Alright, so there is a other thread about protonmail and what email provider to use, that is full of so much FUD, bullshit and misinformation that I had to start a new thread to debunk all of the lies being thrown around.
The vast majority of these "secure" email providers are complete snake-oil designed to take your shekels or even spy on you.
Please read this entire post before responding with bullshit.
This is how you secure your emails:
>create an email account at any email provider (gmail, yahoo or any other NSA controlled mail server).
>whenever you send someone an email, first encrypt the contents of the email on your computer, then send it
Your probably going to say: gmail has an NSA backdoor. Yes, Gmail does have a backdoor, but it is still safe to use gmail.
You have to understand. Email does not protect your metadata, which is stuff like who the email is from who it is to, the subject line and when it was sent.
All of this information is sucked up by the NSA regardless of what email provider you use. Because when emails are transferred between servers, they are sent unencrypted. The vast majority of emails are sent in cleartext, and of the remaining, the vast majority are sent unencrypted. So The entire email, all the metadata and the actual message, are easily intercepted by the NSA.
Protonmail or ANY provider CANNOT protect the metadata of your emails. This is because email is an utterly shit protocol.
However because we encrypted the email on our PC using something like GnuPG, the message is the only thing actually encrypted and so the only thing the NSA will have any problem reading.
Now you will probably say: well the NSA can probably break the encryption, therefore I will use protonmail. Well, even if the NSA can break the encryption, then they can also break protonmails (which also uses PGP) therefore you are still fucked.
So thats why it doesn't matter which email provider you use.
Just use any provider and fucking encrypt your emails!