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Introduction

E-mail is the well known communication system brought to the digital world. It's useful mainly for signing up for stuff, but also to receive and send messages to other people. To use it, you need a provider (or you can host your own, but we won't cover that here) and either a web browser or a mail client (the superior option). Various providers have their pros and cons, and choosing one can seem overwhelming - especially with the amount of hype many of them are throwing around. I'll try to make this really simple. The most important features a service should have are mail client and anonymization support. If a provider lacks either one, they are disqualified, in my opinion. There are many reasons why mail client support is so important. First of all, you can choose the program you like, and make it fit within your workflow, instead of depending on whatever special snowflake JavaScript your provider comes up with. Your mail client software will always stay the same, while a webmail service can change their JavaScript at any time - including to make it malicious or incompatible with your web browser. Standardized protocols allow the downloading of mail to your computer; they keep the control in your hands, instead of a big corpo. A good mail client will surely outcompete webmail in terms of features. It also takes the weight off a web browser, which should really focus on just browsing the web (unix philosophy - one application per task). But perhaps the most important issue is that mail clients support established encryption in PGP; while webmail-only providers sometimes don't - and even if they do, it is not as secure when used that way.

The other feature - anonymization support - should be obvious. You don't want the stuff you do on the Internet to connect to your real identity, lest it be used against you sometime in the future. This means you need to be able to sign up with a VPN or the TOR network; as well as avoid revealing data such as real name or phone number. There are a few other things you might want to look for, but these two are the fundamentals that can't be replaced. An alias feature allows you to have many unconnected identities (for example, one for "professional" work, and another for sperging out about vidya or anime) within the same account. A good privacy policy that limits the amount of collected information - I mean, we don't tolerate spyware browsers, neither should we spyware providers. Then comes the price - free is the best; a paid provider better support Bitcoin if they want the highest grade. A mild ToS which won't ban you for homophobia or some other victimization issue of the day (still, a provider should not be reading your mail, and you should be encrypting yours, if possible). Most of the other stuff that services use to advertise themselves is pretty much hype; it's a jungle out there, and providers will try anything to get ahead of the competition. Keep the fundamentals in mind while reading this report (hint: providers are sorted from worst to best)!