Recommended Email Providers

Free email from Big Tech is paid for with your inbox, scanned to build ad profiles and shared with third parties. A private email provider runs on a different deal. Paying with a subscription means the company has no reason to mine your mail for ads. How much the provider itself can read varies. The strongest lock your mailbox so even they cannot open it. Others encrypt less. The right pick depends on how much you need them shut out.

How to choose an email provider

Email was never built to be private. The headers sit outside any end-to-end encryption, which leaves who you write to, when, and usually the subject line visible to the servers in between. Encrypting the body itself needs both people to hold keys. The open standard for that, OpenPGP, works across different providers once you have traded public keys, while some services use their own scheme instead. A good provider builds this in and keeps the rest of the leakage down.

Here are some things to look for.

Zero-access mailbox encryption. Your stored mail is encrypted so the provider cannot read it.
Standard encryption support. OpenPGP or a similar standard, which works with people on other providers.
No ads or message scanning. You are the customer, not the product being profiled.
Open-source apps and audits. So the security can be inspected instead of taken on trust.
Your own domain and standard access. A custom domain plus IMAP and SMTP let you leave without losing your address.
Minimal metadata and logs. Stripped IP addresses on outgoing mail and few records kept.