The Best Free Way to Send a Secure Email
The need to send secure email has never been greater than today. The last year has showed us why we need email encryption now more than ever.
The Covid-19 pandemic, racial and police brutality protests in the United States and most recently the presidential elections in the US have all reminded us just how important it is to be able to communicate securely and without fear for your own privacy and security.
Unfortunately, there are not a lot of truly secure ways to make your message protected from prying eyes until it gets to the receiver.
One secure way, however, is to send encrypted messages.
Why You Need to Use an Encrypted Email Service?
The answer to this question depends on three other questions:
- Am I sending any information that can personally identify me or someone else?
An average Internet user has 70-80 passwords, according to 2020 research by NordPass (via NewsWire). If we say that 1 password = 1 online account, that’s a lot of online accounts.
A lot of the websites that you sign up to are overly curious about your personally identifiable information (PII). This includes anything that can be used to identify you, such as your name, phone number, where you live, where you work, bank account number, credit card number, Social Security and more.
- Am I sending any valuable, sensitive, proprietary, or otherwise confidential information?
When sending information through email, it shouldn’t be just your personal information that you will need to worry about getting into the wrong hands, but also any information that belongs to other people.
Do you need to send any sensitive or confidential files belonging to your company, clients, or employees? Perhaps you need to send a document securely to your lawyer? If so, you definitely need to use an encrypted email.
- Can the information I send be used in any way against me?
The information you send via email can often be used against you and be exploited by bad actors.
What can this information be? It can be anything. It can be your travel plans, online passwords, proprietary information, confidential business plans, your medical records, bank account number and so on.
All of these and more data that you freely send over email, can be used against you and can lead to identity theft.
What is the Best Way to Send a Free Secure Email?
If you answered “yes” to the three questions above, or even to just one or two, there is no doubt. You need to use a secure email.
But that opens up a new question. What encrypted secure email service to use?
The good news is that there is no lack of options available today when it comes to email encryption. Ever since Edward Snowden released the NSA documents in 2015, people have started to pay much more attention to secure email.
However, as the people have started to pay more attention to their email security and to take actions to take back their privacy, so too have the governments of different countries sought ways to put an end to this.
For instance, in the US, the EARN IT Act and the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act are both created with the sole purpose of introducing a backdoor to encryption.
And that’s the United States government we are talking about. Now, if this is going on in a democratic country, just imagine what is going on in a country with a totalitarian regime like Russia or China for instance.
We think all of this should give you ample reason to start thinking about ways to make your email more secure and encrypted email is the best way to do this.
The only problem is finding a good free secure email service that can do this.
We have already established that Gmail is not it. So what does an encrypted email need to have?
Although there are different email encryption protocols, PGP or “Pretty Good Privacy” stands out as the most secure way to send and receive sensitive data via email.
How PGP Encryption Works?
Let’s say you need to send some sensitive files to someone, but don’t want a third person or entity to know about this. What they’ll need to do is to generate two keys – private and public.
For now, the recipient will keep the private key to yourself and share the public key with you. Once you have the public key, you can use it to encrypt an email message and share it with the recipient.
At this point, the recipient can use their private key to decrypt the message. Since no one else has that private key, the recipient is the only one that can do this, even if someone else manages to obtain the public key.
Use CTemplar to Send Secure Email Free
If this sounds complicated and you are thinking that it’s not worth the hassle, don’t worry.
CTemplar: Armored Email is a secure email solution that makes it easy to send secure email free that will protect your privacy.
CTemplar uses 100% audited and open-source code and has a strict no data-retention policy, meaning that, when you delete something, it’s immediately and permanently deleted.
The platform also supports zero-knowledge password protection technology, keeping your private key password secure and has a built-in web browser kill switch that can protect you against man-in-the-Middle and other malicious script attacks.
In addition, CTemplar is available on mobile apps, including iOS and Android.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you are ready to take back your privacy, sign up now for your secure email account and we’ll give you a 14 day, no questions asked, full money-back refund.