Free email services must have a price to them and now we know it. Yahoo, Gmail, and other similar providers sell your data to marketers and allow them to successfully target you with ads. There are also safety concerns since even big corporations won’t be really interested in protecting your data stored on their servers for virtually free. Many users started switching to more secure platforms such as ProtonMail and HushMail.
Let’s talk about them and learn why they are more and more popular with each day!
1. ProtonMail
The price of the service is from $4 to $8 depending on the features that you choose for your subscription. There is also a free option. However, if you need additional storage space and more features, you will have to pay extra.
The servers of the company are based in Central Europe. The company is also based in Switzerland in order to grant stricter protection to the personal data of its clients. The key feature of the service is that it encrypts everything and uses the PGP encryption to protect your data when transferring it from one place to another.
2. Tutanota
With a price tag of up to $66, the service is quite expensive for an average user. However, if you want your emails to be safe from governments and third-parties, you will pay the extra fee. There are additional encryption options that will make your letters virtually unreadable without a password that you will send to the receiving party. This extra level of safety and privacy is certainly worth paying for.
The service encrypts not only the contents of the body of the email but also the metadata included in it.
3. Mailfence
This is a cheap alternative to Yahoo, Gmail, and other big providers. You can pay $2.75 for additional storage and access to the full range of functionality including PGP compatible encryption and even additional encryption for your most important letters. The IP address of the sender and metadata will still be accessible but it is a small price to pay for total protection of the letter’s contents. A great feature is that the provider offers a detailed report on how many times authorities asked to access your letters.
4. HushMail
This is a Canadian service that will give you a lot of additional features and strong encryption for a price ranging between $5.99 and $49.98. Is it a high price? Well, yes. However, the service offers standard email features like POP and IMAP servers as well as PGP compatible encryption. The only problem is that Canada is a nation that does not respect privacy as much as European nations.
