ProtonMail

Every day, we send and receive emails through popular and common platforms. But how safe are the e-mails you send to colleagues and friends? In case you didn’t know, the emails that pass through your account are always being monitored. It’s true that you might not always have an actual human cyberstalker reading through all your mails, but have you ever wondered why these services are free? Standard email clients are designed in a way that they scan through your messages for specific keywords to use when advertising. That’s why most ads that you encounter on your email service seem targeted towards you. There’s also a chance that you could suffer more malicious problems especially if you’re working on something confidential.

The way ordinary mail clients are designed leaves a chink in your safety armor that can easily be exploited by hackers and government agencies. Through normal mail clients, the messages you send and receive are hardly ever encrypted. Even if they are encrypted, they can be viewed when they’re on the mail provider’s server. Anyone with access to the client’s server can easily read through your mails.

If you want to protect your email from prying eyes, use a secure email service. Depending on the secure mail service you use, you can protect your information from just about anyone; from the casual prying hacker to even government agencies, your mail will be 100% secure. 

Proton mail is a great option for secure mail service as it offers all the features of any encrypted mail service. It offers easy to use features for anyone to pick up.

ProtonMail offers End to end encryption. This is a common term is the world of secure emails and pretty much anywhere that information needs to be kept secret. Encryption protects the content of emails from all prying eyes. It hides your sent messages from malicious third parties that might try to view your information along the way.

With end-to-end encryption, the message is encrypted when you send it and is decrypted when the recipient opens it. Encryption simply means making the file unreadable by any software unless it is decrypted. The message can only be unlocked only with the recipient’s personal key so nobody in between can decrypt it. Services like ProtonMail make it possible to transmit sensitive information without worrying about it falling into the wrong hands.

Protonmail has it’s own unique method of end to end encryption when you use ProtonMail to exchange emails with another ProtonMail user, messages are encrypted with their key in your browser or smartphone app and are deciphered when the recipient opens the message. This method allows you to send and receive secure emails without the need to set up unique passwords. When you use ProtonMail to send a message to someone who does not use ProtonMail, you have the option to encrypt it with a password. 

The recipient will receive a message containing a link to the ProtonMail web interface. At the interface, they must enter the password to view your message. From that same interface, they can reply with an encrypted message protected by the same password.

On a Windows or macOS desktop or any other computer Operating system, ProtonMail’s web interface is nice and simple. If you’re using a mobile device, you just have to download the equally simple app for Android or iOS. The mobile version has a few features that the regular webmail version doesn’t show. On mobile, these features show up right below the subject line; in the web-based edition, they’re down at the bottom left, below the body text. Clicking the hourglass icon lets you set an expiration time for the message, measured in days, and hours. Clicking the lock icon lets you define a password to encrypt the message for a non-user of ProtonMail. By default, encrypted messages expire after 28 days, though you can set a different expiration time. You can enable authentication by fingerprint, and define actions for left and right swipe; by default swiping to the right trashes a message, while swiping left marks it as spam. You can also set a mobile signature, that can be different from the regular signature.

You can also set push notifications for the mobile app so that you are immediately alerted if any mails are sent to you. The mobile fingerprint verification can be set to have a timer. Each time this timer resets, the app asks for your biometrics. This keeps your info safe even when you left your phone unlocked in a hurry or something like that.

Your data is safe when you use ProtonMail because it stays with you. ProtonMail uses cla client-side encryption with a key that ProtonMail does not have access to, the company cannot decrypt your data. This means that absolutely nobody, even proton mail themselves cannot pry into your files and messages. ProtonMail uses AES, RSA, and OpenPGP secure implementations with open source libraries. Their code has been fully examined by experts in the security field worldwide.

You probably don’t pay money for your standard webmail account, but that doesn’t mean it’s free. You pay with your privacy, allowing the provider to check all your messaging for data to create targeted ads. Consider switching to a security-first encrypted email provider like ProtonMail. You can use it for free, with some limits, or pay a small monthly fee to raise those limits and add features. ProtonMail stores your data using zero-access encryption, which means that nobody but you can access it—neither a disgruntled employee nor a lawyer waving a subpoena. And when you communicate with other users of the service, your messages are encrypted end-to-end. You can also apply password protection for messages to non-users.