I really don’t know that much about cybersecurity, and I was wondering if it’s possible to have a completely secure email (that I could also use for some social media). And what makes some emails more secure than others? And even if I do use a secure email, could someone track me through my IP address anyway if they really wanted to dox me?

I guess, where should I go if I want to learn about basic cybersecurity? Sorry if this is a lot, I'm not really sure where to start learning about it :ohnoes:

  • silent_water [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    the problem with genuinely secure email is that you can only talk to people using the same protocol as you. encrypted messages require a client that can decrypt them and worse, most providers that give encrypted message support only do so for messages sent to other users of the same platform. conversely, if you're talking to other tech savvy people, you can use whatever mail service you like and just encrypt your messages.

    I'm not aware of any means to protect email metadata. you can configure a local mail server to not send the client ip but the receiving server will still know which mail server was used to send the message. also, running a mail server is unreasonably hard, especially because email wasn't designed to handle a mail server being down in a reasonable way. you can straight up lose messages to the ether if you're not careful.

    my advice is to use something like tutanota or protonmail only for communication that can't happen by some other means and to use something like matrix for everything else. if it's an even remotely spicy conversation, don't send emails about it.