need their bridge plugin (which they charge for) in order to do that.
MikeB has done a great summary video on ProtonMail which is listed below.
I hope this was useful.
Cheers
Alan
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