How does it make you feel to know that in your ‘user data’ that a company stores likely takes many gigabytes? check yours here
What is your reaction to the knowledge that each of your personal emails with a certain company has been inspected, analyzed, and preserved in order to better create a profile of your personality and to document the changes in your priorities and interests over time?
Do you approve of the fact that the same company presents modified search results to you based on the profile it has crafted for you?
Does a person that wants privacy from strangers have something to hide?
Is it ok for a company to cooperate with a tyrannical government in silencing and oppressing its citizens?
The time is now to ditch Google.
Perhaps it is due to just how good capable Google’s software is that has brought me to this point. A fairly recent update to the email service reveals options for quick replies to emails that are creepily context aware. The thought of every email that I write being read, analyzed, understood, and saved forever really popped to the forefront of my thoughts when I saw that feature. The uneasiness that feature gave me combined with news of Project Dragonfly directs me to find an alternative for email, calendars, alternate phone numbers, and many more services that Google provided so well.
As luck would have it, a suitable and awesome competitor presented itself for email: Protonmail.
“ProtonMail uses Zero-Access Encryption, which means it is technically impossible for us to decrypt user messages. Zero-Access Encryption applies to all messages in your mailbox, even messages which did not come from other ProtonMail users.” This ensures the emails are not read by bots and then analyzed for ways to manipulate you into buying goods and services. Because of this, there is a charge to store anything over 500MB of data in your emails, Protonmail’s product is not you.
Protonmail also has a neat feature that allows you to use your own domain name for your email address and it works very much like Google Apps does.
You will need your own domain name to do this. This tutorial uses SiteGround.
- Purchase your domain name if you don’t already have one.
- Purchase at least a Plus plan with Protonmail.
- Click on Settings (gear icon on the top bar menu)
- Click on Domains (globe icon on the side menu)
- Now you will need to enter information about your domain, verify ownership, and configure your email security settings.
- Protonmail has a wizard that will guide you through these steps, the icon is a magic wand.
- see below:
- Work your way through the menu, each tab has specific instructions provided by Protonmail.
- see below:
- To add a DNS record in Siteground, enter the cPanel and select ‘Advanced DNS Zone Editor’
- see below:
- For the hostname field, just enter your domain name, this is a little unclear in the instructions as it varies for each hosting provider.
- see below:
- To edit your MX records, select ‘Advanced MX Editor’ in the cPanel
- see below:
- Select ‘Remote Mail Exchanger’ as shown below
- see below:
At the end of this process you will soon be able to receive Protonmail’s encrypted emails at your domain name email address!
Donate to Protonmail to help them in their mission:
As a philosophical technologist, Hari is concerned with emerging innovations and how they impact our life. Mr. Seldon spends much time separating the outstanding from the paltry and incorporating only holistic beneficial technologies into his life.