Best Secure Email Services

Email has been around for more than 50 years, and it’s still one of the most popular ways to communicate online. However, email at its core isn’t secure. Advertisement companies, the government, and hackers are just some of the entities that want to have access to your emails for a variety of reasons.

Just in the first quarter of 2019, 22% of businesses experienced a breach due to an email-based attack. Phishing is still one of the most prevalent cyber attacks and grew around 41% in 2018, a quarter of them done through email.

Unfortunately, phishing is just one of the problems. With zero security, your emails are prone to be intercepted while traveling from your inbox to the destination. Moreover, if your inbox is not encrypted, all your information can be shared with intelligence organizations, hacked, sold to advertisement companies, and the list continues. This way, email security is not only important but essential.

Three main features tell you if an email service is secure: protection of users’ information, the safety of the connection, and security against phishing and spam emails.

Typically, all the content you have in your inbox is stored in the email service’s servers. Due to this, it’s essential that email services handle users’ information securely. The best you can have is an email service that encrypts your data with your own key before saving your information on its servers. Furthermore, the privacy policy must state that it doesn’t share your data with any third party like advertisement companies. Last but not least, the email service servers should be located in countries with strong privacy laws where the government won’t be able to obtain your emails easily.

Besides the stored data, all information must be shared through a safe connection. The most usual are SSL and TLS protocols. However, when it comes to sending and receiving emails, the best security is to have end-to-end encryption.

Nonetheless, all security will fall if you openly share your own information. That’s why secure email providers work their best to have the most updated list of phishing and spam email addresses. Though, this is also something you should always be aware of. New phishing attacks appear every single day and are always evolving, so it’s not surprising that email services can’t block them all.

We use email daily. We speak with our family and friends, do business, receive bills, reset passwords, and the list continues. Basically, email is full of personal information that hackers, advertisement companies, and even some governments would love to know. Thus, having that information traveling the internet entirely in the open is a big no-no. That’s where encryption comes in.

Email services that don’t offer end-to-end encryption, still protect emails while in transit through HTTPS. However, there is a massive problem with this process, the moment the messages reach the email service’s servers, they can read every word since they have the encryption keys. On top of that, if the servers are hacked, cyber criminals will also be able to see everything. The only way to counter this is by using end-to-end encryption.

End-to-end encryption provides an additional layer of security where the encryption keys are stored on your side. In other words, nobody can decrypt your messages, not even your email service or hackers, making end-to-end encryption a must when it comes to email security.