Withdraw Your Data: Email

For years, we’ve been depositing personal data into online accounts. And while it sits there, it’s not just stored – it may be analyzed, correlated, shared, monetized or leaked. It may be time to withdraw that data and put it somewhere safer. Let’s start with some of the oldest online data: email.

Postcards, Not Letters

Despite the popularity of messenger apps and social media, email is still a thing. But maybe more important for this discussion, email used to be extremely popular. If you’re older than 20, you probably sent a ton of emails in your lifetime. And guess what… all those emails are probably still out there. Unless you explicitly deleted them, your email service provider almost surely still has them stored on their servers.

People send all sorts of sensitive information in emails. And then there’s all the automated emails, like for things you bought, package tracking info, travel notices, random emails about other online accounts, and more. People treat emails like letters hidden in envelopes, but they’re really like postcards. Unless you explicitly encrypt your emails, the contents are visible to your email provider as well as your recipient’s email provider. And unless you made a point to delete those emails, they’re still visible – right now – all of them.

In all honesty, it’s hard to reliably delete all copies of your emails. This is why using end-to-end encryption is so important – encrypted copies of your emails are useless to anyone other than the sender and the recipient. But in this series of articles, we’re going to download our entire email history from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and then ask them to delete their copies.

Ditch Free Email

Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook (Hotmail) are “free” email services, but they definitely cost money to run. Therefore, I would worry that all of your historical emails will somehow be monetized (if they haven’t been already). Your massive email history can reveal where you live, who you trust, what you buy, where you travel, and how you spend your day. You can read the email privacy policies for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft… but it will take you days to read. And I’m going to bet that when you’re done you still won’t understand what they do with your data. To add insult to injury, they can change those policies at any time. The ‘notice and consent’ privacy model, without meaningful privacy laws to back it up, is almost pointless.

So the real solution here is to move to a privacy-respecting email provider. I would actually consider using two providers: one for personal emails and another for everything else. I like Proton for personal and Fastmail for public or business email. They cost money, but that’s a good thing. As we like to say: if the product is free, you are the product. (Proton Mail does have a decent free tier you can try, but if you really use it, you’ll eventually need to pay to get more storage.) You should also consider using email aliases for many public addresses.

Extraction Plan

In this series of articles, I’m going to focus on extracting your historical emails from the three most popular “free” services: Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo Mail. However, you can use the same basic process for AOL, ISPs like Earthlink or Comcast, or whoever.

The extraction plan will be as follows:

1. Get copies of all your old emails
2. Verify your archive
3. Backup your local copies, delete online copies

Each of those will be an article and I’ll come back and link to them as they become available.

And here’s the fun part – I’ll be doing this right along with you! I stopped using Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook a while back – but I have yet to request copies of my old emails and delete them online. Part of why I wanted to write these articles is because I’ve been putting this off for myself for too long.

In the meantime, now would be a great time to move to a new, privacy-respecting email provider. Yes, you’ll have to tell everyone to move to a new email address. But I’m actually going to recommend that you keep your old email accounts active – so you don’t have to move everyone immediately. Note that if you’re willing to spend $15 a year for your own domain name, you’ll never have to change email addresses again for the rest of your life.

Also, you might look at my series of articles on finding and cleaning up old online accounts.

Next Step

In the next article, I’ll explain how to download copies of all your old emails.