 Alright, it's finally time to rank the best and the worst email providers of all time. Because I have been on almost a spiritual journey over the past few years trying to find the best email provider. And surprisingly it's very hard to find a good email address these days because I'm sure you've used something like Gmail or Outlook before. These are huge services that are very popular and they definitely work well but one of the biggest issues with these is that they don't respect your privacy at all. And essentially they can read through your email whenever they want to. So Google in the past has been caught going through your emails to collect personal data about you to better serve you more targeted advertisements. And Google has even been caught reading through emails in order to better train its AI. And whenever you use email from these big corporations you just have to basically assume that all of your emails can be read at any time for any reason by these corporations. And so I just want my emails to be read by me and maybe the person I'm sending it to. I don't want it to be read by all of these dystopian corporations. But of course that's not the only thing I'm looking for in an email service. It has to have a lot of good features. I would prefer to have a good webmail client. And I think most people out there want a free email address or at least a very cheap one. Nobody wants to be breaking the bank over an email address. And so in this video I'm going to be ranking all of these email providers here from the best of the best in base tier all the way down to botnet tier. These are going to be the emails that don't respect your privacy at all and just want to collect as much of your personal information as possible. But before I start I do want to offer a quick disclaimer because no email service is going to be 100% private just because of the nature of the medium. Email is a very old technology. It was never meant to be private or even that secure. And so if you really want to send some sensitive information over email. I wouldn't recommend using email. I would use something like signal or some other encrypted messaging app. And if you're doing something illegal or maybe doing some political activism over email. It might not be the best tool for the job. Now of course I'll tell you which email providers collect the least amount of information. But it is something you need to keep in mind that email is not inherently private. But with that out of the way let's just jump into the tier list. And we're going to be starting off with disroot. So disroot is not a very well known email provider. But inside privacy circles I always see this one mentioned. So let's just go to their website and see what they're all about. Now the first thing you'll probably notice is that this looks like email for lefty activists. Maybe if you just entered university and learned what communism is for the first time. This might look pretty cool. But you don't have to be some political activist in order to sign up for disroot. Anybody can sign up for disroot. And they do have a lot of different services. But the one we'll focus on in this video of course is email. And so the first thing that I really like about their email is they collect very little of your personal information by default. And you can even sign up over tour if you want to be more anonymous. But if you sign up for an account with disroot they don't really require any personal information. The only thing that you have to do is you have to write like a 150 character long story. This is kind of their replacement for a captcha. But you have to tell them if you think AI is going to take over the world or not. I just thought that was funny. But once you sign up for an account here you can access it through their webmail. And their webmail is not really anything too special. You can take a look at it here. You can create a new email. And this looks exactly how you would expect it to. It's really nothing special. But of course you can access it through a third party application like Thunderbird if you would rather. But by default nothing in your mailbox is going to be encrypted. So technically they can read all of your emails if they really want to. And so if you really want to keep things private you're basically going to have to do it yourself. And just as an example if you want to do this from the webmail client it would probably involve something like MailValope. And you have to PGP encrypt all your own emails. So it is a little bit technical. But if you know what you're doing then you definitely can send encrypted emails through this. But just know that by default all of your emails are going to be stored here unencrypted so that may be something that you might want to know. And by default they give you one gigabyte of space for free. That is pretty standard. And of course signing up for this route is free. But if you want a little bit extra storage maybe like 10 gigabytes is 20 euros per year not too pricey. And also if you want to add your own custom domain like if you don't want distraught.org if you want to have something like I don't know Eric Murphy dot org then you do have to pay for that as well. But I think most people will be happy with the free tier. And if you really like it then of course you can donate. They're basically powered by donations and you can see how much they collect here. They are very transparent which you may like. But I think that distraught is a pretty good choice for a personal email because their privacy policy is very good. They don't really keep much of your data. They even wipe their logs every day. Every 24 hours they wipe all of their logs so it's not going to collect any information about you that they can send to the government if the feds come knocking. But I probably wouldn't use this for something like a business email because in their terms of service it does say that they don't really want you using this for commercial purposes because I guess capitalism bad or something like that. But I'd say that distraught is a pretty good option. And to be honest you're probably either going to love it or hate it. Probably based on your politics. But even if you're not a fan of this whole lefty poll anti-fog type branding they have here I still think that it is a pretty good option. But it's definitely not going to be for everyone. And that's why I'm just going to be putting it in the decent tier. Now next up we have fastmail. This is another provider that's not really that well known. But if we go to their website we can see what they're all about. And they say here that it is fast private email that's just for you. And so this just seems like another generic privacy respecting email provider. But I'm not really sure if they are that private because in their privacy policy they actually collect a lot of information by default. Like you can see here that they collect your name, your address, your phone number, your IP address, your browser user agent and billing details. So at least for me that's a lot more information than I would really like to give to a privacy respecting email provider. I don't know why they want to collect so much info about you but that is definitely a red flag. And besides this I really don't see what's so special about fastmail. They don't even have a free plan. Their cheapest plan is $3 per month. But this basic plan that they have it is really lacking in a bunch of basic features. Like their basic plan doesn't even let you use third party mail apps or your own domain or even some features that you might want to use like scheduling. And if you want all of those features and you have to pay $5 a month and for that kind of price I really don't think that is worth it. Like nothing here really stands out to me as something that is way better than a competition. Their webmail is just fine. There's nothing really remarkable that I could say here. And none of these emails are encrypted by default. You have to do that all yourself with PGP encryption. So to be honest I'm really struggling to find something to say here. I really don't have much good to say about fastmail. I mean I'm sure they care more about your privacy than something like Google or Microsoft. And they probably don't read through emails even though they definitely can. But I really don't see much reason to use fastmail when there are so many better options on this list. So I'm just going to be putting it in mediocre tier. And next up we have Gmail. Everybody knows Gmail. Probably everybody watching this video has a Gmail account. I personally use Gmail for years and years. And at first it seems super generous. You get 15 gigabytes of storage for free. The webmail is very good. It's one of the best out there. But of course whenever you're getting something for free you know the saying that usually means that you were the product. And Gmail's case that is definitely true. So when you use Gmail they can basically read through all of your emails whenever they want to. And in the past they use Gmail to collect personal data about you to give you better targeted advertisements. But they actually don't do that anymore. This is something that they stopped doing I think around 2017. So you might think that Gmail is actually pretty good now. But it actually still has all of the same issues. So maybe they don't scrape your emails for targeted advertisement purposes anymore. But they still read through all of your emails of course that is how they can categorize them in different groups. And I forgot to mention but of course they still scrape a ton of personal information from your emails like your travel itinerary or some events you're going to to put on your calendar to supposedly make things more convenient for you. And they read through all of your emails to train their AI. I'm sure you've seen their autocomplete feature where you can start typing a sentence and it will automatically finish it for you. But of course the reason why it knows you well enough to finish your own sentences is because it reads all of your emails. Even Google barred their chat GPT competitor has gone on record as saying that it collects data from all of your emails. But of course Google walked this back and said, oh it was just our AI hallucinating. We don't actually train our AI with your Gmail messages. But at this point Google is probably the company that you would trust least with your personal data. And so I really don't believe anything they say to be honest. Of course they can also send all of your messages to the government whenever they want to and they have done this many times before. And I just don't want Google to read through all of my messages. I find it creepy. And that's why I'm going to put it straight into the botnet tier. Next up we have mailbox.org. So right from their homepage you can see that this is a privacy respecting email provider from Germany. So that sounds pretty good. But they don't have a free tier. Their cheapest tier is one year per month. But it is going to be pretty basic. So let's check out their pricing right here. And what they really want you to use is this three year per month plan. Is not too expensive, but that is something you'll need to keep in mind. And if you get their one year per month plan, I don't really think it's worth it because it's basically on par with a lot of other services free tier. And so I would only really recommend them if you use their standard tier, three year per month and custom domain names. Basically all the features that you would expect from email. But by default none of your emails are going to be encrypted. So theoretically they could read them if they want to. But if you do want to set up encryption you can go into the settings here and you have to do a little bit of work yourself. But you can set up encryption for your entire email inbox. First you have to set up their mailbox.org guard and this will basically give you some PGP keys. Essentially they encrypt everything with PGP. So let me just show you how this looks. Once you get your PGP keys you can download that and then put that into your inbox encryption. And it will then encrypt everything in your inbox with PGP. So it's a little bit more technical than some providers out there. You do have to have some basic knowledge of how PGP encryption works. So probably not something you would recommend for your grandma. But if you know what you're doing then this is going to be a pretty good option. And you can set it up so every incoming email is automatically encrypted with PGP. That is pretty useful. So basically they can't read any of the messages inside your inbox. And if you want to send an email to someone it will automatically get their PGP key if they have one. So essentially you can send end to end encrypted email with mailbox.org with very little setup. So I really like that. And even if you're sending an email to somebody else who doesn't use PGP encryption, let's say somebody with a Gmail address you can still encrypt it with this button right here. And you have to type in a password. But this will create a temporary mailbox.org account for them. And so when they receive this email it will be locked and they'll have to type in a password. You can probably send them a password over another app. Maybe some encrypted chat app and then they can open it. So that can be useful if you wanna send something sensitive like some passwords that you don't want sitting in somebody's inbox until the end of time. And don't really have much bad to say about mailbox.org. I guess their UI is a little bit dated and this is not the most beautiful webmail I guess. But you can always set this up with a third party client like Thunderbird or Apple Mail if you want to. As for privacy, they're pretty good. They don't collect too much personal data about you. And they do have the option to pay by cash. You can send them cash in the mail if you wanna be more anonymous. And I'd say this is a pretty good option if you wanna use PGP encryption and you don't really mind the dated webmail UI. But seeing as this one is a little bit more technical to set up than some of the other ones on this list, I'm just going to put this in decent tier. Next up we have MailFence. So this is another generic privacy respecting email as you can probably imagine. And like a lot of other ones on this list, they love talking about how much they care about privacy. But if we check their privacy policy, again, they do collect a lot of information. Like right here, you can see they collect your IP address, message IDs, sender and recipient address, subjects, browser versions, countries and timestamps. They store your external email address. They store all of your payment details. And as far as I can tell, they store all of this info indefinitely. So it's not really something I like to see from this company that cares so much about your privacy. That's always kind of a bad look. And again, I really don't have much that I can say about this provider. So they do have a free tier, I guess, but it is a lot slimmer than some other offerings on this list. They only give you 500 megabytes. And they really don't give you a lot of additional features. Now they do give you encryption. So that might sound pretty good. They encrypt all of your emails. That might be something you'd like to see. But they don't give a lot of information about this. They don't even tell me what technology they're using. Are they using PGP for their encryption? I don't know. I feel like if they really care about encryption, they would give me more detail here. That is literally the entire page. But their email isn't even zero access encrypted, which basically means that in theory, they can read your emails if they really want to. It's not a completely foolproof encryption that they have. And they've been talking for years about how they want to fix this, but they just haven't gotten around to it yet. So I don't know. I really don't have much to say about this again. But I kind of see this one as similar to Fastmail. So they probably care about your privacy more than these big corporations do. But I don't really trust them that much. And there's nothing here that is really setting them apart from the crowd. And so that's why I just have to put mail fence into the mediocre tier. I just don't think there's anything special about this one. Next up, we have Outlook or Microsoft's email. And if you're a boomer like me, then you probably remember the days when this used to be hotmail. And all the cool kids back in the day used to have a hotmail.com email address. But then everybody grew up and nobody's trying to put a hotmail.com email address on a job application. So they rebranded it to Outlook. But it's basically the same old, same old. And so Outlook might look better than something like Google because they even ran this whole advertising campaign years ago called Scroogeld. I don't want to get Scroogeld. I don't know. It's a really stupid sounding name for an advertising campaign. But basically they were talking about, oh, Google reads through all of your emails in order to give you better targeted advertisements. But we don't do that. So Microsoft, the Paragons of Virtue are going to protect your email and they would never do anything nefarious with it, right? Oh, except for that one time when some very bad person leaked their Windows 8 source code. And they just couldn't have that. So they snooped through all of their emails and got them arrested. So if you have an Outlook.com email, you better hope that you're being a good citizen or Microsoft is just going to root through all your emails. Oh, and of course, they'll probably send it all to the government as well because they are proud of Prism, this big government surveillance program. So if you have emails with Microsoft, you better just assume that the government can read everything you're doing. So again, you better hope that you're being a good little citizen because Big Brother is looking out for you. So no, I will not trust Microsoft either. Maybe they don't snoop through emails to give you better targeted advertisements, but they still collect all kinds of personal data about you to give you better ads. They just don't directly read through your email contents. So again, this is another corporation that you definitely should not trust. And that's why I have to put it in the botnet tier. Next up is Postio. This is yet another European based email provider that cares about your privacy. Yes, just like all the other ones, but wait, don't skip to the next timestamp yet because they do have a few things that make them different. So first things first, they don't have a free tier, but their email is only one euro per month. So it's pretty affordable for just about everyone. It's definitely one of the cheapest paid email providers out there. And you do have to pay for the whole year in advance. There's no monthly plan, but when it's only one year per month, it's really not that much. And Postio's privacy is very good. They really don't collect much data about you. They don't collect your personal IP address. They don't even have any analytics running in the background, which is more than I can say for most of the entries on this list. So when they say they care about your privacy, you can definitely believe them. But let's check out their webmail and see how it looks. So I would say that their webmail client is very dated looking. This is kind of a blast from the past. And this might not appeal to a lot of you, but of course you can just use a third party email client if you would prefer. Even though this is very basic, it definitely gets the job done. And I think this might appeal to a lot of people. And it doesn't support inbox encryption out of the box. So they can read through these emails, but like mailbox.org, this is something you have to set up yourself. So you do have to go into the settings, go to encryption, you can set up your PGP encryption here. And you can even encrypt things like your notes, your calendar and your address book as well. So that is very good. But now we have to talk about the downsides. They don't have any support for custom domains. So your email is going to always be something like postio.net. That is just not a feature that they want to support. And they also only give you two gigabytes of space out of the box, which isn't a lot for a paid email provider. But if you do want to pay a little bit extra every month, you can get a few more gigabytes if you really need it. So there are a few downsides to using postio, but as far as privacy goes, they are definitely one of the best. They collect almost no information about you and you can pay with cash via mail if you really want to be anonymous. But they do have a few downsides. So I don't think it's for everyone. It's definitely not for me because I need the custom domain email. So I'm just going to be putting it in decent tier, but I still think it's a very good option for a lot of people. Next up, we have proton mail. Probably a lot of you skipped ahead to this one. This is the most well-known privacy respecting email out there. It has been around for a long time. And it's basically the gold standard for private email online. At least that's how they like to brand themselves. So does it actually live up to the hype? Let's take a look and see. And first things first, I do think that proton mail's privacy is pretty good. If you read through their privacy policy, they really don't collect too much information. And probably their biggest claim to fame is that they encrypt all of their emails by default. So you don't have to do any setup. You don't have to set up PGP or anything because they automatically set up PGP for you. And they make it very easy so even your grandma can use it. And so if you send an email to another proton mail user, then it will automatically encrypt that with PGP. And PGP is not the best end-to-end encryption standard out there, but it is probably the most widely used. So I do think that is a good thing. And like a lot of other providers, if you wanna send an encrypted email to somebody who doesn't have proton mail or something similar, then you can just send them a password protected email. That way you can send sensitive data or something like that. And of course, since your inbox is encrypted by default, proton mail themselves can't read through any of your emails. That is very nice. And they have a few different tiers here. So of course, most people would probably want to use their free tier. And I will say their free tier is only just okay. So they only give you up to one gigabyte of total storage and they even start you off with 500 megabytes, which is not a lot of space, probably not enough for a lot of people. And so that might kind of be a deal breaker. But if you really want the most options, then I would probably go with their mail plus plan where you're paying four euros per month. And I would say in this case, it probably is worth it to get the mail plus package because you get 15 gigabytes of storage. You can have 10 email addresses. You get a custom domain. You can use third party email apps like Thunderbird. You can't do that with the basic plan because in order to keep the emails encrypted, you have to additionally download this bridge software in order to encrypt and decrypt the messages. So I don't really recommend the free tier for a lot of people. But since they are so well known and they are a very big company, they have some very good mobile apps as well. I've used the mobile app before and I think it's very good. It's on par with something like Gmail's app. So if you send a lot of emails from your phone, you weren't really going to be missing much. And they have a ton of other offerings here like they have a calendar, Google drive replacement, a VPN, a password manager. So they're really trying to build this whole giant suite of things like how Google has their office suite. So that also might be something that interests you. And if you do want to be anonymous, if you don't want to put in all of your personal data, you can actually do that because they do have an onion site that you can sign up for over tour. And I will tell you that Protonmail used to come under a lot of heat because their onion site used to redirect the clear net. And so if you're trying to sign up anonymously, they would just de-anonymize you while you're doing that. And in some cases, if you sign up with a VPN or over tour, they ask you for your phone number or another email address. And so a lot of people didn't like that. It basically defeats the whole purpose of signing up anonymously. But they have fixed a lot of these issues over the past few years. And just before I recorded this video, I signed up for an account over tour and I had absolutely no problems with signing up. They didn't ask me for any additional verification with my phone number or anything like that. So you can definitely get a private anonymous email with Protonmail. I don't think that it's a honeypot like a lot of people seem to think. And probably Protonmail's biggest controversy that you might have heard of is that a few years back, they gave an IP address of one of their users up to law enforcement. There was this political activist that was using Protonmail and the feds came to Protonmail and demanded to get their IP address so they could track them down. And Protonmail did end up logging their IP address and giving it to the government. And whenever this went down, everybody was in a panic. They were saying, oh, Protonmail is compromised. You can't trust them anymore. They're just going to give all your data to law enforcement. But the feds really didn't get anything besides their IP address. Like Protonmail didn't give them any of their emails or anything like that. They were all still encrypted. So Protonmail really gave the government very little information. And that's what I like to see. Again, you should never completely trust one of these email services because they do have to cooperate with the government or they'll just be shut down. But I like whenever these businesses give the government as little data as possible. And so that's why I still trust Protonmail. I think they are probably the best option for a lot of people, especially if you want a paid plan, then this is probably going to be one of the best on the market right now. It is a little bit pricey. If you pay by month, it is five euros per month. But I think that it's definitely worth it in this case. If you are able to splash a little bit of money. And so that's why I'm putting Protonmail into base tier. And I think this is one of the rare cases that actually lives up to the hype. Now you may be wondering what this little icon right here is, but this is self-hosting your own email. And if you ever listen to any privacy nuts on the internet, they will always hype this up to no end. And they will say you can't trust any of these services right here. The only way that you can actually trust your email is if you do it yourself. And I mean, they're not really wrong. So what you do here is you rent out a cheap VPS from one of these big providers and then you set up your own email server. Now notoriously, this is very difficult to do and most people probably aren't going to be able to do this. But there are a lot of scripts that kind of automate the process for you. So you might have heard of something like MailCow or Mail in a Box or even Luke Smith's email whiz. I definitely use this script back in the day. And they basically automate all the hard parts for you. So you don't need to be some super cis admin in order to set this up. All you really need is some basic Linux knowledge and you can call it a day. And this might seem like the ultimate privacy respecting email. But I honestly really do not recommend this for the vast majority of people. And that's because when you have your own email server, so many different things can go wrong. Probably the biggest issue I had whenever I had my own email server was spam. I'm not talking about receiving spam. I'm talking about my emails being perceived as spam because if you're often sending emails to big providers like Gmail or Outlook then very often you will run into this issue where your email just does not arrive. Because a lot of spammers, they use these small VPSs, these small servers in order to send a boatload of spam. And so a lot of big companies just block them by default. And if you actually wanna build up your trust, it can take years before you actually get on the good side of these companies and they decide not to block you. So especially in my case, I need an email for my business. I'm not just doing this as a hobby. So I absolutely need an email that's going to work. And when half my emails are just not arriving to big companies like Gmail or Outlook, that is a huge issue. I really don't wanna have to message all of my clients and tell them, oh, can you fish my emails out of spam? Because nothing screams professional like all of your emails ending up in spam. And you also really have to know what you're doing with maintenance and security because you are basically doing all of the maintenance yourself and all of the security yourself. So I really hope you know what you're doing. Otherwise it is a vulnerability waiting to happen. And when you're doing your own maintenance, you have to really hope that you're not going to break anything because if you make one little change, you could completely mess up your mail server's deliverability. Like you make one mistake and all of your emails are just not going to be delivered anymore. So I had my own email server for a long time, but I just really do not recommend it to anyone anymore unless you absolutely know what you're doing. Just because you installed Arch Linux by yourself one time does not make you a Linux expert. And I would say unless you have serious sys admin skills, I would not even touch this with a 10 foot pole. Now, as far as privacy goes, this is going to be one of the best. But again, only if you really know what you're doing because if you're not using good security practices in your server, then anybody can just break in if they really want to and there's not much you can do about it. So I would say hosting your own email server can either be one of the best options out there or one of the worst depending on how skilled you are. And that's why I really don't recommend it for most people. But if you really know what you're doing, then it is one of the best. So I can't really put it in base tier and I can't really put it too low because it is good. So I'm just going to put it in decent tier. But I would say only choose this option if you absolutely know what you're doing. Otherwise you were just signing yourself up for unlimited headaches. Next up, we have Skiff. Now, this is a pretty new one. It's only really been around for about a year, but it has been getting really popular lately inside some privacy circles. And you can tell why right on their homepage they say that they're a privacy first end-to-end encrypted email. Yes, another service that cares all about your privacy, but I actually think that they can back up their claims. So in their privacy policy, which I like because it's mostly written in simple English. So just normal people can understand it. They really don't collect too much information about you. And by default, all of their emails are end-to-end encrypted. So basically they can't read any of the emails that you send. They're not going to be able to read anything in your inbox. And I would say one of the only downsides is that they don't use PGP. So PGP is basically the gold standard for email encryption. But PGP doesn't have a couple of drawbacks. And one of the drawbacks is that some of the metadata cannot be encrypted. And with PGP, some things in the email, like the subject or the recipient, they cannot be encrypted. Only the contents of the email can be. And SCIF uses their own encryption, which also encrypts the subject and the recipients and all of the metadata. So it should be better, right? Well, the only issue is that it only works for other SCIF accounts. So I don't know how many people you know that also use SCIF, but it's probably not many. And so 99% of the emails that you send to other people are not going to be encrypted. They don't even have some feature where you can encrypt the email and have them unlock it with a password. So that's a little bit unfortunate, but at least all of the emails inside your inbox are going to be safe and sound. They can't read any of it. And one of the best things that SCIF has is the UI. So the UI here is really nice. Let me open up an email. Everything just looks really nice here and it's pretty nice to use. I'd say that this is definitely the most aesthetically pleasing private email out there. They have their own phone app as well, which also looks just as good as this. But one of the biggest downsides is that you cannot use this with any third party clients. So if you want to read these emails in Thunderbird, you just can't. And that's because of their encryption. So you can only really use their apps. And they have an app for Windows and macOS. On Linux, you're just going to have to do things from the web browser. And for me, I'm okay with that because after using Gmail for years, I kind of got used to it. But I know for a lot of people, that's probably going to be a deal breaker. But another nice thing about SCIF is that their free tier is very generous. So much that you're probably thinking, what's the catch? Because with their free tier here, you get 10 gigabytes of storage for free that is almost unheard of. Most of these private email services just give you one gigabyte out of the box if you're lucky. And they even give you a custom domain email for free. So if you have yourname.com, you can just get yourname.com email address just out of the box for free, which is, again, also unheard of with these free tiers. So I'd say that this is one of the best deals in email right now. You are not going to see a free tier like this anywhere else. But you might be thinking, what's the catch? And I'm not sure if there is a catch because the reason that they're able to be so generous is because they're basically riding high off of VC bucks right now. So they got a whole bunch of venture capital money and that's how they're trying to build up their business. I'm not sure how it's going to work out because I really don't see any reason to use anything but the free tier right now. That's how good it is. But they have gone on record saying that they have enough VC money in order to last for a very long time. So you don't really need to worry that they're going to disappear next year. And so if you're looking for a free privacy respecting email, then I would say that this is one of the best deals out there right now. And this is also probably one of the best emails for normies right now because it is about as simple to sign up for as Gmail. So if your friend is looking for a new email service and you don't wanna have to explain the intricacies of PGP encryption, then this is probably going to be one of the best bets out there. Now they do also have a few additional services like a Google Docs equivalent and a calendar and a drive. And all of these are also encrypted, which is nice. They're definitely not at the same quality level as Google services, but I think that these can be a replacement if you really miss some of those. All of these also have phone apps as well. So I really like SCIF. There's only a few real downsides, which I already mentioned, but like I said, for free email, this is going to be one of the best out there. And that's why I have to put SCIF in excellent tier. Next up, we have Start Mail. Now this logo might be looking familiar because this is from the same people who brought you Start Page, the private search engine, which I've covered before in another tier list. And I think that their search engine is very good. It's one of the best out there. But can I say the same for their email service? Well, let's take a look here. So this is going to be private email you can trust. Of course, they're all going to say that. And they do have a lot of good features. They have PGP encryption in their web mail. Their privacy policy is pretty good, but probably their biggest drawback is going to be their pricing. So Start Mail is definitely one of the priciest options out there. So they are running a promotion right now, but this is only for the first year. After the first year expires, it is going to be $6 per month for their most basic plan. Of course, they don't have a free tier. And this is only if you want to startmail.com email address. If you want to use a custom domain, it is $7 per month, which is extremely expensive. And I really don't think you're getting that much for how expensive it is. So you do have some nice things like 20 gigabytes of storage, but you can get all of these for cheaper elsewhere. I don't think they have any features that really set it apart from anybody else. Probably their biggest claim to fame is unlimited aliases. So you can basically create as many email addresses as you want. Maybe you would rather have a different email address for your banking than your social media accounts. That's probably a good security practice, but I really don't think that it is worth $7 a month. That is extremely expensive. And I think there are better options out there. I mean, the webmail UI is totally fine, I guess. It definitely looks a lot better than a lot of other ones on this list. But again, I don't think that is worth $7 a month. And so that is probably the biggest drawback about Start Mail. It's good, but there's nothing about it that really sets it apart and makes it worth its price tag. And so unless you're really rich and you like paying an exorbitant amount of money for email, I can't really recommend this for many people. I'm just going to be putting it in the mediocre tier. For this kind of money, you can get a much better deal almost anywhere else. Now let's talk about Tutanota. Tutanota is probably famous for being the second most popular private email provider behind Proton Mail. So they are all about their privacy and their end-to-end encryption. So by default, your mailbox with Tutanota is going to be completely encrypted and they're not going to be able to read any of your emails. And you don't have to do the whole PGP setup like you have to do with a whole bunch of other ones. And that is because they don't use PGP. So this is a similar case to Skiff. They have their own end-to-end encryption, which you may think is a good thing, but I really don't think it's that good because it really limits the amount of people that you can use end-to-end encryption with. So basically the only people that you can use end-to-end encryption with is other people that use Tutanota, which again is not going to be very many people unless you know a lot of weird privacy nuts, I guess. But that's probably the biggest issue with it. And if you don't really find that to be too big of an issue, then I would say that Tutanota is pretty good. As far as privacy goes, it is one of the best. They really respect your privacy and they really don't require you to give out too much personal information to them. And they do have a free tier, but their free tier is not that generous, to be honest. So you get one gigabyte of storage, which is not too bad, but they do have a lot of weird limitations on their free tier. Like you can only search within the last four weeks of your emails. If you want to search through emails older than that, you just can't on the free tier. And if your free email address is inactive for six months, then they will just close it. And one other big downside is that, again, like Skiff, you can't use a third party email client like Thunderbird. You can only use their webmail client or their mobile apps. I'm not sure if they have a desktop app either. They also don't have an email import option. So if you want to say import all your emails from something like Gmail or Outlook, they just don't have that option right now, which again, might also be a deal breaker. If you do want to pay for it, it costs three euros and 60 cents per month, which is kind of just in the middle range. Not too expensive, but not too cheap. And you do get some nice things like custom domain email. You get a calendar. You get a few extra aliases. But in terms of features, I really don't think they have too many killer features. Their webmail UI is just okay. I know a lot of people complain about it. I really don't think it's that bad, but a lot of people don't like it. So I don't know, you might like it or hate it. For me, I'm kind of indifferent. But of course, their biggest claim to fame is always going to be their privacy. So they are very private. They don't collect any personal information about you. And they are, I think, one of the only email providers that allows you to pay with Monero. You do have to do it through a third party. There are a couple of hoops that you have to jump over. But if you really want to be anonymous, then I would say that TunaNota is a pretty good option. And so if you care about privacy, I think that this is a very good option. But of course, it still has the same drawbacks as something like Skip does. And that's why I'm just going to be putting this in the excellent tier. But it's still a very good option. Finally, last and most definitely least, we have Yahoo email. Does anybody actually still use this? I'm not sure. But every once in a while, I still run across somebody in the wild who still has a Yahoo email address. Look, I get it. Back in the day, everybody had a Yahoo email address. It was the coolest thing ever. But it is not the 2000s anymore. It's time to grow up and get yourself a real email address. And in fact, the only reason I'm even including Yahoo here is because they actually have the high score for the biggest data breach of all time. So back in 2016, over three billion Yahoo accounts were hacked and I've made some pretty big mistakes in my life, but at least I can say that I've never messed up this bad. So literally every single customer who had ever signed up for Yahoo and the data that these hackers got included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, even unencrypted security questions and answers, dates of birth and hashed passwords. So they compromised just about everything. These hackers have got to be pretty proud of themselves. They basically got the high score in hacking. So I guess congratulations, Yahoo, well done for being number one in the list of the biggest data breaches of all time. So of course you should never use Yahoo email for anything. It is time to get a new email address if that is what you have been using. And literally any other option on this tier list is going to be better than them. And in case you weren't completely convinced, yes, they also send all of your information to third party advertisers to give you better targeted ads. Isn't that nice of them? So yes, obviously Yahoo is going straight into botnet tier. So in conclusion, if you want my recommendation for the best email providers out there, I would say that Protonmail is probably the best paid option. So if you have $5 a month that you want to spend on email, Protonmail is probably going to be the best deal that you can get. But the best free email out there is probably going to be Skiff because they have a very generous free tier. But I think that you're not really going to go wrong with any of these from the top three tiers, except for maybe hosting your own email. I really don't recommend it unless, again, you know what you're doing. But that's just my opinion. You can tell me your favorite email provider in the comments. But hopefully you learned something from this video. And if you only learned one thing, is that it's finally time to let go of your Yahoo email address. I know it's going to be emotional, but you can do it.