The next type of email services that I want to talk about, our email services that are focused on privacy
and anonymity.
So unlike temporary emails, these are proper email services that will give you a proper email.
Your inbox will never expire.
You will sign up and log in with a password similar to the way you sign up and log in to the email services
that you're familiar with.
Similar to Google and Hotmail.
They offer a lot of very useful features.
They're user friendly.
So again, all of this is similar to the services you're used to.
But unlike Gmail and Hotmail and all of these services that collect a lot of data about you, these
privacy focused email services collect no data.
They don't store any logs.
They don't track you.
Most of them use some sort of encryption.
The good ones would be using end to end encryption.
So your email will be encrypted at your end and only decrypted at the destination.
Therefore, nobody that intercepts this email will be able to read it.
Even the mail provider itself shouldn't be able to read it.
Now I actually look at the services as a hybrid between the email services that we all know and use,
such as Gmail and the email services available on the darknet that I will talk about in the next lectures.
Because like I said, first of all, they offer all of the features that we are used to.
They are also user friendly, but at the same time they won't track you.
They won't keep any logs and their privacy focused.
And another reason that makes me feel that they are like a hybrid is the fact that most of them are
available on the clear net and on the darknet.
So they'd have a clear net address and a darknet address, and they can communicate with both Darknet
and clear net email providers.
Similar to the temporary emails.
There are a number of providers that offer these services.
I highly encourage you to do your own research and read the privacy policy before you sign up with any
of them and never use your real identity if you're using the services in the darknet.
Make sure you use your fake identity.
With that being said, a very popular example is Protonmail.
So this is just an example of a privacy focused email provider.
It is not the only one.
And like I said, I highly encourage you to do your own research and read and see which is best for
you.
So Protonmail comes with all of the features that I just mentioned that all of the providers in this
category offer.
On top of that, it is open source.
So all of the code used is available for anyone to read and analyze.
And even if you don't know coding, you can be rest assured that people are constantly revising their
code and will call them out if they discover anything fishy.
Protonmail also enforces HTTPS on both on their clear net and on their darknet website, which is something
that is rare on Darknet websites.
And it is great because that adds an extra layer of encryption.
It uses end to end encryption.
So like I said, the messages that you send get encrypted at your end and only decrypted at the destination
and vice versa.
So even protonmail, if they wanted to read the content of your email, they won't be able to do that
because it's going to be encrypted.
They also use their own servers so they don't rent servers from third parties and all of their servers
are in Switzerland, which is a country known for having good privacy laws.
With that being said, if you read their privacy policy and their transparency page, you will see that
they did reveal information about specific users in order to comply with court orders.
But like I said, they keep no logs, they don't track you and everything is encrypted.
So they don't have a lot of information anyway, even if they do reveal this information.
And at the end of the day, like I said at the start of this section, I'm showing you all of the options
and you should go with what suits you best in terms of why you need this account and what's your threat
model.
Now let's go ahead and have a look on this website.
So right here I have their clear net website and in here I have their onion hidden service.
For this to work, you should actually put your security settings to medium to safer so that it allows
JavaScript to be executed on HTTPS pages.
Now, depending on your threat model, you might not want to do this, but in general.
Because this is only done on HTTPS pages which already has encryption and because Protonmail is open
source.
So all of its code is known and because of their reputation, it's not a very bad idea to do this.
Now signing up is very simple.
All you have to do is just click on sign up.
I'm going to choose the free account.
And I'm going to select it.
And let's set up a username.
So like I said, you want to keep in mind that you are going to use your fake identity in here.
So I'm just going to set this to j0wk and let's put a password.
You can also set a recovery email that you can use to recover the password with.
I'm going to keep this to blank because I don't want to give a lot of information about myself and I'm
going to click on Create Account.
It's given me a warning that I'm creating an account without a recovery email, but that's fine.
And right now, Protonmail is going to create the keys that will be used to encrypt your data, your
emails.
Like I said, it uses end to end encryption.
So when you send something, it gets encrypted at your end and it will only be decrypted at the destination.
Therefore, anyone in the middle, including Protonmail themselves, they won't be able to see the contents
of your emails.
Now you want to give this some time because it could take a few minutes depending on the specs of your
computer.
Okay.
Now it's asking me to solve this CAPTCHA.
So I'm going to click I'm not a robot.
It's not accepting this probably because I'm using the Tor network.
So the other solution would be to verify myself that I'm not a robot using an email.
And again, you can use any email in here.
I'm going to use a temporary email similar to the ones I showed you in the previous lectures.
So I'm just going to go to gmail.com.
And let's just use a different domain just in case they get a lot of domains like this one.
And that's copy this.
And paste it here.
And we're going to send.
So it's telling us that the verification code should be sent to the email that we picked.
Let's go back and check if we actually did get this verification code.
Perfect.
As you can see, we have the code in here.
It's 974, six, four, four.
So go back here.
And we're going to click on Complete Setup again.
You want to be patient with this and let it load and create your account.
And perfect.
As you can see, the account should be set up now.
It's asking us if we want to change the name.
I'm going to keep it the way it is.
Going to close these tips.
And perfect.
As you can see, it's a very nice user interface.
Like I said, this really is like a hybrid between what you get on the clear net and on the dark.
Using this is very intuitive.
I'm not going to waste more time on it.
This is your inbox draft sent and so on.
You click on Compose to send a message.
The messages that you get will show up in here in the inbox and you can from any message you can click
on it.
And now that you're inside the message, you can reply forward and so on.
So that's it for this lecture.
Just wanted to cover an example of a private kind of hybrid email service.
Like I said, this is not the only one, so please don't take this as the only example.
This is just an example, and I want you to understand the whole concept.
So there is a whole number of services that operate on the same concept.
Like I said, there are a lot of pros to this.
As you can see in here, the only cons are the fact that it uses JavaScript and the fact that it is
a clear net website, it is a proper company and they have complied and revealed information about their
users when the court ordered them to do so.
With that being said, like I said, they don't keep any logs, they don't track you and everything
is encrypted.
So they can't really reveal too much because they don't know too much.
But again, read the privacy policy.
Continue with the options that I'm going to show you and pick the option that works best for you based
on the reason why you need this service and based on your threat model.