Why can’t your email be as secure as your texts?

Most people assume the messages they send via well-known messaging apps like Meta’s WhatsApp or Apple’s iMessage are end-to-end encrypted, meaning only the sender and receiver can read them. However, this high level of privacy protection does not apply to emails. The major email providers—Google’s Gmail, Apple’s iCloud Mail, Microsoft’s Outlook, and Yahoo Mail—don’t support end-to-end encryption for personal accounts.

If you want E2EE for your emails like you do for texts, you’ll need to use different email platforms. The reason emails aren’t end-to-end encrypted is practical. Email is an old technology that needs to work across all services. If emails were end-to-end encrypted, it would be hard to send emails between different providers, like Gmail and iCloud.

Encryption in emails also makes it hard for providers to detect spam, phishing, and to search for specific emails. Most emails are stored on the provider’s servers, and searching through them would be difficult with end-to-end encryption. Two popular services offering end-to-end encrypted emails are Proton Mail and Tuta Mail. They encrypt emails by default between their own platforms, but if you send emails to other email providers, the encryption is lost, and you have to use a secure link to decrypt the message.

Whether or not to switch to E2EE email depends on how much privacy you want. If privacy is a top concern, E2EE email platforms like Proton and Tuta may be worth considering.