Free email services have dominated the market for a long time—Gmail alone has more than one and a half billion active users worldwide. However, many users have switched to or are considering switching to a paid email provider for better security.Several paid email services, including Proton Mail, Tutanota, CounterMail, and others, were introduced during the 2010s. These services encrypt your email communications to ensure that neither the company nor any third parties can pry on your conversations.Let's look at how paid email providers provide secure email communications.

1. Advanced Encryption Protocols

It's not that free email providers don't use encryption at all, but they may lack advanced encryption technology. For example, Gmail uses Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (S/MIME) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) to protect your emails both at rest and in transit.

But despite the strict security, hackers leaked about five million Gmail passwords and addresses in 2014. The reason for such incidents is simple: cybersecurity threats are increasing with the progression of technology.

Paid email services use end-to-end encryption to prevent hacking, making the email harder to decrypt for anybody but the recipient. They use various high-tech encryption protocols, including RSA 2048 and AES 128-bit. For example, Proton Mail—the most secure email service provider—offers enhanced security and uses ECC Curve25519 and built-in PGP email encryption.

2. Enhanced Privacy

Proton mail privacy policy

Free email services may scan all of your emails and track your online behavior, destroying your privacy in the process. Google is renowned for scanning emails to show targeted advertisements, though it claims that it stopped doing so in 2017. Nonetheless, Google still scans your email to provide features such as Smart Reply.

On the other hand, paid email providers cannot read, analyze, or sell your data because they simply don't have access to it. Most follow the no-logs policy, which prevents them from keeping track of or storing your IP address or online behavior.

Zero-access encryption is always used to store encrypted emails, whether on the email provider's server or in transit. Therefore, your email messages cannot be decrypted by the service provider or any of its employees.

Free and paid email providers have very different business models in terms of privacy. Paid email services promise to safeguard your privacy, but free email services frequently treat your data like a currency.

3. Scam Protection

In the world of cyberspace, email phishing is a common and growing risk. According to CISCO's 2021 Cybersecurity Threat Trends report, 86 percent of companies had at least one employee connect with a phishing site. Phishing is typically done to steal personal data or infect your device with malware. Hackers frequently use emails to impersonate a legitimate individual or organization before directing you to a phishing website.

Paid email providers have implemented enhanced spam protection features to avoid phishing scams. For example, Proton Mail offers the Link Confirmation feature. Since the majority of the links in phishing emails take you to a risky site, a pop-up window appears in Proton Mail, asking you to confirm that you want to open the external link.

Many email services like Tutanota have DKIM and DMARC protocols, which use an encryption key and digital signature to verify an email. However, even paid email providers will need to strengthen their anti-scam features frequently. Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more prevalent, and cyber criminals may now use it to produce a production line of phishing emails that they can exploit to steal data.

4. Remove Tracking Pixels

Emails contain small transparent tracking pixels that are usually hidden in images or links. It's a marketing tool, but companies can use tracking pixels to obtain your private data. When you open an email that has tracking pixels, the code inside the pixels sends the following data to the email's sender:

  • When you opened the email (on what day and at what time).
  • The device you used to open the email.
  • The location from which you opened the email.

According to a study published in Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2018, around 70 percent of emails you receive contain trackers. Companies believe that email tracking is a helpful marketing tool since it lets them measure the success of marketing campaigns, organize follow-ups, and do much more.

As a result, big firms like Facebook are famous for tracking users by embedding tracking pixels in emails.

To avoid this issue, paid email services automatically delete tracking pixels from your email. Most paid email providers do not automatically load email attachments—because these are where hidden pixels are most commonly found—while some preload emails on their company servers to prevent your real data from being delivered to the sender.

5. Secure Data Storage

Emails are stored on the servers of the service provider in their data centers, so the location of the data center and the encryption standards used have a major impact. For example, Yahoo Mail has data centers in the United States, which is one of the 14-Eyes countries—the country has agreed to store and share users' data globally.

However, email services like Proton Mail and Tutanota have data centers in Germany and Switzerland, respectively. Both countries are renowned for having strict privacy laws that forbid businesses from using customers' private information without their permission.

Paid email services use a variety of encryption technologies to keep your emails in an end-to-end encrypted form. Your mailbox password and the private key, which are also encrypted and kept on the servers, are used to protect your emails.

6. Encrypted Calendar and Contacts

Whether you are an individual or a business, your calendars and contact files contain sensitive information that, if compromised, can create several problems. Someone who has access to your calendar may even be able to view your schedule or attend your online meetings.

Paid email services use zero-access encryption, which makes it difficult for the provider—let alone third parties—to view your contacts list or calendar. Therefore, all your stored phone numbers, addresses, URLs, events, and notes are end-to-end encrypted.

Is Switching to a Paid Email Provider Simple?

Yes, switching to a paid email provider for better security is simple. Many offer migration tools that let users transfer all of their emails from their current email clients. With your new email service, you will need to set up a brand-new account from scratch, but given the protection provided, it is well worth the effort.

Paid email services provide end-to-end encryption, zero-access encryption, and total email tracking protection. But since there are many secure email providers on the market, the first step in switching to a new email client is choosing the service that satisfies all your requirements.