Are you using Gmail or Yahoo Mail or HotMail or Outlook.com or some other free email service hosted on the site of some multi-billion dollar corporation? If so, your email messages are being monitored and your personal information is available to corporations, governments, and other spies. In fact, Google admits that they do read (by means of automated software) all the emails that you send or receive via Gmail—mostly to improve their advertising platform. It is believed that most of the other major free email providers do the same.
Luckily, there is a simple solution: use an email service that offers encryption of your messages, even when stored on the email company’s mail servers. Not even the company that owns the mail servers can read your email messages (nor can the NSA). Several encrypted email providers offer free services for a limited number of email messages per month. However, most of them charge a modest monthly fee for unlimited or nearly unlimited messages and may add in some other security services as well. How much is your privacy worth?
Justin Uther has written How to Switch to Encrypted Email: The Ultimate Guide to Everyday Email Encryption and I would suggest it be required reading by every computer owner who values his or her privacy and wants to stop worldwide spies from reading private communications. You may read the how-to guide in the BestSafeVPN web site at: http://bit.ly/2HX00ws.
Justin Uther describes the use of Proton Mail, an excellent solution. However, it is not the only solution available. For a list of several other encrypted email services, see my earlier article, A List of Private and Secure Email Services, at https://privacyblog.com/2017/02/04/a-list-of-private-and-secure-email-services.
NOTE: Another option is to host your own encrypted email server and administer it yourself. However, that solution is far more complex and usually significantly more expensive than using the services of a company that is already in the business of providing encrypted email services. That may be a good option for larger organizations but usually is cost-prohibitive and too complex for most individual consumers.
Categories: Email Security
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