secure email

[musht]

Less comfortable relying on Gmail than once was... looking at secure/encrypted email.

Main players seem to be Protonmail and Tutanota , mentioned by Tim recently, how are people finding they work in the real world?

Installing PGP ,at my level of savvy is liable to leave me more exposed, not less😉

Guess slightly concerned about non technical recipients receiving un unreadable gibberish or replying with confidential content quoted back in plain text.

What's the panels experience?

Thanks

[richard_cooper]

I have used both, and settled on Protonmail, but there is very little in it if you're only interested in the email side. There are other extras like Proton have a VPN and secure cloud storage options. Weirdly Proton have no native client for their calendar on iOS, Tutanota do. Both have free and paid tiers, I believe Tutanota's tiers are generally cheaper.

It's important to realise that even with these services most emails will be sent unencrypted. To send encrypted you either need to have your addressee's public PGP key (Proton), or you can send them a password by other means and they get a link to the message by email (Both). Most emails you receive will also be unencrypted whilst in transit, unless the sender has well set up PGP (proton) or uses the same service. There is no real standard from what I can work out. Protonmail is based on PGP so can communicate with others using PGP, Tutanota is a proprietary system so is only seamlessly encrypted with other Tutanota users (I think but happy to be corrected!). Sending encrypted emails with passwords and links just doesn't work in the real world for anything other than very specific sensitive messages where the hassle is worth it.

My reason for using these services is not so much the encrypted email in transit, but the encrypted nature of the mailbox and wanting to get away from everything being indexed by Google and the like.