The company is based in Switzerland, so it’s outside the jurisdiction of the ‘Fourteen Eyes’ surveillance alliance (see ) and can’t be ordered to share its users’ data with intelligence agencies. Proton Mail also insists on ‘zero access encryption’, which means that – unlike Gmail and Outlook – it can’t read or grant anyone access to your messages. If not, you can password-protect your messages to prevent interception and set them to expire after a specific time (see page 56 to find out how).

However, this end-to-end encryption only works if the recipient is using Proton Mail or another PGP tool.

Emails are encrypted automatically in your browser, or Proton’s Android and iOS apps, before they’re sent to the company’s servers and aren’t decrypted until received by the other person. Justifying its claim that “our top priority is keeping your data safe”, Proton Mail uses powerful PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption to protect the contents of your messages so that only you and the recipient can read them.

Email services like protonmail