Ask Slashdot: Advice For a Yahoo Mail Refugee

New submitter ma1wrbu5tr writes: Very shortly after the announcement of Verizon's acquisition of Yahoo, two things happened that caught my attention. First, I was sent an email that basically said "these are our new Terms of Service and if you don't agree to them, you have until June 8th to close your account". Subsequently, I noticed that when working in my mailbox via the browser, I kept seeing messages in the status bar saying "uploading..." and "upload complete". I understand that Y! has started advertising heavily in the webmail app but I find these "uploads" disturbing. I've since broken out a pop client and have downloaded 15 years worth of mail and am going through to ensure there are no other online accounts tied to that address. My question to slashdotters is this: "What paid or free secure email service do you recommend as a replacement and why?" I'm on the hunt for an email service that supports encryption, has a good Privacy Policy, and doesn't have a history of breaches or allowing snooping.

Comments

Re: Run your own

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sure?"

Running a good, reliable mail server yourself is hard to do well. Doing good spam filtering is harder. Being secure/hackproof, harder still.

Running your own server if you're an amateur is a terrible idea.

Sure, you COULD spend a huge amount of time learning how to do this well, and a lot of time keeping up with patches an maintainence. But it's likely the highest cost option if you value your time at all.

Proton Mail

[Rick Schumann]

I've had the same question recently and the answer I got was Proton Mail, based in Switzerland. Fully encrypted end-to-end. I'm surprised someone else hasn't mentioned it by now.

Don't be obtuse

[bradley13]

Don't be obtuse.

Of course there's no perfect security. You know, if a burglar wants to get into you house badly enough, he'll get in. So why bother locking your door? In fact, just leave your front door open... Oh, change all of your PINs to 1234 and your passwords to "password" while you're at it. After all, if there's no perfect security, why have any security.

The point of TFS is finding a service that is as secure as reasonably possible, while still being useful.

Re:Take Marissa's advice

[swillden]

Gmail is great in terms of reliability, spam filtering (best I've found), and features. But if you're looking for privacy, the only company that's probably worse in my mind is Facebook.

What do you mean, specifically, by privacy?

If you want to keep your family, friends, neighbors, etc. out of your email, then Gmail is great. Security is excellent, especially if you enable two-factor.

If you want to keep random hackers out of your email, then Gmail is great. Security is excellent, especially if you enable two-factor.

If you want to keep your ISP out of your email, then Gmail is great. It uses TLS connections for all client communications, and also with whatever other email servers it talks to that support it. Gmail-to-gmail communications is definitely encrypted all the time, both in transit and in storage.

If you want to keep the FBI/Police out of your email, then Gmail is as good as any US-based email provider can be. They all have to provide data in response to proper subpoenas and warrants, and Google's lawyers scrutinize requests carefully.

If you want to keep the NSA out of your email, then it's hard to say, but I suspect Gmail is quite good. Snowden revealed that the NSA was tapping Google's internal fiber, but Google has since moved to comprehensive point-to-point encryption. It's not completely impossible that the NSA has compromised the key management system that enables that, but it's actually pretty unlikely. I would assert that on this measure Gmail is as good as any large US-based email provider can be. Smaller ones may slide by the NSA because they're not interesting... but if they do become interesting they'll almost certainly be easier to pop than Google is.

(As an aside: If the NSA is targeting you specifically for surveillance, as opposed to just sweeping you up in the dragnet, you should just give up on electronic communications entirely.)

If you want to keep Google's advertising profile analytics software out of your email, then Gmail is awful. Your email will be scanned by systems that try to work out what you might be interested in buying, and this data will be correlated with web searches (if you don't have web history disabled), and data from other Google products. The resulting information will be used by Google (not by advertisers; they don't get access to the treasure trove) to show you ads for things you might want to buy, instead of things that you almost certainly don't want to buy.