Suggestions for a safe private email as opposed to gmail?

4/23/12 | Freemike

[freemike]

I'm looking for a alternative to gmail. Any suggestions for s safe private preferably free email? Or am I living in fantasy land.

[listenhillary]

Did you get any voter ID cards yet from the DNC?

[ICCtheWay]

A Custom Domain name with email from 1and1.com (and other companies) is not totally secure - and it does cost a little money ... but it is better than dealing with Gmail and the other data miners. Plus - I kinda like having a domain name that I created to be used for my email...

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

“Did you get any voter ID cards yet from the DNC?”

No. And I’m still trying to figure out how they got my home email address , using my FR nic.

[DBrow]

PGP takes a little getting used to. Give people a mail program with encryption transparently built in, and I think they’d use it all the time with people they email with regularly.

[discostu]

If it ain’t encrypted it ain’t private. Remember all internet traffic goes through at least 6 computers, you at best control 2, all the rest can be used to read the traffic.

[zeugma]

One other suggestion I'd offer is to make use of an email forwarding service like pobox.com. You create a "real" email address wherever you like, then have pobox.com forward mail to it. You never give out the underlying email address, so you can change providers as often as you like yet you don't have to send out change of address notices to people you correspond with regularly. I've been using this for 15 years., and have no idea what my 'real' email address is at the moment.

An additional benefit of this, is that it loosens the tie to your ISP. You can change internet providers fairly painlessly.

I use pobox.com, but there are several others out there. Google "email forwarding service" and you should find others. As a satisfied customer, I strongly recommend pobox.com though, as their spam filtering is really good. One drawback is that there will obviously be a slight delay in getting mail because email has to first go to them before it is routed to you.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship to pobox.com other than being a long-standing satisfied customer of theirs.

[TheOldLady]

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[brityank]

For a temp Email I use 10 Minute Email from my Browser. Allows you to send email or sign up to sites and reply (you can extend the time-out in 10 minute intervals) and it totally dies after timeout.

As others have said - there is no secure way of transmitting anything on the Web. You can temporarily secure the contents, but the Headers are in plain view and traceable. Good luck.

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

I made a decal of the girl in lacy pink. She’s on my old Tele.

[zeugma]

PGP takes a little getting used to. Give people a mail program with encryption transparently built in, and I think they’d use it all the time with people they email with regularly.

Enigmail is a great plugin for PGP/GPG. Works really well and is fairly seamless. There are others that work with it as well. The basic problem is first of all, that people dont understand encryption. They especially don't understand public-key encryption. Secondly, people are lazy, and despite what they say about wanting privacy, they just don't want to have to do anything or accept any responsibility for securing their life.

There is no reason why the vast majority of person to person email should not be encrypted today, other than ignorance and laziness. I digitally sign most of my email, but can't actually use encryption because it takes two to tango.