The entire contents of your inbox could be handed over to authorities and used against you. Murat Can Kirmizigul/Shutterstockīecause Google stores data in an unencrypted format on their servers, you don’t need decryption keys to make use of it. This information can then be shared with other members of the Five Eyes allegiance. (And in the U.S., emails are considered “abandoned” after 180 days, so the government can request them without a warrant.) This includes inbox contents, metadata, IP addresses, and more. and may be forced by law to turn over information on its users.
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Switzerland is not part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing agreement that exists between the U.S., Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.īy comparison, Google is located in the U.S. This means that ProtonMail can’t be forced to hand over data to authorities in the U.S. In addition to not being able to read the email stored on their servers, ProtonMail is based in Switzerland, where privacy laws are notoriously strict. RELATED: What Is End-to-End Encryption, and Why Does It Matter? ProtonMail’s Servers Are Located in Switzerland Unlike with ProtonMail, which explicitly supports the feature, working with PGP inside of Gmail is much less streamlined and borderline unusable on mobile. Using PGP inside of Gmail is possible but difficult, with browser extensions like Mailvelope and FlowCrypt making it easier to manage.
In essence, this is a bit of a trick, since the recipient must click on a link to open the message, but it works well enough, and it’s not something that Gmail or Outlook provides. ProtonMail even allows you to send password-protected, self-destructing messages to users of any webmail platform. ProtonMail also facilitates the use of Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, which allows you to “lock” email contents so that only recipients with the key can open them. All communications between ProtonMail users are automatically end-to-end encrypted so that not even ProtonMail’s employees can read them. In addition to providing encryption on the server, ProtonMail also makes it easy to send encrypted messages between users. Gmail can tell what you’re doing and when you’re doing it based on the contents of your inbox, and that’s become a feature that many users rely upon. Google will use AI to “read” your email for services like the Google Assistant to make useful suggestions at opportune moments. This isn’t the case with standard webmail providers like Gmail, which only encrypts data between your browser and its servers. In the case of a security breach, data swiped from ProtonMail’s servers wouldn’t be of any use.
ProtonMail encrypts all data on the server so that it is rendered useless to anyone without the key to decrypt it. RELATED: What Is Secure Email, and Should You Switch? ProtonMail Prioritizes Data Protection and Secure Messaging If you want an email service with all the conveniences of Gmail, ProtonMail isn’t it. For example, it won’t automatically crawl through your email and add events to your calendar.ĭeciding between a traditional provider like Google and a secure provider like ProtonMail is a case of weighing up convenience and privacy. Many of the features that make Gmail so useful aren’t possible in ProtonMail due to the emphasis on privacy and security. The free plan is limited-for example, it only offers 500 MB of storage.
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While ProtonMail sounds like an upgrade over Gmail, it does come with some caveats. ProtonMail goes further still by not logging identifying information, storing data on the server in a manner that’s useless to third parties, and better facilitating private conversations between users. Google and Microsoft use standard good security practices like two-factor authentication and securing the connection between your browser and their servers.
Google profits off its free Gmail service by showing you ads, while ProtonMail doesn’t have any ads. Unlike with Gmail, you’ll have to pay to unlock many of these additional bells and whistles. ProtonMail is one of a handful of so-called secure email providers that shun the traditional webmail route of plentiful free storage and integrated services in favor of heightened privacy and security features. That’s what makes it different from the big email providers like Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s. While all major email services claim to respect your privacy, ProtonMail goes further than most in a bid to protect you.
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