PGP

If you already use PGP, mail we forward you can be encrypted to your key before it leaves our servers.

Forwarding to your own key

Add your public key to a mailbox. From then on, mail forwarded to that mailbox is encrypted to it, so what sits in your inbox provider's storage is unreadable to them.

This is the highest-value use of PGP here, because it moves the trust boundary past the biggest holder of your mail, which is usually Google or Microsoft.

Note what it does not do. We encrypt on the way out, which means we handled the plaintext first. PGP on a forwarding alias protects the mail after us, not from us. If you need protection from us, that is the private inbox, and it works differently.

Per-contact keys

You can also attach a key to a specific contact, so replies you send them through a masked address go out encrypted.

Key attachments

Senders and clients love attaching public keys to every message. We strip them from forwarded mail rather than passing them along, because they add up and almost nobody wants them.

If PGP is not for you

Skip it. It is a genuinely awkward technology and the honest answer is that most people should use the private inbox instead, which achieves a similar thing with a key your browser manages for you.

Something here wrong or missing? Tell us. These pages live in the same repository as the code, so a correction is a one-line change.