Over the past year and a half I have been taking lots of steps to secure my digital life. I’ve written a lot about the different aspects of that. My migration from Google mail and other services to more secured options.
One thing I’ve known has been a concern that I’ve not yet addressed the quantity of data online. For example even though I moved my mail to a Swiss based provider I still had my entire email archive available. I have mail going back as far as 1997 I believe. I have been wanting to take that archive off-line and out my email provider’s servers. Over the years I’ve had the packrat mentality where I want to keep all of my messages. Recently I’ve grown to not want many of the messages I received. I’ve been deleting stuff that are unnecessary however there are still things that I get a do want to keep. In general I would like to keep the archive, especially my personal correspondence.
The challenge that I have is that I’m growing less trustworthy of any service provider. Even though my email hosting company is in Switzerland they take no extraordinary security precaution so the system is just as susceptible to hacking as most. That means my mail at rest is in the clear, unencrypted. But I want to do is take my mail and store it off-line so I have more control over it. I currently plan on keeping it in a local archive on my Mac at home. I will also have it backed up on my bit torrent sync network.
The first step in this process was for me to copy all of my mail to a local application. For my purposes I found the built-in Mac mail application to work the best. Once I had a downloaded copy of all the mail I was able to export it to an mBox formatted archive. At the same time I took the opportunity to recategorized how I organized my mail. In the past when I was using Google I had been using tags extensively. When I exported out of Google I went back to a folder structure where each high-level tag was its own folder where I put received mail. When I exported the mail to a local folder I put all sent mail in one folder and all received mail and another. Using mail tags I was able to continue to tag and make smart queries of the male if I ever needed to get a hold of the categories that I used in the past.
Once I had the off-line mBox files I put them in an archive on my BitTorrent Sync network. I kept the live copy in my Mac mail on my computer in case I need to search for and email in the archive. Over the past few weeks after I’ve done this I’m surprised how often I do go back and reference old emails for things like key codes or when did I buy something. After I was satisfied that the mail was backed up I deleted it from my hosting provider.I did leave this calendar year’s mail on my hosting provider. I figured that was a good round number to keep online. I can annually do an archive. Having to be at home or to remote into my home computer to perform mail queries has become a slight inconvenience however it hasn’t been the end of the world.
In addition to moving my entire mail archive off-line I want go further and start using a secured email provider like proton mail that takes extraordinary steps to encrypt the data at rest.I do not need that level of security for all my mail however does come in handy for some of it. There’s been several messages I’ve been hesitant to send or had no choice but to send that contain sensitive information such as bank information or Social Security numbers in the past that I would prefer not to use via email. And of course that’s not my paranoia security experts say never do that. Having a secured provider that encrypts the mail at rest and also has mechanism for sending secured mail to others could be useful. Really what he secure mail is doing is it sending email to the recipient with a link back to the website that secured that contains the actual message. I need to provide a password hint in the body of the mail I send. It’s not perfect however in most cases it will solve the problem of sending outbound secured man.
One of the challenges in a system such as proton mail is that at present there is no mechanism to import or export mail. That means anything I receive is locked into that system. On day one that’s not a problem however I like to have data portability. Protonmail says they are working on that function however who knows when or if it will ever come to pass. I may still use them for some correspondence only and in essence had two private email addresses one for security and one for unsecured messages. That way I can route one I want secured to the encrypted system.
I’ve also been looking at Tutanota as an alternative to proton mail. It appears to have the same import and export limitations however otherwise seems like a very similar and comparable option. Both systems offer a free tier.I signed up for both services to play around with them. I’ve since signed up for a month-to-month service with both of them and them in the process of pointing in unused email domain to Mutant, while I’ve already completed setting up proton mail. Protonmail so far seems like a slightly better option in terms of usability however it is significantly more money per month than Tutanota. The only reason I signed up for the paid version of Tutanota after I signed up for Protonmail was because it was less than two dollars a month.I hope to give both services try for a month or two before settling on one or the other.
For now the combination of moving my mail off-line and having a encrypted provider as needed suits my needs. These changes are all still pretty new so I will see how things pan out over the next month or two before I decide to make any tweaks or to let the situation be as is for the time being.
