After running a few tests with some family and friends in my search for some digital privacy, ProtonMail edged out the only real competition it had in Tutanota. Not by much, mind you. The feedback I got included that the interface seemed a bit more updated, but it wasn’t a huge difference. It was still a pretty tight race, particularly since Tutanota gives its free users twice the base storage for their emails, and their upgraded, paid packages are cheaper.
In what was probably the deciding factor, one friend agreed with my (unspoken) impression that encrypted messages should have their subject lines readable and not also encrypted. Meaning, both services let you force encryption onto emails you send to even unencrypted services, so for instance I could encrypt messages from both ProtonMail and Tutanota to recipients who are using Gmail (which is unencrypted). This particular difference between the two services I was trying out is that when you force encryption in ProtonMail, recipients using Gmail (for instance) would be able to read the subject line prior to unencrypting the body of the message, whereas doing the same process with Tutanota encrypts the entire message including the subject line. Nothing from it (aside from the sender) was readable prior to unencrypting it.
Personally, I’d like to see the subject line before unencrypting something, even if it was from someone I knew. Expecting someone to open something completely blindly, with zero idea of what the message is about, seems a bit much to me. I’d get how people may want that in their encryption–à la if you’re going to be private about your messages, be all the way private–but personally it didn’t sit as comfortably for me as the idea of recipients I send to being able to see the subject line ahead of time.
One big change I’ll have to make is that I’m going to have to be way more on top of clearing out my unneeded old emails with ProtonMail. Its free service has a storage limit of 500 megs, which is pretty slim compared to the 19 *gigs* (that’s 38X more space, for any readers not clear on how computer storage works) that I currently have with my Gmail account, most of which I don’t mind saying I’ve used up, because it can very easily become an archive of sorts for old emails and photos and game design images, etc., that I’ve sent around and just leave there for potential use or reference later on. So that’ll need to stop. But being better at pruning old emails is probably not a bad thing.
And, at the end of the day, even if I end up bumping up to a paid subscription to expand that storage capacity, I still won’t mind, as either way I now use a service that deals with ensuring privacy instead of using potentially anything and everything I state in an email for their own purposes. Which is, of course, the whole purpose of leaving Gmail in the first place.