In a world where Google and the NSA inspect every email, a truly secure email service would be a godsend. Several email systems have touted themselves as secure, but we eventually learned that they were flawed or that their servers could be grabbed and inspected or otherwise compromised.
1: End-to-end encryption (emails are decrypted in your browser).
2: Does not require a phone number or another email to open an account (that account might be used to track your identity).
3: You can set your email to expire after a number of days—even hours.
4: It keeps no logs.
5: Even the administrators at ProtonMail can't read your email.
6: It is located in a neutral nation that is known for its respect for privacy.
About ProtonMail
ProtonMail was developed in 2013, at least in part due to the revelations that Edward Snowden provided regarding the NSA's world-wide surveillance (WWS) program. It was developed by researchers from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. If you are not familiar with CERN, it's the world's largest subatomic research facility that many credit with the development of the World Wide Web, among other things.
ProtonMail was designed to give the email user complete anonymity. To accomplish this anonymity, it provides the following.
1: End-to-end encryption (emails are decrypted in your browser).
2: Does not require a phone number or another email to open an account (that account might be used to track your identity).
3: You can set your email to expire after a number of days—even hours.
4: It keeps no logs.
5: Even the administrators at ProtonMail can't read your email.
6: It is located in a neutral nation that is known for its respect for privacy.
HOW TO SEND ULTRA SECURE EMAIL
1: Apply for a ProtonMail Account.
The first step, of course, is to request for an account. Go to https://protonmail.com and submit a request for an account.
2: Create an Account
Once you receive the email notifying you that you can now open an account, click on the link they sent you. This will take you to a "Create Your Account" screen, such as below.
It looks a lot like any other webmail account form, with one exception: it requires two passwords. One is to log into your account and the other is to decrypt your email. For maximum security, make certain that these two are different.
3: Log In
Once you have created an account, you can log in like any other webmail account.
Now that you have successfully logged in with your username and password, ProtonMail will prompt you for your second password which is used to decrypt your email.
When you enter it, it begins working on decrypting your email as seen below.
When all of your email is decrypted, it will open a familiar email interface.
4: Security Settings
If you click on "Settings" in the top bar and then "Security," it brings you to the screen below. Notice that you can export your PublicKey for use in PGP-compatible services. Presently, it is only compatible with OpenPGP. Also notice in the lower half of the screen the "Authentication Logs." By default, they are "Disabled" and I recommend you keep them so for the highest level of security.
5: Email Expiration
One of the features of ProtonMail that I really like is the email expiration feature. When you compose an email, you can choose how long it will exist on the server before "expiring."
To do so, simply click on the "clock" icon in the bottom of the compose email window and it will open a slider where you can choose how long the email will exist. In this case, I set the expiration to 13 hours. After you hit "Set," the clock will begin ticking, and when the time has expired, the email will expire and no longer be available to Anyone.
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