> What email service is best for privacy? There's no simple answer, because it comes down to your threat model. What do you want to keep private? Just content

> What email service is best for privacy? There's no simple answer, because it comes down to your threat model. What do you want to keep private? Just content? Or also metadata, including your identity and the identities of your correspondents? And who are your adversaries? Random cybercriminals? Competitors? The email provider? Criminal investigators? Foreign intelligence agencies? Your government's intelligence agencies? > With the recent thread on privacy in Chrome, I'm thinking of switching off Gmail. OK, so the email provider is considered an adversary. If that's the case, the only prudent option is end-to-end encryption, done locally, and not using the provider's services. But that's barely workable. Most correspondents won't cooperate. Configuring clients correctly is nontrivial, to avoid attacks like Efail. Also, there's no forward secrecy, and metadata is not encrypted. For privacy at that level, you ought to be using something with forward secrecy, like Signal. And if anonymity really matters, you ought to be using something that does P2P via Tor .onion services, such as Briar or Ricochet. But anyway, you could use email with end-to-end encryption, use pseudonyms, and minimize metadata with some mix of VPN services and Tor. And then use providers with better reputations about privacy and security. Such as Autistici, CounterMail, Posteo, ProtonMail, Riseup, ScryptMail, Tutanota or VFEmail. However, there's no guarantee that any of them will refuse "lawful" access. For example, Autistici acknowledges that they might "lose control" over their servers, perhaps through seizure by police, or that their servers could "run into accidents that could undermine [their] security".[0] And Riseup redefined their warrant canary policy to exclude investigations of individual users, or groups of users, that don't put Riseup users generally at risk.[1] Even so, you're arguably OK as long as they can't decrypt messages, don't know who you or your correspondents are, or where y'all are located. 0) https://www.autistici.org/faq https://www.autistici.org/faq 1) https://riseup.net/about-us/press/canary-statement https://riseup.net/about-us/press/canary-statement edit: alphabetized provider list