Secure email providers

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BrentMc

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Jun 15, 2015
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Hello, I am looking for a new email provider that is more secure and has an android app. When I search for secure email, I get lots of results for private encrypted email like hush-mail. I am not looking to encrypt things if I have to tell people who want to email me they need to follow special instructions.

When I say secure I mostly mean hard to hack into. I use complicated passwords and second factor authentication when available. I am going into online selling soon and want to be able to check email via my android phone.

I hear yahoo is trying to gain a reputation for security. Any opinions on secure email providers?

In addition, if I get a website soon it may come with email service. They may not have their own android app, so does anyone recommend an email app that won't give me malware?
 

You're aware that email is sent as cleartext, right? That is, no matter how secure the connection between you and your email hosting service, the moment you hit "send", anyone snooping the network between your host and the recipient's host can read the contents of your email.

The frequently-used analogy is that email is like a postcard. While you can secure the postcard from the time you write it at home to when you drop it in the mailbox, anyone working at the Post Office can read what you've written on the postcard while it's in transit.

The situation is better if you're sending within a single hosting service (e.g. from a gmail account to a gmail account). But otherwise you have to use a private encrypted email service and the complications it entails if you want true security. That's the equivalent of sending your letter in an envelope. The drawback being you have to teach the recipient how to open the envelope.

While Google does have their computers mine your emails to show you ads, they've shown they take user-to-server security very seriously. They were the first to require a completely encrypted connection (https) to access their website, and first to disallow unencrypted connections by email apps. Most of the other email services have followed Gmail in this direction, so you should be pretty safe with any of the big names. Just remember that like a postcard at the Post Office, anyone working at any of these companies could conceivably snoop your email. There's just no way to avoid that with the way the protocol is designed.
In addition, if I get a website soon it may come with email service. They may not have their own android app, so does anyone recommend an email app that won't give me malware?
The standard protocols used for retrieving email are POP3 (if you want to download the emails to your computer) and IMAP (if you want to leave the emails on the server - handy if you access the same email account from multiple devices). There's also Exchange, but that's mostly used by companies running their own email service with Microsoft Outlook - you'd know if you needed that.

Pretty much all the standalone email apps out there support POP3 and IMAP. And pretty much every email service supports POP3 and/or IMAP. So you can just grab whatever android email app you want, configure it to access the server, and it'll work. The default Google one ("Email") is not bad; a little light on features but it gets the job done. Just make sure when configuring the app to access your email server, that it uses SSL encryption. (There's no way to use gmail without it, but some services still allow unencrypted POP3 or IMAP connections.)
 

BrentMc

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Jun 15, 2015
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Thank you for your reply. as for email security I am mainly concerned with a person hacking into and taking over the account to send spam etc. Your notes about Gmail sound good. Do you think it is the hardest to hack of the free email hosts?
 
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