Why should I use an encrypted email service?

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Do you believe email users should move away from the typical free email accounts such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.com to other email services that might better protect users information and privacy?

Why or why not?

Maybe a combination of accounts for different purposes is appropriate to achieve a working mix of ease of usability for email that "doesn't matter" vs. other email where you want more privacy or no history such as transferring passwords or other sensitive information between two or more people?
 

SCRYPTmail

Email Service Provider
Comparing such two distinct things is almost as comparing apples to oranges.

Free services like gmail or yahoo remind me about scientists in white robes and big glasses where we playing role of guinea-pigs. They observe us and analyze our virtual lives. I'm not here to judge such approach, as we all agree for such terms when signup for a free account, but I'm very concerned it start getting too far. I guess none of us want to take shower with open window even if glass company give it for free. So why with emails we agree to such terms?

I personally want to be in control of knowing who can see what I write and when. In the same time paid service not always guarantee your safety and privacy. I personally went through tens of services and found that most of them are just too lazy to sell my data and want to charge some fee instead.

I'm glad more people start asking right questions; after more than 30 years of using emails this is a good time to have some order. Especially when emails start to play such important role in our personal and financial live.
 

chang

New Email
Tried Protonmail and only rec'd ~25% of emails on 2 test ones and only 1:8 or so on the other. Disappointed. We heard from ppl at our current email site asking, "You always reply, what's up?" Then we tested it ourselves. arh CS, such that it is, reply was a D-.

Also tried Mailfence but when you click on Register after entering all your info, nothing happens. Tried that several times over several days.
Tutanota would not let me post a resume ad. It gave "Blocked" which is weird. Never saw that from cl in all these yrs.
Mailbox.org is down so many days and even when up it takes forever for it to open.

Finding most don't work and I'm not ready to pay currently. And why pay if they aren't private. Should the mailman read our mail at the mailbox with his friends?
 

Big Dan

EQ Forum Moderator
The way I see it is if you have something sensitive to communicate you do so in person. If geography is an issue you use a real time client with end to end encryption and message expiration. I'm partial to Telegram currently. I'd like to say I care enough about the intrusion on privacy from Big Brother to encrypt my emails just to bug them or make it harder for them to read but I don't.

In my case with email anything that's remotely sensitive (credit card statements, purchase history, etc) can easily be obtained by law enforcement direct from the source with less hassle then thwarting encryption. The rest of my email is pretty mundane. For most servers the email isn't encrypted server side unless you've sent it pre-encrypted with PGP or something similar. Chances are it will be sitting on a server in plain text anyhow. Big Brother could just as easily 'tap' the info from your provider.
 
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