How Secure is Your Email Without the Encrypted Email Service?

For the past couple of years, you might have heard that email is obsolete and dead. Well, rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Email is very much alive and kicking, especially in the business world where an average office worker receives 121 emails per day.

The vast majority of emails are sent via one of the popular email clients such as Apple, Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook. As of 2018, for instance, Apple’s iPhone email client accounted for 29% of email opens and Gmail for 27% and mobile email accounted for 43% of opens in December that year according to Statista.

In total, according to the same source, more than 281 billion emails were either sent and received a day in 2018. That number is expected to go above 306 billion in 2020.

That’s a lot of emails going back and forth, but one as you’re about to press “send” on your next email to your employer, bank, school, colleague or a family member, stop for a second and think.

Is the Email You are Sending Secure?

Because, if you’re sending it via Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Apple, etc, the answer might not be what you’re looking for.

Your email is not as secure as you might think. Different threat actors will try (and some might succeed) to hack and spy on your email communication.

Will Gmail protect you against this?

To an extent. Your email data is encrypted while in transit with TLS encryption (TLS 1.1), while at rest Gmail uses the 128-bit encryption, both of which are industry standards. On the user side, the encrypted data is authenticated with SHA1 hash function and decoded using the ECDHE-RSA key exchange mechanism.

Now, this should be enough for most brute force attacks an average hacker sends against you (it would take a couple of billion years to decode it using a normal computer, check the math here), but that’s not the only threat to your email out there.

Why Do You Need Private Email Providers to Protect Your Data?

There are other things besides hackers that you should be concerned about when emailing. One of them is Google itself as they might be reading your emails without your knowledge. They’ve already been caught doing that and have now “kindly” stopped.

Now they have bots scanning your emails for valuable data about you.

As if that’s so much better.

Let’s see what Google says about this. From the G Suite Agreement:

“Google may transfer, store and process Customer Data in the United States or any other country in which Google or its agents maintain facilities. By using the Services, Customer consents to this transfer, processing and storage of Customer Data.

Now, “transfer, store and process Customer Data” can mean a lot of things, including opening, reading and sending your data to a 3rd party and this here is G Suite, which is meant to be even more secure than regular Gmail.

And you might even be okay with that when it comes to everyday email. But what about the email that contains sensitive data like your bank account information, Social Security number, credit card information, important passwords and the like? 

Would you entrust Gmail with that?

Let’s say you discovered a crime in your company and your boss is deeply involved. If you send an email telling the police about it, the boss might find out and fire you. 

How can he do that? By tracing your IP address. Every device on the Internet is assigned an IP address, which identifies it on the network and every outgoing email you send through Gmail contains your IP.

Now, there are ways to hide your IP, like using a VPN, proxy or Tor browser, but it’s possible to detect if someone is using these with tools like this privacy detection API, meaning that’s not a 100% safe option and that there are ways around it.

The Best Free Encrypted Email Service

To truly protect your email against prying eyes, you need to start using a secure encrypted email.

Today, there is a great choice of private email providers that can protect your data and, although I think you can’t go wrong with many of them, one, in particular, stands out and that’s CTemplar.

CTemplar provides a mass of security features that will keep your emails secure and you anonymous as you’re sending them. 

Unlike Gmail, which requires an SMS verification and tracks your IP), you can sign up for CTemplar completely anonymously using nothing else but a fake username and CTemplar won’t monitor, store, record, log or share any of your information, including your IP. 

Your IP will be removed from all your outgoing emails and replaced with CTemplar’s IP so you can’t be traced with it.

CTemplar also uses Zero-Knowledge Password Protection technology, meaning that you are the only one who knows your password and can access your decrypted data. This is something many privacy email providers claim to offer, but in reality, they often serve you with malicious Javascript code that can be used to hack you and even de-anonymize Deep Web users.

CTemplar is the only end-to-end encrypted email provider that prevents JS code manipulation thanks to our checksum implementation, which allows users to compare the code in their browser with the code in Github in less than 30 seconds (normally, this would take hours or even days).  

CTemplar also protects your data by using physical, bare-metal servers, instead of cloud servers. While the cloud is relatively safe, there are still plenty of risks involved (remember the iCloud celebrity hack from 2014?). 

This is why CTemplar uses bare-metal servers located in Iceland, a country with some of the strongest privacy laws in the EU to protect your data. That means your email data will be outside the 14 EYs or the MLAT data-sharing treaties.

Ready to take over your privacy once and for all? Sign up for the best free encrypted email service today.