Some of us would like to think our emails are personal and private, like the old snail mail was. But that isn't the case. The big email providers in the U.S. like Yahoo and Gmail are not only subject to the demands of National Security Letters and possibly unauthorized snooping by the NSA, but the companies themselves snoop in our emails to use our words against us in a marketing sense, or to use their rationalization, to enhance our online experience.
Not too long ago we talked about Hushmail.com, a Canadian email provider, as a viable alternative to the American email biggies. Now there's another one. This one is located in Switzerland and is called ProtonMail. Here's a writeup about it at Forbes.com titled The Only Email System The NSA Can't Access. (Forbes link via Liberty Pen.)
The problem with secure services like Hushmail and Proton is that their end to end encryption means nothing when your email correspondents still use the American biggies. So emails to those people go right into the databases of Google, Yahoo or whichever service they use. It's a good start, but if the Snowden scandal didn't send those people out looking for more secure email services then there probably isn't much that will.
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