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Comparison of email providers
1. Introduction
2. Choosing a decent email provider
3. Summary
Introduction
Email is one of the popular decentralised communication tools in the world wide web, in which everyone can host a email server to communicate with one another. However not everyone wants to configure or host it itself, and that’s why email providers exists. Of course, there are existing big corps like Gmail and Outlook that is convienient and free, but on the other hand, those email providers will track you, sell your personal datas to third parties, and show you targeted advertisements in order to earn money.
Apart from these big companies, there are also email providers like ProtonMail which advertises itself as the private email service, but are they really private? The fact of the matter is that some of the “private” email providers just use this word for profit, but it doesn’t really respect your privacy. Therefore this review is born, to help you to categorize different email providers, including the "private" ones.
Choosing a decent email provider
Here are the basic factors of how I am going to review different email providers, and the things I consider before I give grades to one of them.
- Mail cilent support - I don't need any feature like auto-encryption, just give me the freedom to use OpenPGP in my own email client.
- Uses website analytics softwares like google analytics - This is a huge drawback as it means the service alone is not respecting your privacy. But yeah - it's the actual service that matters for most people.
- Does registration requires reCaptcha/hCaptcha which can track you? *
- Do they share information to 3rd parties? *
- VPN/TOR allowed for registration or log in? *
- Is the terms of service restrictive? - for example, "no messages spreading hate" or "no porn content".
- What do they collect? *
- How long the collected data is stored? *
- Do they implement disk encryption? Can they see your mails? - This means any emails without encrypted by OpenPGP can still remain unreadable by the service provider. This is a matter of trust anyways, since they may still be able to creep on your emails before encrypting them.
- Do you accept bitcoin if they are paid? *
- Does JavaScript required to login/register/view the page? - JavaScript is the main tracking method used by big corpos. Many uses browsers like NetSurf to combat this - if they require JavaScript, they are combating those minimalsm users.
- Is the website cloudfared? *
* Refer to this article for more information.
Summary
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