Verizon is quitting the email business....now what?

Where should we migrate to and how complicated will it be? TIA

gmail.

I migrated to AOL--it couldn't have been easier and was able to keep my @verizon.net email address.  The AOL engine works just like Gmail and Hotmail, and all past emails were migrated in minutes.  Easy to add to your smart phone too.  

Verizon's email engine was terrible--this is a great improvement.

If you go the AOL route that Verizon suggests in order to keep your verizon.net email address, beware AOL's spam filter. It was blocking a number of legit emails from long-established recipients of ours until we turned it off.

Rejoice. They were the worst at email.

One day, gmail will be the worst, even though they're the best now. Or at least they won't be the best, because they're becoming a big ugly behemoth of a company. My solution: I use a custom domain. Google hosts it as long as I want them to. Then one day, I'll pick up and leave. Don't have your email provider be in your address. My email is tom@noglider.com and you have almost no way of knowing it's hosted by google. So you could be rob@rhwmaplewood.com or whatever. I don't know if your name is Rob or something else; that's just an example. Find a domain that isn't taken. I'm sure rhw.com is taken, since it's so short.

I changed from Verizon to gmail years ago -- and never looked back.

Another vote for gmail. Actually, I use both gmail and aol--gmail for personal and "significant" correspondence, aol for commercial transactions. As a result, 99% of the garbage emails I get go to aol, and my gmail account remains clean.

Another benefit of gmail is that you can organize your saved correspondence under labels, which remain attached to individual emails. In addition, to you attach various symbols to items in your inbox (e.g., red star, green check, etc.), which can also be very helpful.

I switched from AOL to gmail years ago and it was much much better.  AOL was frequently hacked, was not user-friendly, and was on life-support. At this point, AOL has a certain cache of being associated with people who aren't current, created an account 15 years ago, and are too tech challenged to upgrade.  Maybe that will change if they get massive infusions from Verizon, but I would recommend taking the plunge directly into gmail.

This is a good idea.

Tom_Reingold said:

Rejoice. They were the worst at email.

One day, gmail will be the worst, even though they're the best now. Or at least they won't be the best, because they're becoming a big ugly behemoth of a company. My solution: I use a custom domain. Google hosts it as long as I want them to. Then one day, I'll pick up and leave. Don't have your email provider be in your address. My email is tom@noglider.com and you have almost no way of knowing it's hosted by google. So you could be rob@rhwmaplewood.com or whatever. I don't know if your name is Rob or something else; that's just an example. Find a domain that isn't taken. I'm sure rhw.com is taken, since it's so short.

AOL  will be the engine behind their advertising/data collection business so they need the e mail data to get more data on you and your activities.  Do you feel comfortable PAYING verizon for services and them making money on your data ? Yahoo accounts will be next for them to exploit as that acquisition is moving forward

I use gmail as i think there is a better exchange of value - free email service for ad display 

One more vote for GMail. The spam filters alone are reason enough, but it also does everything else very, very well.

new207040 said:

AOL  will be the engine behind their advertising/data collection business so they need the e mail data to get more data on you and your activities.  Do you feel comfortable PAYING verizon for services and them making money on your data ? Yahoo accounts will be next for them to exploit as that acquisition is moving forward

I use gmail as i think there is a better exchange of value - free email service for ad display 

You don't think Google is collecting data on you?

sac said:

new207040 said:

AOL  will be the engine behind their advertising/data collection business so they need the e mail data to get more data on you and your activities.  Do you feel comfortable PAYING verizon for services and them making money on your data ? Yahoo accounts will be next for them to exploit as that acquisition is moving forward

I use gmail as i think there is a better exchange of value - free email service for ad display 

You don't think Google is collecting data on you?

yes but there is a quid pro in that i get something in exchange I value -- with aol and yahoo owned by verizon there is no fair exchange for my data as I pay verizon allot !! 

Thanks for all the suggestions. This is a PIA. All billing companies have the VZ email address. We have folders set up for different events that we have saved emails from.

I am moving away from using my Verizon email, but I will still be using FIOS, so it's not like I'm saving any money.  If their email was the best, I wouldn't really distinguish between the data they collect from me and the data Google collects from me.  I gave up most of my privacy rights a long time ago by using the Internet in the first place.

That being said, I definitely do not support the most recent congressional action on this topic.

I never switched to Verizon email in the first place. 

sac said:

I am moving away from using my Verizon email, but I will still be using FIOS, so it's not like I'm saving any money.  If their email was the best, I wouldn't really distinguish between the data they collect from me and the data Google collects from me.  I gave up most of my privacy rights a long time ago by using the Internet in the first place.

That being said, I definitely do not support the most recent congressional action on this topic.

There is some privacy when you are on a secure site such as this or the Washington Post.

I would certainly like my mail to be private. To me, email has replaced postal mail. How many are OK with sending your personal postal mail unsealed so others can read it?  Using Gmail is like sending your mail unsealed.

I'm now looking at ProtonMail. Like Gmail, its free but unlike Gmail its supposedly secure and  private.

protonmail.com

You don't have to give up your verizon.net address.  Also, you don't have to use AOL's reader.  You can use a third party reader like Thunderbird, which is better than gamail imho and will allow you to keep your archives no matter which email address you use.

Are you saying this in relation to the fact that they scan your messages for keywords? Or has there been some security breach that I'm not aware of? 

(This is a legit question; not meant to be argumentative.)

BG9 said:

Using Gmail is like sending your mail unsealed.

BrickPig said:

Are you saying this in relation to the fact that they scan your messages for keywords? Or has there been some security breach that I'm not aware of? 

(This is a legit question; not meant to be argumentative.)

BG9 said:

Using Gmail is like sending your mail unsealed.

https://www.google.com/policie...

From their privacy policy:

Right. I know all that stuff. Thanks.

Sending email unsealed isn't quite the best analogy. With regular mail it's still a million times easier for a bad actor to open your mailbox, unseal your envelope read your mail then reseal it than it is to be at the right spot to intercept the traffic between mail server A and Gmail's mail server. (I could easily do one if motivated, I couldn't do the other even with high motivation... unless you're the NSA of course.)

The problem with securing email is that it's a very old system and you can't easily slap 'security' on it and still communicate to everyone. ProtonMail is essentially the least painful way of doing it, but you're not realistically going to be able to communicate securely with anyone other than ProtonMail users. Yes, you can send an encrypted message to non ProtonMail users, but you'd have to establish sending the password via other means and they're bound to have to write it down or store it somewhere non-securely. Realistically it's better to have the other person sign up for ProtonMail than to bother with their secure method of sending to non-ProtonMail users.

Another thing worth noting, is that with real security if you lose your 'password' (private key) you lose the data. It's 100% non-recoverable. For most people I'd rank the risk of data loss via losing the key for encrypted data as much higher than the risk of someone intercepting your messages 'somewhere on the Internet'. (I've seen one happen a few times, the other I haven't seen any known case of it.) Most interception is done via phishing, which is someone being tricked into giving out their password, encryption doesn't really protect against that.

Security is unfortunately complicated and always imparts usability issues - which usually end up causing people to implement something poorly and make it much easier to compromise something.

BG9 said:

sac said:

I am moving away from using my Verizon email, but I will still be using FIOS, so it's not like I'm saving any money.  If their email was the best, I wouldn't really distinguish between the data they collect from me and the data Google collects from me.  I gave up most of my privacy rights a long time ago by using the Internet in the first place.

That being said, I definitely do not support the most recent congressional action on this topic.

There is some privacy when you are on a secure site such as this or the Washington Post.

I would certainly like my mail to be private. To me, email has replaced postal mail. How many are OK with sending your personal postal mail unsealed so others can read it?  Using Gmail is like sending your mail unsealed.


I'm now looking at ProtonMail. Like Gmail, its free but unlike Gmail its supposedly secure and  private.

protonmail.com

I wasn't going to quibble with the unsealed mail analogy, but since qrysdonnell did I'll agree with him. Without doing the necessary research to prove it, I would suspect that sending a Gmail message is quite a bit more secure than sending a letter via regular post. Even one in a properly sealed envelope. (And the reason I won't do the necessary research is that both scenarios worry me in precisely equal measure, which is to say very nearly not at all.)

qrysdonnell said:

Sending email unsealed isn't quite the best analogy. With regular mail it's still a million times easier for a bad actor to open your mailbox, unseal your envelope read your mail then reseal it than it is to be at the right spot to intercept the traffic between mail server A and Gmail's mail server. (I could easily do one if motivated, I couldn't do the other even with high motivation... unless you're the NSA of course.)

The problem with securing email is that it's a very old system and you can't easily slap 'security' on it and still communicate to everyone. ProtonMail is essentially the least painful way of doing it, but you're not realistically going to be able to communicate securely with anyone other than ProtonMail users. Yes, you can send an encrypted message to non ProtonMail users, but you'd have to establish sending the password via other means and they're bound to have to write it down or store it somewhere non-securely. Realistically it's better to have the other person sign up for ProtonMail than to bother with their secure method of sending to non-ProtonMail users.

Another thing worth noting, is that with real security if you lose your 'password' (private key) you lose the data. It's 100% non-recoverable. For most people I'd rank the risk of data loss via losing the key for encrypted data as much higher than the risk of someone intercepting your messages 'somewhere on the Internet'. (I've seen one happen a few times, the other I haven't seen any known case of it.) Most interception is done via phishing, which is someone being tricked into giving out their password, encryption doesn't really protect against that.

Security is unfortunately complicated and always imparts usability issues - which usually end up causing people to implement something poorly and make it much easier to compromise something.

BG9 said:

sac said:

I am moving away from using my Verizon email, but I will still be using FIOS, so it's not like I'm saving any money.  If their email was the best, I wouldn't really distinguish between the data they collect from me and the data Google collects from me.  I gave up most of my privacy rights a long time ago by using the Internet in the first place.

That being said, I definitely do not support the most recent congressional action on this topic.

There is some privacy when you are on a secure site such as this or the Washington Post.

I would certainly like my mail to be private. To me, email has replaced postal mail. How many are OK with sending your personal postal mail unsealed so others can read it?  Using Gmail is like sending your mail unsealed.


I'm now looking at ProtonMail. Like Gmail, its free but unlike Gmail its supposedly secure and  private.

protonmail.com

I'm not really worried about interception when traveling through the internet from mail provider 1 to provider 2. Not easy. What is easy is a mail provider itself reading my messages in order to build and sell marketing databases.

As for the encryption key in Proton mail-

As long as Proton Mail is active, I don't think there is a worry. The key is there and transparent to  use. You could lose all your messages if Proton mail went out of business. But they're going to implement IMAP so you can download directly from Proton mail into a program like Thunderbird, to be stored locally and deleted or retained at your leisure.

As for the one time password when sending a secured Proton mail massage to a non-Proton mail user -

Send the password separately using secured messaging (Signal, etc.) or even telephone the password. I have two lawyers who want I send confidential documents to them using Fax. They assume that unlike email Fax is secure. I really don't know if that's true. But in the future, I'll insist that they accept an encrypted Proton email with their needed documents attached.

@rhw, is verizon going to forward your mail for some time? I certainly hope so. Get that set up now (along with your new mailbox) so you have time to change your billing addresses.

Email is not secure. I don't know about protonmail, but there is no panacea. Secure email is a while off.

@Tom_Reingold - can you explain here or in a PM how you got your private email domain and set it up under gmail or whatever service you use?

Send the password separately using secured messaging (Signal, etc.) or even telephone the password. I have two lawyers who want I send confidential documents to them using Fax. They assume that unlike email Fax is secure. I really don't know if that's true. But in the future, I'll insist that they accept an encrypted Proton email with their needed documents attached.

Fax is WAY less secure than email. Just get a few alligator clips and open up the phone box of whatever building the lawyers are in. Make a few test calls and you've found the fax line. Record the signal. Decode later. Just try and look like you're from the phone company and you're gold. Anyone who thinks faxes are secure has clearly never thought about it seriously for even a second. Not to mention that faxes are usually automatically printed and delivered to a common area where it can be (and usually is) picked up by someone that isn't the intended recipient.

There's no reason to insist on Proton Mail. You can use any PGP implementation. They do need to set up their private and public keys and share their public key with you. The public key can be shared with anyone and is used to encrypt, but messages can only be decrypted with the private key. This is more secure than ProtonMail, because you don't have to trust any third parties. With ProtonMail you still have to somewhat trust that they're doing what they say they will. (There's no signs that they aren't trustworthy though.)

I disagree. I hate fax, but in some ways, it is more secure. If someone wants to intercept my faxes, he needs to know if my phone line is POTS, VOIP, efax or other. If it's POTS (which has become rare), tapping in physically is a lot more trouble than a pure software hack, since you have to be on my premises.

@oakland2, you can start at https://gsuite.google.com/ I believe that page will guide you through the process. I haven't gone through it recently, and since they keep changing it, I can't say exactly what the steps are. Google is hosting my mail for now, but I like the flexibility of moving it. Currently, google does the best job at email, but I'm certain that won't be the case forever, so I don't like publishing a xxx@gmail.com address.

Yikes why does the "mention" feature fail? oakland2 tried to mention me, and I tried to mention him.

What is the 'mention' feature?