After I moved away from two major Google services, the next beast in the house was Gmail. And this one wasn’t easy too.
Here’s a bit of backstory of my experience with email and how it still remains intimate. If you aren’t interested, you can skip this completely and continue from here.
The year was 1999. I had just finished my high school in India. Me and bunch of our school friends went in different directions to pursue our college education. And we wrote letters to each other. You know, those letters where you literally had to write them on a piece of paper.
We used to run out of paper that we would write in the margins with arrows pointing continuity (those habits from school where you always left margins on all sides whenever you wrote anything :)). And then the letter used to take few days to reach the other side of the country. And what a joy it was to open such letters – so much that I still have some of those with me after 20 years!!
These were pre internet days in India. Or rather, pre computer revolution days – not a lot of homes could afford computers. Within the next couple of years the internet landscape in India started changing. We used to go to what’s called as “internet cafes” where you can rent a computer with an internet connection.
And that’s where we discovered things like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. And what a revolution it was. That we could communicate with someone 1000s of miles away so easily! Yahoo offered something like 2MB mailbox size and Hotmail bumped it to 5 or 10MB. And it was such a celebration. That we could keep more memories in our Inboxes (we still used to clean up some old ones though).
And then it was circa 2005 or so. We heard about something called as Gmail that offered a whopping 1GB of space. Google was still a search company. We were fascinated with the idea that someone could offer us 1GB of space for free!! There was a mad rush to get the invites. And every time you went to Gmail’s home page, the counter that showed how much Inbox space is offered kept increasing slowly!!
Wow, what a moment in history for email it was. That I longer have to delete a single email anymore and I could keep all my communication with my friends and colleagues for ever! And how clean the interface was!! With all those labelling, filtering, searching – Email had indeed arrived with Gmail.
The nail in the coffin
15 years later. The very company that revolutionised email, has scared me enough that I am taking every step to cut my relationship with them.
While Google had clarified earlier, that they will no longer scan customer’s emails for serving ads, in May 2019, there was one incident that finally made me take the step of leaving Gmail. There were numerous aritcles, like this, that spoke about Gmail tracking user’s shopping activitiy. When I checked my account history, all my shopping activities across e-commerce stores, those food and grocery deliveries to my home – everything was neatly organized.
Since then, Google seems to have removed this feature. But it was good enough for me to make a decision. By now, I had already moved out of Android and Google Search. GMail was just a matter of time anyways.
The Alternatives
This one is harder – isn’t it? When it comes to email, there are plenty of providers. Almost every hosting company or your ISP itself provides an email service. And you do have a host of other free email service providers:
- Going back to Yahoo / Outlook – A big NO as they have a huge advertising engine
- Mail.com – free email service from Germany but displays Ads based on email context
- GMX – another email service provider from Germany
While looking for alternatives, almost every article that was listing out options, mentioned few service providers who provide “Paid” email service. And then it stuck me.
Back in the days, when we used to write letters to our loved ones, we bought those blank letters from the post office. Or we affixed a Stamp on them. Those letters were sealed. That meant, the service provider, the postal service in this case, has no reason to look at what’s written inside the letter. And the person on the other side would know the post office had looked at the content if the “seal” is broken.
If email is a communication service, isn’t that how emails are also supposed to be? That the service provider shouldn’t have any business in looking at the content of the emails (except for things like spam filtering)?
That led to me find a host of email service providers who take pride in providing email as a service at a price. No snopping into email contents. No Ads. No Tracking. Here are the top ones that I found:
Out of the above list, ProtonMail and Tutanota provide end to end encrypted email service. Fastmail and Zoho Mail do not seem to encrypt email content but their business models are based on customers paying for their service.
ProtonMail
Out of all the above paid email service providers, most people overwhelmingly recommended ProtonMail.
I switched to ProtonMail about an year ago. An end to end encrypted email service. ProtonMail and its staff cannot snoop into your email. Data is encrypted on the client side using an encryption key derived from your password.
Pros
- A business model which clearly establishes that they are not interested in tracking user’s emails
- On the server side they don’t log any data that is traceable to the user. You can checkout their security/privacy capabilities here
- Open source: They recently open sourced their code so that anyone can validate their claims. This is a big deal!!
- Based out of Switzerland where privacy laws are pretty strict
- Most of the typical email features that you expect like filters, labels work well
- Mobile apps
- Tons of features like custom domain, aliases, catch-all and so on
Cons
- Limited search capabilities. Because the email body and attachments are encrypted, the search doesn’t work on them. Search is limited to Subject and From/To addresses. This can be a bit frustrating coming from GMail
- If you come from the Google ecosystem where calendar, contacts, drive, docs and others are pretty deeply integrated, you will miss those. They just recently got “Encrypted Calendar” out and are working on ProtonDrive – a Google Drive’s equivalent. So pretty much early days
Paying for the service
Apart from all the “Cons” listed above, I expect one major block for most average users. It’s the notion of “paying” for email. Over the last 15 years, we have got so used to things being “free” and most people (including me) didn’t understand the extent of tracking by large corporations like Google.
While ProtonMail offers a “Free Trial”, the capabilities are fairly limited. You need to switch to one of their paid plans for the service to reasonably work for your day to day email needs.
My other worries
While I have been a paid user for the last year or so, I still do have some worries on using the service.
- Service getting blocked: There have been incidents where ProtonMail has been blocked by countries (this, this). So, there is this worry in the back of my mind if the service could be blocked by the country where I live and I will lose access to my emails. Proton also provides a VPN service that can be used to address this issue
- Accounts getting blocked: There have been instances where people have reported (here, here) that their email acocunts have been locked by ProtonMail’s automated systems. Most of them have been able to work with ProtonMail’s support and get it unlocked
- Service Availability: One other major worry is the long term availability of the service. Compared to a big tech firm, ProtonMail is still a small, privately held firm. Though their business model is based out of paid services, we have no clue about their profitability and long term sustainability
My Recommendation
Despite the above worries and few cons, ProtonMail has been working very smoothly for me for the last year. Here’s what I would recommend:
- Start with their free trail and check out their experience
- If you decided to use it for “prime time”, then I recommend switching to a paid plan
- They provide a short domain called “pm.me” as an alternative to “protonmail.com” (which is longer). The free plan allows people to send emails to both @protonmail.com and @pm.me. However, for sending emails using @pm.me, you need to be on one of the paid plans
- I will also recommend you getting a domain and use it for emails (PM supports custom domains in their paid plans). Having a custom domain will help in future if you have to switch out of PM into some other email service provider (you don’t have to change email addresses at all those websites you are signed up)
Closing Thoughts
While I have started using ProtonMail as my primary email service, I am still not completely out of GMail. Primarily because service providers like banks, mutual fund houses make it hard to change email addresses – you got to physically visit them to make changes.
Having said that, I feel it is a right step. It may take another year to come out of GMail completely. However, with every email that I am able to switch out of GMail I feel more comfortable with the fact that I am reducing or at least making it hard for Google.
And if you are planning to go down this road, I would suggest you to take it slow as well. It is definitely worth it.
With Android, Search and Gmail out of the gate, it’s time to look at the other products. That’s for an another post.
CloudStaq 
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