And what do you actually use? I know the answer is probably self-hosting but maybe there are other solutions for a decent privacy.
I own a custom domain and actually use Tutanota as my host. Self hosting is a nightmare and easy to fuck up, which leads to your emails getting sent to spam or just not receiving. I use custom domain support in Tutanota that costs me $12/yr (2 custom domains) and my domain is $15/yr. Since custom domains stick out like a sore thumb, if I need privacy then I will use AnonAddy to forward to my email with an anonymous forwarder.
Like 99.9% of my emails aren’t encrypted but that’s not the point. Tutanota removes a lot of the privacy leaks via metadata and has privacy protection measures by default like disabling images from automatically loading. Also it’s calendar/contacts/email all rolled into one and everything is e2ee. Not to mention, unlike ProtonMail, they have their own push service that works on DeGoogled Android and can be installed from fdroid.
this is a very sensible alternative to actually going all-in on self-hosting mail, which is a total pain in the ass.
Anonaddy/Addy.io to create aliases, then PGP encrypt it before forwarding to my Google mailbox.
I also use Proton but considering ditching it in favor of Anonaddy.
A privacy email provider and email aliases for everything you sign up for.
Email Providers
Protonmail
Tutanota
Email Alias Providers
Simplelogin
addy
Proton pass does e-mail aliases if you pay up for the high tier subscription
Which is through SimpleLogin, which Proton bought.
But its though SimpleLogin, not ProtonMail itself.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/
Normal email is unencrypted when it’s on the wire in transit. (Nowadays they use SSL between servers, but it’s totally readable by every server in your pathway. Which isn’t much better ). The best you can hope for email is to encrypt it and store it at rest once it arrives at the server. If you self host the server you could have one way encryption enabled. If you don’t want to self host the privacy guide options are pretty good.
Don’t have any conversations via email if you can avoid it. Prefer end-to-end encrypted platforms like signal instead
These days almost every mail server will send mail over tls, but it’s not a guarantee which is a little unfortunate. Like you say there’s always privacy concerns with email, unfortunately.
I think in terms of privacy it really depends what you care about and what you’re using it for. If you care about Google reading your inbox, then self hosting can in theory help (at least for emails where the other party isn’t on Google or whatever)… Personally I like the idea of Google not knowing every company that I have an account with and everything I order online, which is information that’s definitely in your inbox. If you care about obscuring who you are to services that you sign up for with email, then arguably self hosting is not ideal because you’ll be the only one using that domain for email, and you might be better obscuring yourself through something like Apple’s “hide my email” service (which of course means you trust Apple to see those emails instead).
If you have more serious concerns and are having conversations that you don’t want anybody other than the recipient to know about email is probably the wrong choice for that conversation, but PGP is a decent option in these cases, albeit too clunky for most people. You may consider other services like protonmail or tutanota, but there are concerns with these services as well (eg, protonmail gets some flack for not encrypting metadata like message subjects, which is a big deal) and again there aren’t necessarily good guarantees for anybody you’re talking to on gmail or whatever.
Personally I like self hosting my email because of the flexibility that it offers and the price. It’s nice to be able to have as many email accounts as I want and it’s cheap to host, and I enjoyed learning about it and setting it up. My personal inbox is out of the hands of giants, but obviously if I’m emailing normal people it’s probably going to be available in the clear to Google or Microsoft (which is likely the case regardless of your solution). That’s not ideal, but it’s the reality right now with email. I kind of think of email more like a Twitter account or something at this point. It’s a semi-public way for random people to get in touch with you and a lot of conversations might be kind of explicitly public like on mailing lists, or something more akin to talking to a colleague in a public space — not super private, but a convenience, I guess?
I’d still recommend that people do try to self host their email if they’re thinking about this. Independent mail servers seem like a healthy thing for the web and learning more about it will give you a better sense of how secure / private your emails really are. Things like protonmail seem to have some advantages, but I also get some weird vibes from them and I’m not sure how much of a privacy increase they really give if you aren’t talking to other protonmail users and stuff anyway.
