The first part of this article, written recently, went over secure instant messaging. This second part will take up secure email communications.

The subject is extensive enough that it is not easy to cover it comprehensibly in just 2 short articles, while also keeping it understandable for the non-geek. But here we go.

Secure emails: To a greater or lesser degree most people have heard about it. It is often accompanied by words like encryption, et cetera. The idea being that only the sender and the recipient, i.e. the intended parties, are able to access the contents of the emails.

As with everything, several degrees of security exist in different email systems models. The lowest, your “free” Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft email accounts are relatively easy to intercept, and are often scanned by the email providers themselves (as covered in their own Terms of Service you agree to when you get the email account) to search for content that can be used to market products to you. So much for free 🙂 .

A level up are providers like Hushmail, a Canadian company that has been around for about 17 years and which provides encrypted emails and the ability to send emails that require a password to decrypt (decipher, decode), is ad free, and provides a decent level of privacy. It has free and paid versions, depending on how many features are enabled.

Then you have StartMail, brought to you by the creators of Startpage/Ixquick (one of the most private search engines around). This only has a paid version (one can start with a free trial) and provides better security. Again, no ads, encryption based emails, only intended recipient and the sender can read the messages.

Finally my pick as the one that has the most potential for actual full privacy: ProtonMail. The main feature that sets ProtonMail above the rest is that the-end-to-end encryption/decryption happens in your computer/device (seriously, you need a password to get into your account and then a second password to decrypt your inbox on the spot), so even if the Swiss based servers were subverted somehow, it would be impossible to gain access to or decrypt any messages. Also a nice feature is the ability to set the longevity of the of the emails sent (how long after sent do they expire) if so desired.

ProtonMail has been around for a year in Beta (initial) testing stage and still only available by invitation (meaning you’ll be in a waiting list for a little while, as the demand for more users is met).

As a closing remark I’d like to remind you that absolute security is a nice concept, but to me it doesn’t exist. Specially when placed in the context of a rapidly evolving world of computing technology and telecommunications. But as of this writing and so far ProtonMail is the closest I’ve found to secure email communications.