End-to-end encrypted email.

Fastmail doesn't provide end-to-end encryption in its own apps. That means Fastmail can access your messages and files. This is a no-no for me and one of the reasons I moved away from Google. I was looking into alternatives like Proton Mail. I had used their VPN service in the past, but after hearing about their CEO's AI psychosis, I decided to avoid their services.

For now, I have settled on a mixed approach: keep using Fastmail but encrypt sensitive emails end-to-end with OpenPGP. The idea is simple: share a public key so others can encrypt messages to me, while keeping the private key secret to decrypt them.

This week I looked into end-to-end encrypted email with Thunderbird and GnuPG. Thunderbird has built-in OpenPGP support for managing keys and sending encrypted messages. It's easy to set up:

• Generate your GPG key
• Go to Tools, OpenPGP Key Manager, File, and Import Secret Key
• Then, go to Account Settings, End-to-End Encryption

One cool feature of Thunderbird is that it integrates with https://keys.openpgp.org. If your recipient has uploaded their public key, Thunderbird will automatically discover and download it. Otherwise, you can always manually add the public key.

One thing to remember: encrypting the message body does not necessarily hide metadata such as the sender, recipient, or subject.

I have added my public key and fingerprint to the website for anyone who wants to send encrypted email to [email protected].