With the “How they got hacked” episodes along with every google search and some emails from friends now showing up as product ads. I’m looking at going to a secure email solution (I’m currently trying out DuckDuckGo as a search engine).
In doing some web surfing, it seem ProtonMail, Tutanota and Mailfence seem to be consistently in the top 5 of the reviews. Does anyone have any experience in using these services for email? I know Mailfence add Calendar and some other integrated tools, but ProtonMail and Tutanota seem to have at least the calendar on the road map as well.
I know these are all paid services and Tutanota is open source so I may try them first but wanted to get some thoughts from the group.
Mailfence I can’t comment on but as to ProtonMail and Tutanota I have both and am very happy with them for communicating with clients (part of the service agreement). Haven’t had any issues that would be a big negative.
DuckDuckGo is also a standard for me better results but also use searx.me and Ixquick when I do thorough search.
For confidential file sharing take a look at Semaphor from SpiderOak https://spideroak.com great for teams zero knowledge crypto.
That is all.
I’d choose ProtonMail it is well done and based in Switzerland where the privacy laws are the strongest. Proton’s data center is also best practice, very well connected and physically secure.
Trusting nothing I still encrypt sensitive information before attaching to an email. How did Buffalo Springfield put it song “paranoid runs deep.” In todays world it pays to be suspicious.
I chose hushmail that was the one off the top of my head that had been in the game the longest, i’m curious as who is the best choice for secure email services right now too. My knowledge on the subject is dated.
I went with ProtonMail. So far as an end user I’m happy with it. However, I don’t think it is enterprise ready yet. I don’t have any issues, but it is missing features. No way a company could really use it as on Outlook/GMail replacement. They just added calendar ability in the web beta version. They have been making some improvements on it, but I still can’t figure out how to send out meeting invites. They are supposedly working on a Drive as well for encrypted storage but that is yet to be seen. Also, you can’t have nested folders to organize saved emails. The non-free version isn’t the cheapest either. However, I’ve had them for almost a year and due to various promotions they have increased my storage from the initial 5M to now 15M for free. Two times now they have given out 5M increases for free. So that is nice.
Once they get the Calendar figured out, add the ability for nested folders and add the Drive function, I think they will be very close to being a real solution for small to medium companies.
rip tutanota has been under consistent ddos this year. i still use them though as few of my client isn’t heavily reliant on mail activities, YMMV
if you want to secure your mail account, ask your user to throw their mouse before opening emails. it’s hard to teach to “normal people” to filter out which mail is suspicious or not, or at least try to ask their janny / sysadmin
Personally I find that yahoo and google seem to do a good job of keeping out a lot of the rubbish. Though you are right I still remember the I LOVE YOU email from 20 years ago, nearly brought the bank I worked in down
Divorced myself from using yahoo and gmail for anything important and went to Hushmail.
Yahoo was bought out at least 2 times, every time they were bought my account would vanish or I’d lose the ability to modify or otherwise access it.
I’m willing to pay an independent third party that isn’t linked to my ISP so that I can get a reliable and potentially more safe/secure mail services. I pay about 35 bucks a year, which is not a hardship, since it’s paid they will be hearing from me if something happens to my account.
“Though you are right I still remember the I LOVE YOU email from 20 years ago”
So do I, it hit the military base I was posted at in 99. Of course everyone thought it was cute, passed it around totally unaware of it’s actual intent.
Overall it was much more harmless then it could have been, particularly compared to something like Code Red which followed a year or two later.
By that time I was in tech college, it took a year to fully clean it out of the college’s networks, it still came back for another round later on.
I have been using ProtonMail for 2 years. It is stable and has some “business” features like mapping your domain and creating @yourdomain address.
The only problem I have found is that they don’t offer the option to forward your mail to another address of yours. This means that if you decide to leave them, then you have to keep visiting their site to check if someone has sent you something.
Tip: they offer a big discount every Black Friday.
