The recent mess with unroll.me selling user data to Uber has got me thinking about email privacy again. I’m still using OtherInbox Organizer with my Gmail account, and I still think their privacy policy isn’t unreasonable, but I am also thinking about the fact that it would probably let them do the same thing thing unroll.me did. Mind you, I also don’t think that selling anonymized data to a third-party is a big deal, assuming the data is truly anonymized. And I’m quite surprised about the level of vitriol about the unroll.me thing; I didn’t realize how many people were clueless about how services like that make their money.
I’ve also continued to experiment with ProtonMail. I haven’t had any real problems with either the web interface or the mobile app, so that’s good. I looked into their IMAP plans a bit more too. It looks like their plan for that is to have a “bridge” program that can run on your PC, which will encrypt/decrypt emails on the fly and interface with your desktop email program (Outlook or whatever). That’s good, I guess, but it would mean that you still wouldn’t be able to use IMAP on iOS, if I understand it correctly. I guess there’s no easy solution to that, given the way that their service is set up.
FastMail still seems like the most reasonable alternative to Gmail, and should be relatively secure. I still haven’t talked myself into switching away from Gmail yet though.