If you ever thought to yourself “Why do I trust Google with all my private, unencrypted emails?” and the answer was “What’s the alternative?”, then ProtonMail might be very interesting to you. I’ve really grown to like it, so I thought I’ll share it here with you. It’s not that new anymore, but I’m sure not everyone has heard of it yet.
ProtonMail is an email service created by scientists from MIT and CERN, which offers fully encrypted email (so even ProtonMail can’t read it) in a well designed and easy to use interface on the web, Android and iOS. It works just like Gmail and co., but if you send a mail to another ProtonMail user, the email is automatically encrypted (so you might want to convince your friends and family to use it too). You can also send an encrypted mail to someone who doesn’t use ProtonMail, in that case the recipient only receives a link that he can click to read the actual mail on ProtonMail’s servers, protected by a password.
If encryption isn’t enough because you’re afraid an authoritarian government could raid the servers, ProtonMail has its servers in Switzerland which has strong privacy protection laws and if you’re afraid of natural disasters or a nuclear bomb destroying your email archive, their servers are in Europe’s most secure datacenter, below 1000 meters of solid rock, so your emails are safe. Just joking of course, who cares about emails after the apocalypse, but it is true, the servers really are deep beneath the surface in Europe’s most secure datacenter.
ProtonMail even has a Tor onion address, so you can use it even if the clearnet website is blocked in your country.
If you need some extra safety, you can send emails that destroy themselves after a set amount of time. Personally, I find that a bit gimmicky, but to each their own, maybe there is an actual use case for that.
And if even that isn't safe enough for you, the team behind ProtonMail also offers a free VPN service with a focus on security (it was made for journalists and activists) that doesn't log, goes through servers in privacy friendly countries like Switzerland and Iceland, and can even be combined with Tor for added security.
One more thing, you are given the choice when creating a ProtonMail email address between [email protected] and [email protected] (CH is the Swiss top level domain). Personally I chose the .ch option, so that the domain name isn’t under control of the US government. Not really a big problem right now, but who knows what the future will bring, so I thought .ch is the safer choice, but you need to make that choice for yourself.
Q: But it’s free! And if it’s free, YOU are the product!
A: True! That’s why it’s freemium. You get 500 MB space for your emails for free, if you need more you have to pay money, which also gives you a bunch of additional features. The cheapest plan starts at just €4 per month and gives you 5 GB of space, 5 email aliases and more.
Thank you for letting me know about this stuff.
You're welcome ;)