Email security

When communicating with other people by email, if you care about privacy you should be concerned about email content being intercepted and anonymity. The main email providers like Yahoo, Gmail and Outlook are the worst choices of email services for a boylover, these services have a backdoor for the NSA to read your email in real time, as proven by Snowden papers , and they also scan your files.

Everytime you upload an image to Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook the attachment will be automatically scanned to detect if it is child pornography . The scanning of your messages, is a privacy violation treating everybody as criminals without being one and they do not guarantee that any of your images will not be flagged by mistake as child pornography, if this were to happen, a report is automatically submitted to the CyberTipline working with the FBI or Interpol, by the time the misunderstanding has been solved your social life would have already been ruined.

Boylovers should have into account that email services offering email encryption only work if the receiver has an account with the same email provider as you or if they are using a compatible OpenPGP service.

Free secure email

Tutanota.com: Company in Germany offering free email with encryption and minimal logs.

ProtonMail.com: Company in Switzerland offering free email with encrypted inbox and minimal logs.

CTemplar: Company in Iceland with servers in the same country, it offers OpenPGP encrypted email in between users of the same service and they claim do not log IP.

VFEmail.net: Company in the USA, PGP email with anonymous sign up and accessible using Tor.

About Hushmail

According to Hushmail privacy policy deleting your account will not delete records of your activities, the company textually says: 3. The records we keep of your activities are permanently deleted after approximately 18 months.

Any email company keeping logs for as long as Hushmail does should never be used, the company being based in Canada can be a problem too as the country is known to take part in mass surveillance. The only way to trust a company not to hand over your data to others is when they make it impossible for their own staff to read the data, this is not the case with Hushmail.

Disposable Email

The following email addresses come in handy for when you want to register in a forum and all you need is to receive the welcome email where a link has to be clicked on. These email addresses are not secure but they do not need registration and if combined with a Proxy and VPN can provide low or medium level privacy.

You should bear in mind that if forum accounts are approved manually, it can take days for you to receive a welcome email, by then, the disposable address you have created will no longer exist and many times the domain name of the address gives away that it is a disposable email.

These addresses are best used for forums set to automatic registration. Disposable email provides no privacy and they can be read by everybody, make sure to pick a random username.

Tempr Email: No registration needed, disposable email address that can be read in desktop and mobile devices. Emails deleted after 30 days.

GuerrillaMail: Disposable address without registration needed, it can also be used reply to messages.

TrashMail: Forwarding address, you create an email address that can be used to forward messages to a different email.

Paid email services

• Posteo: Company in Germany, servers encrypted, minimum logs and payments not connected to email accounts.

• Torguard: Their email service is free if you pay for a VPN account, or you can buy it separately, they claim they do not keep logs.

• Countermail: Company in Sweden that can be paid in Bitcoins, they offer encrypted email, Jabber messenger and no logs.

Email encryption

If you are advanced in computers and understand how OpenPGP works you will want to encrypt emails yourself instead of relaying on a company to do that for you. Privacy email services are convenient because you don´t need to do anything to secure the email and they will save you lots of time, but the risk exists that their security could be sloppy or worse, if security is really important for you, learn how OpenPGP works and use your own private key to encrypt emails this way nobody will be able to read anything without the key that only you have in your power.

Remember that the person receiving your encrypted OpenPGP message will have to know how OpenPGP works too and have the software installed to be able to decrypt it.

• MailVelope - Available as a Chrome extension and Firefox addon, this extension can be used to encrypt and decrypt any webmail, it allows you to create or import your own OpenPGP keys and manage them to encrypt and decrypt messages.