Encrypted email made easy – free or paid versions protonmail.com

Impetus

TED Video: http://www.ted.com/talks/andy_yen_think_your_email_s_private_think_again#t-360960

A few scientists at CERN* in Switzerland where the WWW was invented, have come up with a secure email service – https://protonmail.com which offers end to end security. My guess is that they were concerned at foreign governments snooping on technology discussions to steal their (European nuclear energy and related) secrets. Protonmail has apps for Android and iPhone devices. There is also a browser version. It supports Linux and others. It has been around for a few years on a limited access basis, but is now open to the world.

I installed it today, and had an issue with the mobile app this evening – my phone app wasn’t making a noise/vibration when a mail arrived. I reported it at 19h CET and it was fixed at 20h.

The interface looks pleasant (WEB and app), and there are lots of options in the settings. You can use it with your own domain name if you wish. It can be used to send emails to ‘the unwashed’ who use non-encrypted email providers. To do so you compose a message, click the padlock and type in an agreed password for the recipient to use to decrypt the message. You can even send them a reminder for the password. When they receive an email, they see a screen inviting them to enter their password to reveal the unencrypted message. Childs play. Proton to proton emails are automatically encrypted end to end.

The app supports swipe to move to trash or mark as spam. There is a mobile app pin option, with timeout variations. The control over download notifications are very granular. Unlike Google, they don’t hide from the customer – it is easy to contact them with an issue.

On top of normal support tickets, they give you the option of securely emailing them with a support issue, and there is an urgent email address for out of hours issues – eg system breakdowns or whatever. Typically Swiss. The paid for service only costs EUR 5 to try for a month. The paid service offers more features than the free product. Needless to say no advertising. It offers alias email addresses - which I use for hotel and airline reservations - once the trip is over, dump the alias address and you get rid of hotel and airline spam. Irish and Spanish airline spam is appalling, even after one has checked-in, they send reminders to check-in and adverts for their special offers. Aliases allow crap like this to be auto-returned to sender.

They have open sourced the code.

As I said above watch the TED video:
http://www.ted.com/talks/andy_yen_think_your_email_s_private_think_again

The name protonmail came from the CERN collider which energizes protons…

*The European Nuclear Research Facility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN

Anybody using advertising supported ‘free’ email services today is naïve in the extreme. Yahoo! mail was hacked twice recently 500 mil and 1 bil email logins stolen. How many of those logins were also used in other services?

Email has a great lock-in advantage – especially if you don’t own the domain name. The easy way to move is to forward emails to your old account to protonmail and reply to the sender from there. Over time they will forget your old address, and all the spam that lives with it once you get to a point when you are happy to stop the forwarding.

Impetus

Instructions on how to transition from Gmail to Protonmail, including how to forward messages from Gmail via IMAP to protonmail:

https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/transitioning-from-gmail-to-protonmail/

Impetus

More features on Protonmail.com:

When setting it up mobile using the app, they give you a choice of 2048 or 4086 bit keys. They warn you that the 4'096 bit key choice can crash mobile phones due to the large amount of computing power required. Methinks 2048 is enough for the next zillion years. I don't know if this is an issue with the latest smart phones which have lots of processing power.

We used to use 1024 bit with https until about five years ago when they changed over to 2048 bits (well managed companies, that is). They can probably break a key of around 1000 bits at the moment. However if they moved from 1024 to 1025 bit keys (ie just +1) that would double the number of computations required. So I think 2048 is sufficient overkill until the end of the earth, touch wood.

When creating a proton.com email, you can time it to self-destruct at a specific time/date.

I have been in several countries over the past few days, and have found the app to alert one to new incoming emails, far faster than any other email service I have used (paid or free).

You can use protonmail with a domain name registered by you, if you wish. Anybody with evil intent will not want to use this feature - but it suits me fine, because I want to come up with a URL understandable in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Which will probably be a word with a Latin origin also used in German. Something that will be easier for somebody who works in a hotel in Spain on minimum wage can get their head around.

neonman

I've been using protonmail since early 2016 and really like the service. I am still using google inbox a bit but if I am signing up to a new service I give my protonmail address now and also give out my protonmail address if someone asks for an email address from me. What held it back for me was the lack of the smartphone app as when I signed up it was in beta only but now that it is released to everyone i'm using it more and more. I would recommend it.

I'll take a look at that link Impetus has linked above later so thanks for that.

Impetus

Protonmail.com is full of smart Swiss ideas. When you send an email, it shows a padlock icon on your screen. If you mouse-over the icon, it will tell you the encryption status of the email.

There are three possible options. When a message is: end-to-end encrypted, stored encrypted and un-encrypted.

If one sends an encrypted email to joe@gmail.com, Joe will have to know an agreed decryption password that you exchange with him when you meet etc.

When Joe receives your email, he can reply to you in an encrypted window - but attachments between joe@gmail and you are not encrypted. If you want to send a scan of your passport, payment card or other confidential material to Joe - both he and you have to use protonmail for the attachment to be encrypted as well as the text in the mail. Of course you can send un-encrypted emails to anybody from protonmail too.

You can sign-up for free protonmail.com (which has Android and iPhone/iPad apps) or you can pay EUR 4 per month for a more comprehensive service which allows you to use your own internet domain name, use more alias addresses and offers more storage.

The service is based at CERN in Geneva, and takes its name from the proton accelerator which runs underground Geneva and into neighbouring France.

It is easy to get people to move to using your new email address. Every time they email you, reply to them from your new address. Ultimately, they will wake up!