This guy can be pretty harsh at times, but he’s clearly very knowledgeable..
However, not all providers have a recent review, and his priorities are skewed heavily to the “paranoid” side of the tech world. For example, he considers being able to mail cash to a provider a significant pro. The overwhelming majority of users aren’t mailing cash to pay for their email.
Overall, it’s good info that’s worth sharing.
I enjoyed the read. I’m a fastmail user and I didn’t pick it for real privacy but because it’s not Google. It’s better than Gmail, more features, looks better, faster etc.
I don’t know how any email provider can provide real privacy since they have to scan for spam, malware, and so on.
Fastmail is part of the 5 eyes surveillance network as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
Yeah, his requirements for an email provider are well above what most people need.
Email is not a secure means of communication in most cases. If the recipient isn’t encrypting, then your communications to them are vulnerable anyway. And in the vast majority of cases, they probably aren’t.
Really, the best thing about getting a more privacy conscious provider is not giving all your data over to Google.
Yeah, I switched to Posteo mainly so all of my emails aren’t scanned by an advertising company.
The main thing I dislike about the encrypted email providers is that I can’t use my own client, I’m stuck with whatever features they want to give me.
Yeah and getting away from Google is worth so much actually. People don’t seem to realize how important it is to simply not use Google and block their tracking scripts (on the web), and don’t use their free email service, naturally.
Exactly my reasoning. Get away from Google and advertising (though they said they are not using Gmail for that), get a better interface, masked emails. Fastmail is great.