Email Protections
What To Do
At the simplest level, you need only change to a secure provider.
| Method | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Hushmail | service | Simply put, HushMail provides HIPAA compliant email services. The HushMail service offering looks very much like Gmail, Ymail and the others on the surface. It is a company that centrally hosts thousands, maybe millions of email accounts. It is accessed by a browser and it is free of charge. There are however, significant differences. Google scans (i.e. reads) all email content. Hushmail reads no content and encrypts the email they store. "Gossip" is Google's business model. HushMail's business model uses the "Try Before Buy" aspect of the "Direct" business model. The two businesses are completely inverse in that HushMail operates from the perspective applying a business framework within the constraints allowable by good privacy practices. Google, Ymail on the other hand stretch their privacy practices as far as the public will tolerate in support of ambitious business goals. Take a look at HushMail's privacy policy in contrast to Google's defense of their own tactics. |
| ProtonMail | service | A newer service based in Switzerland that operates very much on the same principles as Hushmail. The pricing is comparable as well. You could, for the most part, read the "Hushmail" description above and apply it to this site as well. |
| ISP email | service | Internet Service Providers (ISP) nearly all provide some sort of email hosting service. While we at TekAdvocates are not aware of an ISP that has been identified as scanning email content for purposes other than virus protection and spam prevention, we are also not aware of an ISP that declares definitively that they do not do so. Use of an ISP provided mail account is better than using an obviously intrusive provider like Gmail, vigilance is however warranted. The major ISPs have shown themselves to not be above invasive behavior. |
| Personal Server | internal | Running a personal server within your domain, and especially on your own computer, is the single best way to assure email stored on the server is not being accessed by anyone else. Private servers are the approach taken by the big corporations wanting to protect their own data. You won't find Google hosting their email over on Microsoft's "Hotmail" or "Outlook" mail services, even if it is free. This is however a little technical for many people and a lot of ISP's block the SMTP port (25) from receiving emails at the residential IP addresses of their customers. Ways for addressing these issues are discussed in step 6 of the "Breaking Away" pages of this site. |
Special Notes
This page discusses strategies for keeping your email secure at it's point delivery on the mail server. Two other aspects of mail delivery are important to a completely secure solution.
- Reading/Sending email, transferring it from the server to your screen or visa versa
- Transferring email, passing the email from your email server to the recipient server
Both of these areas differ from the issue of scanning email by the host in that they represent the hazard of interception by an unknown third party that is a problem with any communication. The scanning of emails by the host is a violation of trust by the entity you have specifically chosen to handle your messages.
Aspect 1 can be relatively easy resolved by assuring you are using a secure connection to your mail provider if you are using a browser based solution. If you look in your browser address bar and you see "https:// ..." you are using a secure connection. If you see "http:// ..." you are not using a secure connection. This only protects you from your device to the server. It does not protect your information on the server itself.
Aspect 2 is much more difficult to solve. Email transferred between mail servers is, as of this writing, passed as unencrypted clear-text as the standard on the Internet. Solutions are to pass messages within a private network or use a service that allows for the sending of encrypted messages. The former is discussed in step 6 of the "Breaking Away" section.