SECURE EMAIL in 2022 Comparing the 4 Best Options (and features)

For those of you who are looking to move away from platforms like Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook, or perhaps if you're like me and you just want an additional account for more sensitive email communications, the good news is that there are plenty of great secure email options out there. There are so many, in fact, that I can't include all of them in a video like this. As I've told you before, I only create videos about software and services that I've personally used. So, I've spent the last couple months testing out four private email services that I think stand out among the crowd and how they look and perhaps even act differently. I'm sure there are other great services out there, but these are the ones that I'm looking at today. Welcome to All Things Secured. My name's Josh, and before I show you each of these secure email options, let me first explain my current setup. I still use Gmail for both personal and work email right now, and my reasoning is likely the same as many people. My Gmail addresses and my email archive are simply too valuable for me to give up entirely, at least not yet. So, what I do instead is supplement my primary accounts with my secure email account. There are a couple of ways to do that, which I'll explain at the end of this video, and one setup that you definitely should not use, so watch all the way through to learn what those are. So, as we compare each of these secure email options, we're going to look at a number of different features individually, and then at the end, we're going to sum up the best use case for each service. Let's start with email encryption. The most obvious reason you'd be using a secure email service is because you want even greater levels of privacy and security than popular email platforms provide, and to that end, each of these four email providers offers what you need. Otherwise, they wouldn't be part of this list, right? So what is it that they offer exactly? Mostly, it's end-to-end encryption, something referred to as zero-knowledge encryption, which means that all of the data in your account is locked up in such a way that even the service provider can't unlock it, even if they're asked to by the government. But wait, don't Gmail and Yahoo encrypt our emails? Yes, kind of, and this is confusing, I know, but there's an important difference here. Every email provider encrypts your email as it flies across the internet and as it sits on their servers, but they still hold the key. It's basically the difference between owning and renting your home. When you rent your home, you have your own keys that lock and unlock your doors. Nobody else can get in except your landlord. Your landlord also has these keys and they can enter in if needed. That's the way that regular encryption works. Your email is locked up and you do have your own keys, but so do Google, Yahoo, and Outlook. Using secure email options is like owning your own home. You have the keys and you can change the encryption keys whenever you want. In this case, services like ProtonMail, MailFence, StartMail, and Tutanota are simply managing your property and they do not have the keys to go in whenever they want. They have zero knowledge and it is truly end-to-end encrypted, whether you use what they call asymmetrical email encryption, which means that both the email sender and receiver are using that same email provider, or symmetrical email encryption, which usually involves password-protecting email contents for those who aren't using a secure email provider like you will be. Now, that's overly simplified, I admit, and there's some debate about how some of these services implement their encryption, but that's basically what you're getting when you move to a truly encrypted email service. All of these email services make encryption very easy for those of you who don't consider themselves tech-savvy, as in you don't really have to do anything but just start using the service and you'll have better encryption than you currently have with your email provider. But they each also offer their own kind of PGP encryption, or pretty good privacy encryption, for those that want extra security and don't mind getting their hands dirty just a little bit. In addition to email encryption, I think it's important to rate secure email providers by how they allow users to secure their account. I'm referring, of course, to two-factor authentication. Honestly, it's surprising to me to find that not every secure email provider uses the strongest form of 2FA. And I would bet that what I'm about to share with you will be out of date in the next six months as the move towards 2FA acceptance is happening pretty fast. As I record this, Tutanota is the only provider that accepts 2FA keys, which is widely considered to be the strongest form of 2FA. Not only that, but they allow you to connect multiple keys, which means that you can do what I do and set up a primary key, a backup key, and then make sure that my wife's key also authenticates my account. ProtonMail, MailFence, and StartMail use the Authenticator app, which is better than nothing, to be sure. But when it comes to something like secure email, I don't know why you wouldn't offer 2FA key integration, and I'm sure many of them will soon. So from a 2FA security standpoint, Tutanota stands out here. But from a more privacy standpoint, the tables flip. You see, Tutanota is the only provider on this list that doesn't accept a more anonymous crypto payment method. ProtonMail accepts Bitcoin, and MailFence accepts both Bitcoin and Litecoin, both from the checkout page. StartMail says they accept Bitcoin, but you have to email them to get instructions to pay, which is a little bit clunky in my opinion. Also, from a privacy standpoint, all of these services maintain their email servers in privacy-friendly countries. Now, hear me clearly, there is no perfect location, but since all data on these servers is encrypted such that it can't be unlocked by anybody other than you, it technically shouldn't matter too much, right? Before we jump into comparing how you actually use each of these email services, I'll also add that on this list, only ProtonMail and Tutanota have made their code open source. StartMail is a mix of open and closed source code, and MailFence says that they plan to be soon. Open source basically means that the code is open for any person, whether that's a security researcher or just one of us, to look into and make sure that there isn't any flaw or they aren't hiding some kind of malicious tracker. Okay, at this point, I want to transition to looking at the aspects of these secure email providers that make up the user experience, or UX. That's what you and I see when we actually use the service, whether it's on our computer or on our mobile device. For example, which companies offer mobile apps to check your email on the go? If you check your mail on your mobile device often, this might be important to you, and if that's the case, both ProtonMail and Tutanota have dedicated mobile apps. You can still check your mail on the go with StartMail and MailFence, but you'll be logging in via your internet browser, which, that's not a bad thing per se, but it has its limitations. With each company, you're allowed to create aliases, which is another way of building privacy, by not giving out your primary email address to anybody who asks for it. As you can see here, this is a paid feature, and in most cases is limited to five to ten aliases based on your account level. The only exception is StartMail, which gives you unlimited aliases, and this could be useful if you're the kind of person who wants to create random aliases for every website where you create an account, or to give out email addresses that expire after a week of use. They let you do that. Basically, you're getting burner email addresses to use, and it can be a lot of fun if that's what you want to do. All right, next let's dive into the experience with the email inbox. For example, StartMail has a very modern-looking inbox that is immediately familiar to anyone who's been using Gmail or Outlook for the past few years. As you can see, it's clean, it's simple, and it's intuitive to use. I really enjoy it. ProtonMail here also does a good job with their inbox, which incorporates nested replies, which is important to me, and the ability to organize your mail into different folders. MailFence and Tutanota aren't bad, but in my opinion, the design feels slightly more dated. The text is small, and the icons just feel like we're still stuck in the 90s. Strangely, with Tutanota, you don't even have any kind of conversation view where the same email thread is kept together. It's all separate emails, everything in its own, which is just kind of weird to me, and I hope they change that. Also, one of the features that most people take for granted with popular email services like Gmail and Outlook is that seamless integration with a calendar or a cloud storage service. In the past, using secure email has always meant not having direct access to your calendar or cloud drive, but thankfully that's changing. Both ProtonMail and MailFence have great calendar and encrypted cloud drive features, which is a huge benefit when using them, in my opinion. Tutanota offers a calendar, but no drive feature, and StartMail, as of yet, has absolutely no calendar or cloud drive. Now, in some ways, I can see why you might want to keep your secure email separated from your cloud storage, so that's really up to you as to whether or not that's an important feature, but it's helpful to know what's available when you're getting started. In the end, when you add up all of these various features together, here are my recommendations. If you're an individual who just wants a quick and easy way to do more secure email, StartMail is easy to get started using. They offer unlimited aliases, but you'll have to keep using your own calendar and cloud drive. For those more tech-savvy individuals or even small businesses, I recommend ProtonMail, which is the one on this list that I've been using the longest. The calendar feature works great, and they make it easiest to migrate your existing email clients so that you don't lose your archive of emails. Here's what I mean. They have an easy switch feature where you can do a one-time migration of your archive and all the folders you use to organize your current inbox right into your ProtonMail account. MailFence is right up there with ProtonMail in terms of features and benefits, but if you're the kind of person who wants to keep your current Gmail account for daily emails and use a secure email address only for sensitive communications, MailFence has this great feature that allows you to get a simple notification via email or SMS text every time a new email arrives in your inbox. It won't tell you all the contents of the email or anything like that, it just simply alerts you to the fact that you need to check your inbox. And I really like this because if your secure email address isn't your primary email address, then you're likely not checking it every single day. At least I don't, and so this is the perfect solution for that. Finally, if security is your top priority, I have to say that Tutanota is hands-down your best option. They're the only ones who currently accept 2FA keys, their encryption is the easiest to understand, and they're the only ones I know of who are working to develop what they call post-quantum encryption, basically encryption that can stand up against any kind of advancement in quantum computing. They're a good company and it's an affordable service. Oh, and once you purchase a subscription to one of these email services, there are two things I need you to promise me that you won't do. First, please do not set it up where you have all your secure email just being forwarded directly to your current Gmail or Outlook address. And don't set it up where you use a third-party mail client like Apple Mail, Outlook, or Thunderbird to check and send your mail. The reason that you're getting secure email is for security and privacy, and when you forward your mail or you don't access it directly from the source, you're compromising that security. Thank you for watching all the way through this video. If you enjoyed it, please consider using the affiliate links in the description below this video. That helps to financially support what I'm doing here, and then watch this video next about how to secure the files you keep in cloud storage. Take care.