People care about privacy with their email accounts because there is a lot of information about our lives, transaction receipts that we receive from retailers, doctor’s appointments and more. The problem is who has access and knows all about the businesses you use and all your connections. Marketing products to you is the least of your concerns especially when these email providers sell this information to others or allow business partners to scan our mailboxes directly. Does it even stop there? Do these partner businesses then hand this information over to their partners and so on?
Several major email providers have had major breaches that have exposed billions of user accounts to malicious criminal and possible foreign government activity. The major email breaches includes the 2013 Yahoo breach of 3 billion accounts and the 5 million accounts of Gmail in 2014. The outcome for all these people whose email accounts were compromised isn't just an immediate follow-up from the criminals like ransomeware but instead it's a continuous collection of you and the purposes could be much more subtle and subversive over time.
Secure email providers are addressing this problem because private email is primarily about securing the mailbox and delivery of emails. The hallmark of private emails comes in the form of securing emails through encrypting the delivery of them and keeping them encrypted in your mailbox at an email provider’s data center. Private email providers use encryption also in sending and receiving emails. This email communication between the email sender and the email receiver is like mailing a letter where the post office and mailman don’t know what’s in the letter but do know who mailed it and who received it. Your emails can’t be read directly except by you and your recipients thus eliminating others from reading your emails to use to hack you, track you or sell information found in your emails. Any legitimate private or secure email provider you select will have heightened security for you and likely give you options for even better security.
Private email providers can provide a higher level of email security in a few different ways. One way is using an encryption service called PGP (Pretty Good Encryption) but it requires both the email sender and email receiver to have PGP setup and enabled to use. Using PGP also has the benefit of letting email recipients know that your email is legitimately from you eliminating spoofing. Another way to increase email security is having the email receiver log into a special mailbox at your email provider’s data center to pick up the email directly instead of delivering the email to the recipient’s mailbox. This is like picking up your mail at the post office instead of having the mailman deliver it to you.
Another thing to consider is where your emails are stored. Your mailbox is stored at a data center location and where that data center is located can make a difference in how fast or slow your emails are delivered and received. This means a data center half-way around the world from you may be slower than expected which can pose a problem if you are in the process of resetting a password for instance. Some providers store your emails across many data centers all over the place. Although this removes performance concern, it does bring up another privacy concern that your email is strewn about all over the globe. The private email provider’s business location and data center location(s) will also count if your emails are included in any legal standing if you are ever involved in a legal matter and is a matter of choice in how you feel about jurisdiction and government access to your emails.
The Mega Review scores below are based on each reviewers specification on the features each feels is important to private and secure email and can include other features like ‘self-destructing’ email and use of eco-friendly energy. The list below gives you the top providers across top reviewers and experts.
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