Indie Email Ushers in the Privacy Age
Email is becoming more important than ever for entrepreneurs at the exact moment that privacy concerns are turning the public against the tech that powers email.
Like many celebrities, politicians, and businesses know well, popular email services like Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail are not the most secure option.
Those services also don’t have much regard for privacy, often employing or allowing techniques to track and sell users’ data and behavior for targeted, creepily-personalized ads.
Tracking pixels, also known as spy pixels, are the most common technique. With a simple bit of HTML code in an invisible 1-pixel high by 1-pixel wide image, a sender can learn loads about recipients via tracking pixels. For instance, a tracking pixel allows a stalker, er, sender to see how many people have opened an email, what time a recipient opened it, the device on which it was read, and the location in which it opened.
Fortunately for privacy-concerned consumers, some alternatives have stepped in to offer less creepy and more secure options.
Keep informed about the indie businesses taking on Big Tech:
Hey
Hey is one of the emerging leaders in the space of privacy-focused email. In addition to rethinking the conventional email inbox to enable efficient screening of senders and other batch operations, the company is outspoken in its disdain for spy pixels.
“We think that’s a gross invasion of your privacy. In fact, we believe it should be illegal, and punishable by law,” the company says.
Hey prevents roughly 98% of spy trackers but if somehow a sender was still successful with its spying, Hey routes all images through its servers, preventing anyone from learning your physical location by opening an email.
ProtonMail
Based in privacy-strict Switzerland, ProtonMail’s primary concern is user security.
The open-source company offers end-to-end encryption that prevents your emails from ever being read or shared with others. ProtonMail also doesn’t save any of its users’ tracking information and doesn’t require any personal information to register. Users can even send self-destruct messages that will be automatically deleted from the recipient’s inbox once your time-limit has expired.
Lavabit
Launched in 2004 with the promise of private, secure communication, Lavabit offers both individual and enterprise customers secure email services.
The open-source, end-to-end encryption platform gained notoriety in 2013 for defiantly refusing to surrender a particular user’s information to the FBI. That user? Edward Snowden. And rather than giving up Snowden’s info, founder Ladar Levison took the bold step to shut down the company. He eventually relaunched Lavabit in 2017, providing encryption of every element of user communication, as well as enterprise-level hosting and security consultations.
I’m sure there are many other alternatives that exist but these two seem to be the leading indie contenders. What other privacy-focused email products do you use or are interested in learning more about?
Image credit: Panda Security
My favorite email provider is by far posteo. It's a German based company focusing on privacy and sustainability. They use 100% renewable energy (Greenpeace Energy), are ad-free, privacy friendly, have yearly transparency reports and donate to NGOs. It starts at 1 euro per month and even there payment process is anonymized. You cant even link an email account to the payment process.
Thanks for sharing. @consoffner! posteo sounds awesome. I'll make sure to check it out!
You need to add Fastmail.com to your list. They are an Australian based company that was one of the original alternatives to Gmail. I've been using them for over ten years. Their web interface looks good and is very fast compared to Gmail and the like.
If you want a contact link, with ZERO spam, you should check out https://contact.do
It's my small 2 years old project, built out of my own necessity. It's great for when you don't want to share your email on forums, Reddit, Twitter, etc. Or if you just want a simple contact form for your website
There's also a bunch of addons/extensions that remove trackers from the most popular web clients (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook...). I personally use Trocker.
For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/trockerapp/
For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/trocker/bjojfeillmmoeadgobbcknkgdkngbcdb?hl=en
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I find it interesting how new privacy-first products are essentially spinning fewer features as a feature in itself. This is what the market wants, but still kind of funny.
@adamhowell did you consider anonymized tracking/analytics? Similar to Plausible and others but for email?
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Smart to use alternative engagement metrics. I'm working on a product that helps newsletters manage sponsorships and open + click rates are currently the de-facto metrics. Hopefully this can change.
I use Plausible on my sites and it doesn't get blocked by my privacy settings, while GA does get blocked. I wonder if Groupy could also somehow provide standard analytics while not being blocked by Trocker and others. Their block lists are handwritten (eg: https://github.com/trockerapp/trocker/blob/master/chrome/lists.js), so it should be pretty easy to be whitelisted.