Emails and Privacy

Regarding private emails, I now realize that using an “encrypted” email service was a mistake I’ve been using Tutanota. . Not only do they have limitations such as the inability to use IMAP/POP due to end-to-end encryption Tutanota FAQ. (n.d.). Tutanota. https://tutanota.com/faq#imap , but upon further consideration, I believe that they only provide extra fingerprints in terms of privacy. Allow me to explain further: our primary objective in using private email services (including self-hosted servers) is to avoid being monitored by the bigbrothers who dominate our hyperspace world. However, this cannot be specifically achieved through the email protocol in my opinion.

Typically, we use email for one of the following purposes: 1) subscribing to mailing lists, 2) verifying our identities, and 3) communicating with acquaintances. Private email servers cannot assist with any of these, except possibly the third. Firstly, when subscribing to mailing lists, our privacy can easily be compromised if the maintainers use proprietary services such as Google Groups or if any of the users use Gmail or other proprietary email services, which is highly likely to happen. Secondly, the service we use to verify our identities most likely already utilizes a proprietary service such as Xverify or Brite Verify, so using a private email server will only help prevent sending metadata (of using service \(x\)) to other bigbrother like Google via Gmail, but this will not prevent the service provider from selling that data to other other bigbrother.

Lastly, communication with acquaintances will only remain private if both parties use encrypted communication, such as sending emails using GPG encryption. If either the recipient or sender uses a proprietary email service, the whole conversation will essentially be leaked. Therefore, the only way to maintain privacy is to write encrypted emails rather than using a private email service. Thus, it is pointless to me to use an email service that only limits the client I can use via IMAP. It only adds a special fingerprint for you that you are using a private service.

So I registered a mail.ru account to use it freely with mu4e (larrasket[at]bk[dot]ru) lr0[at]gmx[dot]com, you can also find my PGP public at the heading of this site.

My old tutanota email will continue to be active.