How to Send Ultra-Secure Emails

One of my favorite seasons, Mr. Robot utilized multiple tools throughout his seasons. ProtonMail was one of his best and safest plateform to send emails. Elliot, a smart hacker, didn’t pick Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo for private messages because he’s clever. Instead, he went with ProtonMail, the safest email for regular folks like us, not just for military or spy types.

What is ProtonMail

Proton Mail (previously written as ProtonMail) is a Swiss end-to-end encrypted email service founded in 2013. It uses client-side encryption to protect email content and user data before they are sent to Proton Mail servers, unlike other common email providers such as Gmail and Outlook.com. This protects against data breaches and ensures no one (not even Proton) can access your inbox. Only you can read your messages. Users can reach the service using a webmail client, the Tor network, or dedicated iOS and Android applications.

ProtonMail was created to offer email users total anonymity. To achieve this, it provides the following features:

• End-to-end encryption (emails are decrypted in your browser).
• Does not require a phone number or another email to open an account, as these details could potentially be used to trace your identity.
• You can set your email to expire after a number of days—even hours. That keeps no logs.
• Even the ProtonMail can’t read your emails—fully secured.
• It is located in a neutral nation that is known for its respect for privacy.

A lot of people like ProtonMail because it keeps things super safe. Right now, there are more than 70 million users all around the world, and more people are joining quickly. Because so many people want to use it, you might have to wait a bit to get your own account. To get one, you have to ask for it. Once they have enough space, they’ll send you an email saying you can make an account. Usually, this takes about 2-3 weeks, but sometimes it’s different.

Account Setup

The first step, of course, is to request for an account. Go to proton.me and signup for protonmail account.

After creating your account successfully, you can log in like any other webmail account at proton.me. Once you logged in to your account, ProtonMail will prompt you for your second password which is used to decrypt your email. And once you enter it, the process of decrypting your email begins.

When all of your emails are decrypted, it will open a familiar email interface.

Email Expiration

One of the features of ProtonMail that I really like is the email expiration feature. When you write an email, you can decide how long it stays on the server before it disappears.

Just click on the clock icon at the bottom of the email window. A slider will pop up, and you can pick how long the email sticks around. I chose 13 hours in this example.

Once you hit Set, the clock starts counting down. When time’s up, the email vanishes, and no one can access it anymore.