Anything you try to do to take control of your digital life will be determined by values, pragmatism, and budget. Email is older than the world wide web and it’s hard to get by online without it. While most people do most of their personal communication on SMS, iMessage, Signal, Whatsapp, or something else, email is still where receipts, bank notifications, airline reservations, hotel confirmations, bills, job searches, and a lot of really valuable data for mining for advertising. It is currently the only universal form of digital communication, so it’s really indispensable and easily one of the most important pieces of your digital world.

Most of email is controlled by two companies: Microsoft and Google. Microsoft is busy collecting data in an attempt to keep relevant and Google is busy collecting data to sell advertising. Microsoft still dominates business email and is pressuring businesses to move to the cloud, while Google dominates personal email and has a robust cloud ecosystem that is sufficient to satisfy many needs. A lot of it isn’t great, but at least good enough.

There are other email providers, some sell privacy while others just sell an email service and privacy is inherent in their business. For example Proton Mail can’t read your email by design, while Fast Mail doesn’t unless they have a specific need to do so to provide the service or comply with the law.

How should you move forward? Figure out your threat model, what your needs are, and what your budget is.

As an interesting note, I started writing this blog post in March of 2019. I’ve made a few minor tweaks and am posting it hear December of 2020. That’s life with a toddler, day job, podcast, and a pandemic.