I’ve been slowly migrating some services out of Google because I do not want to be overly dependent on one company. Read about why here.
Part of the migration naturally involves email.
Email encryption has been available for many years now, but it is rather difficult to implement. Most people find it too much of a hassle, and don’t bother.
Even though I consider myself fairly adept at technical stuff, and always up for a challenge, I too gave up. That was several years ago.
Today, though ProtonMail makes email encryption easy. You don’t have to know how it works, but that it does. Better still, it works even if your recipient doesn’t have encrypted email.
Why is encrypted email important?
Email encryption prevents your email from being read by anyone else except by the recipient.
In the previous article, I showed you the new Gmail features which are pretty impressive especially confidential email. Confidential email is good but Google still knows the content of your email. Truly encrypted email means even your email provider cannot read your email.
If you are still not aware that your emails in Gmail are scanned by Google or rather the AI algorithm, the smart reply feature proves beyond any doubt that Gmail scans every email in your mailbox.
Update - here’s more information on third party app providers riding on Gmail that have real people reading your emails to develop new features as well as tracking your online behavior.
Thus, the importance of encryption. ProtonMail does not hold the decryption key so even if someone manages to hack ProtonMails servers, nobody can read them. The encryption works in the background so you don’t have to do anything except use their service.
Here’s a video that shows you some of the features inside.
I’ve been using ProtonMail for several months. It is stable and fast, although you don’t get all the bells and whistles like Gmail.
I suggest you give ProtonMail a test, and tell me what you think?