Email is a critical piece of software/platform/component of your life. If something goes wrong with your email it can cause havoc throughout your digital but also physical life.

I used Google’s Gmail for years, why for the obvious reasons. Just a free @gmail.com address. It was “good enough”. It did exactly what you needed email to do. Eventually, it even had calendar, photos and plethora of Google products that arisen over the years.

Over time though, I needed more. I transitioned to a paid Google account with my own domain. This gave me the security to be able to ensure that I could move from provider to provider with minimal fuss even if it would take a huge effort.

Eventually, Google has they do with a lot of their products changed their paid email service in ways that I just didn’t like. Add to this was the business model that Google and many other internet first companies adopted, advertising. As the old saying goes, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.

I explored quite a few private email platforms such as Fastmail, Tuta, Mailfence, Proton as well as more recently Skiff.

I decided to go with Proton, not necessarily because they were the most secure or best though I, of course, did like the aesthetic. Frankly, I liked their branding. Their vision wasn’t just for email but for a whole privacy forward ecosystem. The fact that they are based in Switzerland with Swiss privacy laws was just a little bonus on top (I am Swiss).

Over the past 4 years that I have been subscribed to Proton, they have launched and made a mountain of improvements. It is a much more fully fledged product compared with 2020. Drive, Calendar, VPN and Pass all very good products in their own right. They purchased/merged with Simplelogin and have no integrated an email aliasing service directly, which is just super convenient and allows for essentially an unlimited amount of email addresses.

To dig a bit deeper into my system, I use a unique email for every account that I have. I am currently transitioning to an Alias but before I just used a catch-all address that meant that It didn’t matter what was put in front of the @xyz.me it would arrive in my inbox. This systems means that it allows for a very quick sense check on spam and phishing because not only does a scammer need to find my email but also make sure it matches. For example my bank account email might be [email protected] but my facebook one might be not.so[email protected]. So if I get an email purporting to be from my bank to my “FB” email I know it is a scam immediately. It is, of course, not full proof as there are very sophisticated scams out there but every little bit helps.

I could talk for hours on this topic, hit me up if you want anymore details.

Again, like with my choice of using a paid search engine, I want to reiterate that paying for a private email platform is a luxury in this day and age. I can appreciate that for a lot of people there are more important things to spend their money on.