Old-fashioned and well-known text messages and attachments, delivered to a digital mailbox.
Old-fashioned and well-known text messages and attachments, delivered to a digital mailbox.
Email is a method of exchanging messages (“mail”) between people using electronic devices.
Mails are written and read in an email client and send to the sender’s email server.
Emails can also be use to send documents by attach them to the message with some limitations. Attachments must be encode in a way that make them about 1.37 times bigger than the original. Email server usually limits the size of emails which alse limits the usage of attachments.
There are countless email clients but the most used are web-based ones that have the disavantage to always need a connection.
You can send email to someone with any email client as long as the sender’s email server accept it: Email is federated.
You can also send mail to discussion lists aka mailing list or join a list. The list can be used as a forum to share discussion with a group and navigate in discussions' histories.
The first important thing to know about emails is that, by default, you cannot trust an email. It’s easy, if not trivial, to change sender’s address, the principal of email do not guaranty sender’s identity.
Another problem is that email is not safe by default, someone can intercept the communication along the way. wikipedia page on email encryption
If you want to communicate by email safely, you must encrypt and digitally sign your emails. More on this below.
Finally, the most famous problem of emails is unsolicited message aka SPAM. As anyone can send email to anyone, almost for free, commercial advertisings and fraudulent messages represents the majority of email traffic. To block spams, email servers and clients have anti-spam filters. Another way to limit spams is to use temporary email addresses when websites ask from one.
As said previously, default mail usage is unsafe. If you care about privacy and data integrity, you should choose the way you use your email client wisely.
The easiest way to use email securely is by using a client who encrypt yours emails from end-to-end, an exemple is deltachat
Most wevbmail have no digital signature nor end-to-end encryption options, only few email provider provides such features (more on this below). However, you can add encryption in your webmail by using third party web browser plugins such as mailvelope
If you still want to use your regular email client and still wants some security, you can use third party plugins also it can be painfull to configure. If you’re using Thunderbird, Enigmail will encrypt message and digitally sign mail for you. For Outlook on Windows systems,you can use outlookPrivacyPlugin. For Apple Mail on Mac OS, their is gpgSuite.
It’s important to have informations about the email provider you want to choose.
Firm that own emails can use informations for commercial use, statistics, algorythms improvements… or can be force by the law to give those informations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act).
You can can choose a provider who support email encryption natively, here is a short list of some email providers who support end-to-end encryption with various subscriptions plans.
ProtonMail: Swiss base provider with end-to-end encryption, intuitive interface and secure mobile app. TutaNota: German base provider with specific strong encryption system not compatible with standard PGP encryption systems. MailFence: Belgium base provider use OpenPGP encryption and can share keys with other PGP encryption systems for clients (see above).
Even if you can’t choose your provider, you can still use encrypted system on your client as explained in the email client part.
As a reminder, do not trust unsigned email and do not send confidential nor private contents via unencrypted email.