Email privacy

DeletedUser696

Hi. I've used email services, both the free one with Tuta and the paid one with Proton, and each has its quirks. With Tuta, when I permanently deleted emails from the trash, sometimes they would reappear for no reason, then disappear on their own. With Proton, the interface kept changing: sometimes in English, sometimes in French. And when you asked for support, Zendesk took over. It makes you wonder about privacy. When it's free, we're the product, right? The problem is that even when you pay, you're not guaranteed not to be...

MineralWater

DeletedUser696

There's not much to do about it.

You could buy a domain for cheap and use your own server to receive mails. Problem there could be that you will receive emails, but will have Trouble to send them, because bigger mail providers might block you, because you are too small and this makes you suspicious for spam.

Also the risks of keeping your own server secured, because you will be held reliable for everything that is on it and/or is send or downloaded from it.

You could also use any mail provider and encrypt your mails, but in reality this won't work, because aside from nerds nobody encrypts their email and when you write to things like customer service etc they can't read it when they don't have decryption software.

So at all, email is not secure until it becomes a standard to encrypt those like in messengers.

But we are not there yet and probably will not get there, as many states want 24/7 surveillance of all internet content.

So if you want to keep things private, use a messenger like Signal. Email is for shopping and stuff like that, not for confidential things.

Chipper

DeletedUser696 when you consider the privacy of paid encrypted email providers, i think its important to do so within the context of the existing alternatives, the most common being gmail, which actively forces you to consent to worldwide royalty free licensing of all your intellectual property merely by using any and all of its services. So basically they can do whatever they want with your emails including training ai, selling you shit, sharing it with any company that asks.. Etc etc

It also acts like an arm of big brother by scanning (and reporting to authorities) all your emails, files, pics etc that passes through there servers, all in the name of enforcing its quite reasonable (maybe) code of conduct. Resulting as is easily predictable in cases such as this where a man had his accounts locked and was investigated by police for child abuse after he sent a photo of his sons penis to his wife who needed it for the doctor.

When considered in contrast to this, encrypted email providers such as proton and tuta are in a league of there own.

Franco

DeletedUser696 And when you asked for support, Zendesk took over.

I didn't know about proton using Zendesk for customer support, I found this page: https://proton.me/support/zendesk

There is still an option to skip Zendesk: "All support requests are handled in-house by Proton, but if you have specific concerns and would like to keep your query within Proton Mail (that is, not using Zendesk), you can email us directly at contact@proton.me."

schweizer

Email is the digital equivalent of a post card so what do you expect?

DeletedUser696

Signal of course. But all my correspondents dont use it so... i have to take à dumbphone, get out battery when i dont call, write with pen and paper and send by postal mail my textes. Ready for 80’... !

EverettHitch

DeletedUser696 no, you don't have to do all that but realize email is not private as some have already said and use E2E messaging to exchange sensitive information. What about it is so hard to understand?

DeletedUser696

OK. I'll try to do that. Merci