In the recent years we hear more and more about on-line security and privacy. People wonder how to be anonymous on the web, securely chat with friends (or business partners) with assurance there's no third party reading their conversations or send e-mail/share a file which cannot be tapped/intercepted.
Concerns are being aired frequently within on-line communities and reported by the mass media. There are a lot of services which only give you the ability to use temporary e-mail (when you do not want to register somewhere with your real e-mail) but do not provide any encryption or secure connection when it comes to anonymity and people would often confuse one with the other. That is why we explicitly searched for secure e-mail providers and today we give our top 5.
1. Hushmail
Our first stop is the service that will attract orthodox users (who do not like fancy interface of major e-mail service providers) with it's minimalist retrospective design and different pricing offers:
- basic personal account is free (with ads)
- premium personal is $35-50 per year oriented at tech support
- business option is $5,24 per month
Most importantly, though it offers privacy which is so desired by many. What you get is an e-mail name @hushmail.com and 10 GB of storage. Secure search Duckduckgo has this service in the output for 'secure e-mail' keyword search.
2. Privatoria
This service is a fairly new player. Their approach, however introduces additional security layers that users will benefit from including SSL encryption. You'll get an e-mail name privatoria.net. You can also change your IP to send anonymous e-mail and be sure no one could track you. This is one of the few services found that pays enough attention to it's user interface. You get a polished design without unnecessary 3D and similar stuff. It's plain simple and modern all at once.
Privatoria also provides additional security services including VPN, Proxy, anonymous file-sharing/data storage & anonymous chat. You get anonymous e-mail plus all above-mentioned services free during first 24 hours of use. After that it's $4 per month, $20 per 6 months & $30 per 12 months.
3. Safe Mail
This service has a name that speaks for itself. To use it you'll have to register, provide domain name and do bunch of other technical stuff which could be a little intimidating for new users.
Safe mail also uses orthodontic UI style (one could almost say this is a trend within the industry). The security part, however does not suffer, service provides decent level of security and offers a free version with 3 Mb of space which could just be enough for a personal usage (that is if you delete obsolete mail of course).
Premium offers are:
- from $3 for personal use
- from $12.5 for business
4. Just Leak IT
This service attracts you with a cleverly composed name and hassle-free user-experience. You do not have to register or install anything or provide domain names. Just enter the site and send your mail with absolute anonymity and security.
Some could have a reasonable doubt about the security of this approach. Well, you might give these guys some credit because Mailchimp contributed to it.
5. Countermail
This service provides a secure e-mail channel with data storage ability. Unfortunately free option is only available first 7 days. After that pricing starts at $6,33 per month depending on the amount of space that is used.
They use encryption protocol called OpenPGP, with 4096 bits encryption keys to protect the data. To the best of publicly available information, there is no known method which will allow a person or group to break OpenPGP:s encryption by cryptographic or computational means. They don't have any hard drives and instead start from a CD-ROM. This will ensure that everything possible is being done to keep your anonymity.
To register you need to install extension for your web-browser and do some other tweaks which not all may welcome but some could appreciate such a security-oriented approach.
To sum the things up we can firmly state that it is possible to be anonymous on the web and do your mailing without constantly looking over your shoulder. It's obvious that it is not as easy as we would've liked it to be but those means exist and they're just few clicks away.
Using such service, however could sometimes be a problem if you wish to avoid installing browser extensions or inserting gateways and encryption protocols into your e-mail client. Not all services require that and you may find some of these to be a better match for your use-case or price expectations.