Choosing a more privacy aware email provider
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Recently the privacy of email reading and writing has been a hot topic in mainstream media. Several people are now looking at options to move away from Google's Gmail now. So what is a good and more privacy aware email provider to migrate to ? Activists have been building their own networks since years, https://we.riseup.net/riseuphelp+en/radical-servers but what are the options for the masses ? There's an interesting project to watch "Mailpile" http://www.mailpile.is/ but that is only expected to be ready in the summer of 2014, next year. Also, you should always keep in mind that your emails to for example Hotmail and Yahoo email users will be as postcards going over the internet, not as letters in envelopes (unless you are using email encryption with GnuPG) even after you have chosen a new more privacy aware email provider. There is this interesting list of more privacy aware email providers, a little bit outdated, but still very nice to look at : http://thesimplecomputer.info/free-webmail-for-better-privacy/ This week I decided to test some of these with a Firefox addon called Wappalyzer. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/wappalyzer Wappalyzer can quickly show you what software and tools a website is running. Here's some of the results : Mailoo uses Google Analytics : Hide My Ass uses Google Analytics : Privatdemail does not reveil anything at all what they are running : Surprising to see some of those privacy aware email providers use Google Analytics. So, what is the conclusion ? My personal approach is to divide your email into personal and others and use different email accounts for that. The most interesting seem TorMail and Privatdemail but I have not tested them yet. An option which is not in that list is Greenhost. Their website is partially still in dutch, but has enough english to read the important parts. https://greenhost.net/about-us/ They do no logging of email, and they are concerned about privacy and internet security. (Note: I'm not affiliated with any of these email providers mentioned here above. YMMV)
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