Free email services vs email through ISP's or Pay services - best for privacy?

I have a feeling that the email services that you get with our ISP and ones where you pay for the service are more likely to protect their client's privacy than companies that give away free email addresses like yahoo, google, name.com, etc. The companies where you pay (either for Internet connection or solely for email) seem to be more resistent to giving data to ABC agencies than do the free email companies. I've tried to research this, but it is difficult to find information, but with the pay services there are at least enforceable contracts that state the data within your accounts belongs to the account holder and the holder only and they can not give access to anyone else nor would they sell your data or any data relevent to your account (like metadata from the emails).

In Free emails, I haven't seen agreements anywhere near as complete and comprehensive on the protection of the user as with the pay services.

The biggest problem with emails, especially for those who move a lot, is keeping an email when they switch ISP's so they often get a free email service and stick with it. then it is a major hassell to move away from that and you are stuck with a company that doesn't protect your data and privacy. Now you could go with a service that only provides email (and maybe some other services) but those can get pricey, especially 10+ years ago when it was like $20/month for a single address! So many chose free addresses.

So what do you guys think and what services do you use (free, ISP provided or paid email service, or something else like work provided)?

It largely depends for what do you want use your email.

For inet services registration I use freemails (many) preferably in other country. For personal communication try something from this list.

I can recommend protonmail. It´s also possible to get a domain and set up your own mailserver but you have to make sure it´s secure and updated.

a reply to: verschickter

Mail services are quite complex. You have to deal with spam, setup SPF and DKIM if you want your mails delivered to gmail, setup SSL, etc..

It is possible to do it on your home router if you are able to flash OpenWRT or something similar. You can then use Postfix and Dovecot or Cyrus ... or any other opensource MTA/MDA combination. Dedicated VPS at datacenter is for sure better ...

So unless you want to spend next year by learning WTH I'm talking about, go and create account on protonmail or any other provider I linked in previous post.

originally posted by: verschickter
I can recommend protonmail. It´s also possible to get a domain and set up your own mailserver but you have to make sure it´s secure and updated.

Another Protonmail advocate here.

And they have a system to prevent someone making multiple accounts in a short time, so they're proactive at least to some extent in preventing abuse of their system. Gives me some comfort, as opposed to the many other "free" email services... You don't have to pay for Protonmail, but you can for extras, including pop/imap access from your email client.

Main thing to check is where the remote server is physically located as they'll have to follow the laws of the land or it becomes messy for them when police turn up with a piece of paper with a judges signature, data backups/UPS/size of the feeds going in, responce times to calls, fall over support, how will your data be treated when you leave, size of the mailbox and will they charge to increase it, remote servers getting patched to remove exploits/problems and the list can go on and on.

Its not hard to build a basic email server using any old junk running around with a bit of knowledge and you could almost consider it a challenge to learn some tech skills.

I use free email services from 4 different companies.

As I don't use email for top secret communications I don't have a problem with that.

originally posted by: JanAmosComenius
a reply to: verschickter

Mail services are quite complex. You have to deal with spam, setup SPF and DKIM if you want your mails delivered to gmail, setup SSL, etc..

It is possible to do it on your home router if you are able to flash OpenWRT or something similar. You can then use Postfix and Dovecot or Cyrus ... or any other opensource MTA/MDA combination. Dedicated VPS at datacenter is for sure better ...

So unless you want to spend next year by learning WTH I'm talking about, go and create account on protonmail or any other provider I linked in previous post.

I didn't know OpenWRT could host an email server. I've used so many home brew routers over the years (because I wanted multi-WAN capability with aggregate speed instead of loadbalancing. I liked Pfsense and ran that for a couple years, seemed poweful and I could combine my 6 ISP's into one super fast connection which was awesome for awhile! Linking 3 4G connections (35/20 down/up), 2 25/5 DSL and one 70/20 Cable came to 225/100 down/up and it was like living in a super computer!

I have one ISP email that is like, about fifteen years old or so. Then I have unlimited emails through various free email services.

I rarely engage in any kind of communication through email, and whenever I am asked for one IRL I simply say I don't have one.

Although I still have to dump the junk every couple of months regardless of how little I have ever signed up for anything.
An email is like a phone number to me, disposable and not necessary to conduct daily life.

a reply to: DigginFoTroof

OpenWRT has no mail server that I am aware of but maybe qnap nas like a TS151 might have an app. Its very easy to ryo email server with ispconfig on ubuntu16 but the thing about mail servers is you want run at least 2 mail servers. For free spam filter dnsbl rbl you will need your own local dns caching server. Of course you would want at least 2 of those as well for redundancy. Best to get at least 2 of everything including bgp bandwidth.

Setting up mail servers is fun but you should probably stick to proton mail. Its what I recommend for free (mostly)secure private email.

originally posted by: DigginFoTroof

I didn't know OpenWRT could host an email server. I've used so many home brew routers over the years (because I wanted multi-WAN capability with aggregate speed instead of loadbalancing. I liked Pfsense and ran that for a couple years, seemed poweful and I could combine my 6 ISP's into one super fast connection which was awesome for awhile! Linking 3 4G connections (35/20 down/up), 2 25/5 DSL and one 70/20 Cable came to 225/100 down/up and it was like living in a super computer!

Other GNU/Linux based router distros are capable to run what RAM/CPU/storage allows. Was running PostgreSQL on router with 64MB RAM and 700MHz CPU ...

For MTA/MDA there would be main limitation RAM ... for effective work of filtering subsystems you have to fit whole mail into RAM. With 64MB of physical RAM you will probably have to limit email size to something like 16 - 20 MB.



Teaming 6 connections on various technologies is quite a challenge. Congrats.

originally posted by: drewlander
a reply to: DigginFoTroof

OpenWRT has no mail server that I am aware of ...

OpenWRT have almost every second package "normal" in big Linux distros. For sure there is Postfix and Dovecot + almost every spam filtering subsystem.

It is fully opensource with rel. easy to use toolchain so you are able to compile whatever is missing in ready to use repositories.

a reply to: JanAmosComenius
I merely pointed out the possibility of setting up a own mailserver. I never wrote it´s easy. That´s why I recommended protonmail.

Second came the real solution.