The Best Secure Email Providers in 2024
The Best Secure Email Providers in 2024
Like it or not, email is a critical part of our digital lives. It’s how we sign up for accounts, get notifications, and communicate with ...
Like it or not, email is a critical part of our digital lives. It’s how we sign up for accounts, get notifications, and communicate with a wide range of entities online. Critics of email rightfully point out that email suffers from a significant number of flaws that make it less than ideal, but that doesn’t change the current reality. In light of that reality, I believe that an encrypted email provider is a must-have for everyone in today’s age of rampant data breaches, insider threats, warrantless police access, and targeted advertising. If I can get access to your emails, I can get a range of sensitive information including where you bank (to craft more convincing phishing attacks), information about pets (I get notifications each year from the vet for my cats’ annual checkups), calendar reminders, news announcements from family, support tickets from services you use, and more. In a worse case scenario, if I get access to the account itself, it’s trivial to simply issue password reset requests for nearly any of those accounts, have it to sent to said compromised email account, and gain access to a wide number of other accounts you use – from banking to shopping and more – for any number of reasons. So this week, let’s look into the top encrypted email providers The New Oil recommends and their features to help decide which one is right for you.
TLDR: Proton and Tuta
107This has been the answer for years now and sill be the answer for at least the next few years as well
13Yes, and both have proprietary clients. I have proton and I'm in the process to moving away mainly because I can't use their calendar and contacts natively in Android. Not sure about Tuta, but I never liked them.
11Mailbox.org too.
7Wish I could signup on Tor.
I use dnmx instead
2
Mailbox.org missing, pass
14Why isn't posteo.de in the list? They are like Tuta, but with some more features like IMAP/SMTP.
11A lot of lists for private alternative email services start and and with Proton, seemingly. Services like Posteo, Mailbox, Hushmail, Fastmail, etc are frequently overlooked. It's a shame because many of these other services are great and Proton is one of the most expensive and not suitable for everyone. I've been with Posteo for years and I have nothing but praise for it.
8I like the price tag
4
Has anyone tried self-hosting on a NAS or similar? I'd be interested to hear the practicalities of it, I imagine it's not exactly set or forget, and the realities of the enshittified internet present some obstacles, like ending up in spam filters etc.
4A mail server is often mentioned as the first thing you don't wanna bother with hosting yourself
11I did some more research after your comment and it does indeed sound like it's not for the feint of heart.
Spam seems to be one of the biggest challenges, both incoming and outgoing. For incoming, it's a constant arms race with spammers to circumvent spam filtering techniques. But at least that's something you have control over, you can just turn off your spam filtering and ensure you receive all important email. The real problem is ending up in other people's spam filters, which you have very little control over once you've decided on your mail server domain/certificate.
The crux of the issue seems to be that SMTP is ancient insecure tech designed for an innocent era when email was for universities only. We desperately need a more secure open source email protocol designed for the modern era, but capitalism isn't having it - instead we've got corporations wrestling for control of the next big thing with proprietary protocols... Discord, Slack etc. And big tech companies that continue using SMTP (Gmail, Outlook etc.) simply treat any servers outside their sphere with a high level of suspicion.
1I think it would fun to try it
1
it works fine IMO as long as you don't happen to have an IP with a bad reputation, but you'll likely need a VPS or similar as most home ISPs don't allow mail server or even incoming tcp ports
1
Both Proton and Tuta are great choices. Of the two, I prefer Proton simply because Tuta’s UI makes my head implode.
But for my every day, general email usage, I have gone with Posteo.de. They are pretty cool and work seamlessly with any email client of your choice (no need for Bridge, or the like).
3Both Tuta and Proton make you use non free software.
0
Why people still promoting proton ? Private company will not defending your private data against States. There not Unions or independent organization, there are running for profits. If you don't see it as a safety issue, think again. Proton sold IP addresses used by XR using their services to the french intelligence.
-2No company executive will go to jail for you. Give any company a court signed order and they will comply. Hence, the companies that orient around privacy limit the data they retain so that when they get a court order, they have nothing to give. Email is flawed by design, so some metadata always has to be stored for it to be functional.
12Nobody is going to defend your useless data
8Proton is full of mostly empty claims.
3