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What is email privacy?
Email privacy means keeping your messages safe from prying eyes at all times, but most email providers aren’t private. Learn how private email can help protect you against hackers, government spies, and Big Tech’s pervasive invasion of your privacy.
Your emails record who you are. From chat to shopping receipts, work tasks, love letters, and doctor’s notes, your email messages span the length and breadth of your life from adolescence.
Before email, we would send private information in a sealed letter. Yet email is more like a postcard than a letter, leaving the intimate details of your life open to be read and exploited.
We explain email privacy, why most email services aren’t private at all, and how private email can help protect you and your sensitive personal data from exploitation.
Email privacy means ensuring unauthorized individuals, email service providers, or other organizations can’t read, share, sell, or otherwise exploit the personal and sensitive data in your email account.
Standard email is like a postcard
Unfortunately, it’s easy for Google and other Big Tech email providers to invade your privacy in this way because email wasn’t originally designed to be secure. The IMAP, SMTP and POP email protocols weren’t encrypted, so emails were open to be read.
Today, most big email providers, like Gmail and Outlook, use TLS to encrypt messages in transit. That means your messages are secure while being sent from A to B, but only if the recipient’s email service supports TLS.
Similarly, Gmail encrypts your messages on its servers. But Google retains the encryption keys and can decrypt your emails. So they can access your data and share it with third parties, like advertisers and governments.
By contract, private email like Proton Mail is genuinely private because it uses end-to-end encryption. With end-to-end encryption, your message is encrypted on your device and can only be decrypted by the person you write to.
That means you control who sees your messages. No one but you and those you authorize can read them. And because Proton Mail collects no personal data linked to your identity, no one you never authorized can see, share, or sell your data.
Most large email providers, like Gmail and Outlook, retain the encryption keys to your emails to keep a backdoor into your mailbox. That means they can read your messages whenever they like.
Here’s who can read your email and how private email providers prevent them.
Most large email providers, like Gmail and Outlook, retain the encryption keys to your emails to keep a backdoor into your mailbox. That means they can read your messages whenever they like.
Here’s who can read your email and how private email providers prevent them.