Comment on Mozilla's new open-source Gmail alternative puts your privacy first

• lemmeBe@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Hopefully, I can shed some light because I’m in the process of looking for a new email provider so I’ve been researching extensively for the past few days.

  Firstly, despite their strong marketing about privacy and encryption, ALL the privacy-focused email providers face the same fundamental limitation when it comes to incoming emails from external sources:

  • They can read incoming external emails upon arrival.
  • They process these emails (for spam filtering, etc.) before encryption.
  • Only after this processing do they encrypt the emails for storage.

  It’s a limitation inherent to the current email infrastructure and affects virtually all email providers as far as I’m aware.

  So, marketing claims about “zero-access encryption” often refer to emails at rest (in storage), not during transit or initial processing. For truly private communication, end-to-end encryption (like PGP) needs to be implemented by the sender before the email reaches any server.

  That being said, Mailbox provides E2E encryption through standard PGP and S/MIME protocols, allowing users to encrypt both incoming and outgoing emails with their own encryption keys that can be generated or imported into the system. Beyond email encryption, they implement domain security and server-side encryption of all stored data, with the option to create secure aliases that only communicate over encrypted connections.

  For Mailbox users communicating with other Mailbox users, there isn’t an automatic E2E system in place by default (like Proton has). Doesn’t matter to me because very little people I communicate with use Mailbox (it’s currently the same situation with Proton for me).

  You could register anonymously, use a VPN, and encrypt your messages with PGP and be safe that way. I, however, consider emails inherently unsafe means of communication and use them for registrations and meaningless communication only.

  Also, Mailbox has Guard feature that creates a temporary mailbox for recipients without PGP. The recipient receives two emails - one with a link to the temporary mailbox and another with the password. You can also add an additional PIN for extra security that you communicate through another channel.

  P. S. Their servers are powered by 100% renewable energy, if that carries any weight.

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