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Hushmail is a secure email provider owned by Hush Communications Ltd, based in Vancouver, Canada, and itself, a subsidiary of Hush Communications Corporation, a company based in Delaware, USA. This email platform was launched in 1999 and since then has grown into a popular service for consumers looking to send secure encrypted emails.

Hushmail has some unique features that could make it an ideal email service for your needs. But Hushmail also has some less attractive specifics. We'll take a look at the pros and cons of this long-standing system to help you decide if it has the potential to be your next truly private and anonymous email service.

We will see this in detail later, although Hushmail has a good reputation for providing secure email functionality, being based in Canada is far from ideal. Indeed, the country is part of a historic alliance of five English-speaking countries, called the “ 5 Eyes ” and has many laws that infringe on people's privacy, including Bill C-11 which obliges them to FAI to carry out mandatory retention of their data.

What's more, its ties to its US-based parent company also raise questions about the possibility that warrants and nondisclosure orders could be used to pull data from its international servers to the US.

Additionally, Hushmail is a proprietary, closed-source application, which means that while the PGP encryption it uses for email security has been verified, Hushmail's software has not. Depending on their threat model, these factors may deter some people from using the service.

Most

POP, IMAP, SMTP support
Support encrypted communication with outside users
Built-in OpenPGP support
iOS mobile app
Two-factor authentication
Remove IP addresses from emails
Special features for business users

$5.99 / Month

The lessers

Not Open Source
Hushmail can capture the user's passphrase, allowing it to decrypt OpenPGP messages
No other applications except iOS
Jurisdiction and practices very unfavorable to privacy: Canadian company, subsidiary of an American company
Account deactivation after 3 weeks of inactivity
No calendars or file storage> Non
anonymous and invasive registration requires an email address & phone number
High price, more expensive than competitors

Depending on the level of privacy you're looking for and your specific needs, Hushmail might just be your next webmail. Let's see this in more detail.

The main thing to remember

With all the privacy controversy surrounding the most popular messaging services, many people are now looking for alternatives. The giants of tech. such as Twitter, Google, Microsoft or Facebook have admitted to collecting and selling their customers' data and profiles to advertisers, raising legitimate privacy and security concerns.

If you want to be able to send a truly private email, without your provider scanning its content for advertising, then it's worth looking at other secure email solutions on the market, like Hushmail.

Hushmail is an email service, based in Canada with its parent company, in the United States, proprietary and encrypted using the PGP protocol. Hushmail has been around since 1999.

With this service, you can send encrypted messages to Hushmail users as well as to non-users who have accounts with Gmail, Outlook Mail, or other similar email clients.

Hushmail uses multiple layers of security, such as OpenPGP which protects the content of emails, and SSL / TLS which maintains a secure connection between the user and the server. This mechanism is quite similar to that offered by a VPN, which provides a secure tunnel between senders and the server, as well as encryption for complete privacy and security. It also hides your location by allowing you to use an alternate IP address from a location of your choosing.

Unfortunately, with a Canadian jurisdiction and a US parent company, the reality of protecting your correspondence is very different from Hushmail's marketing rhetoric.

Using a VPN with Hushmail can help provide an additional layer of security for Hushmail on its own. But that may not be enough.

Overall, Hushmail is a competent and functional email service but nothing sets it apart from free email services other than its lack of essential features like a calendar, note-taking, task management, or mail storage. files online. Despite the company promoting its encrypted service, we have found the service no more and no less secure than some popular free email accounts. Most importantly, it also lacks some of the features that make the best free email services so convenient.

The web version of Hushmail is however easy to use and offers a simple interface for sending and receiving encrypted messages from any computer.

Hushmail also offers POP3 and IMAP access to your mailbox, so you can access your email from third-party software. For example, any smartphone or other device running iOS or Android operating systems can access their Hushmail account through third-party email applications.

There are personal and business options when you sign up for Hushmail, but none are free. There is however a free trial which is good for two weeks so you can test all features before purchasing.

Our review of Hushmail also revealed that the healthcare industry uses it, to ensure secure communications between practitioner and patient. The service is secure so that personal health data can be shared online while still complying with strict regulatory requirements.

In the same vein, companies in the legal field choose to use it because they can send confidential data between lawyers and clients without the risk of compromising professional secrecy.

You will also find other features and benefits on this platform such as:

A quick and easy form builder
Unlimited email aliases for Premium accounts to hide your identity
No advertising
The option to use two-step authentication for more security
Easy import of contacts via CSV file
Automatic response device
Spam filter
Ability to receive email notifications for other non-Hushmail accounts
Supports user email signatures

If you want to know more about Hushmail, we invite you to read the rest of our Hushmail reviews.

Let's put it, compared to many other email providers, Hushmail is a bit lacking in features. If you're migrating from Google, the lack of a Calendar, storage for your files (via Drive), or spreadsheets might come as a shock. However, if all you need is secure email services, Hushmail might be enough.

Note that you will find in the Premium version some well thought out features which may not, however, make you forget everything else:

10 GB of storage
Unlimited number of aliases
IMAP and POP support
Importing contacts via CSV
Spam / Junk folder
OpenPGP encryption processed on their servers, rather than JavaScript in the client
2FA two-step authentication (SMS, email, or app)
Secure Forms
iPhone compatibility

We'll look at these benefits in more detail below. In particular, we will talk about how Hushmail implements OpenPGP in its servers, as it is a double-edged sword for the security of your messages.

The Hushmail company

Launched in 1999, Hushmail is a product of Hush Communications, Ltd., a Canadian company. Hush Communications, Ltd. is in turn a subsidiary of Hush Communications Corporation, which is based in the United States.

While the company emphasizes the security it offers for your email messages, it also insists that it complies with Canadian mandates requesting user data, whether from the Canadian government or the Canadian government. US government.

The United States and Canada are both founding members of the Five Eyes intelligence organization. Both countries conduct large-scale intelligence operations and are known to spy on their respective citizens and share this data, allowing them to bypass national restrictions on espionage. They can force local businesses to help them spy on users, and they do, and they can use gag orders to prevent those businesses from notifying the targets they spy on.

The difficulty of protecting user privacy means that most secure email services are located outside of the United States and Canada. The same can be said of VPN providers in Canada, who are also affected by these laws.

Technical specifications

Hushmail uses standard encryption algorithms and protocols to protect your messages. These include:

OpenPGP
TLS / SSL (Transport Layer Security / Secure Socket Layer)
PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy)
HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security)

We detail their use a little below. The service also supports POP, IMAP, and SMTP protocols for synchronization with other email services and third-party clients.

In addition, their specialized professional accounts must meet the standards of each industry such as:

Hushmail for healthcare professionals: HIPAA compliance
Hushmail for lawyers: supports solicitor-client privilege

Advice

Encrypt your Internet traffic and browse anonymously without leaving any traces, using a Premium VPN Service. Learn more about NordVPN or ExpressVPN among the VPNs we recommend.

Practical tests

We have based this Hushmail review on in-browser webmail as well as a free trial account. If you decide that Hushmail is for you, it will be easy to upgrade to one of the many paid plans they offer.

Register now

Next, you are going to have to set up your free e-mail account. However, you will see below, you must enter an e-mail and a phone number to register and obtain the activation code by SMS. This is extremely invasive. Once the SMS code has been entered, you have access to your e-mail account.

Free users get 25MB of storage on the unique email address they set up.

Upgrading to a Premium subscription gives users an unlimited number of aliases, nicknames, and temporary email addresses. In addition, users get 10 GB of data storage. The Premium version also allows subscribers to set up two secure web forms using its drag and drop form builder.

Unlike many cheaper secure email providers on the market, you don't get any cool extras like a calendar, storage for your documents and files, webchat, task manager, notes, spreadsheets, etc.

However, you do get a very large contacts section which is accessible from the hamburger menu at the top right of the web interface. And, unlike some email providers, it's extremely easy to see how you import your contacts from your previous email account via CSV format (vCard is not available).

We also like that free users automatically get a 14-day free trial of the Premium version, which is what we used to test this email provider in this review.

Perhaps the biggest downside to the free service is that accounts that remain inactive for more than three weeks are automatically deleted. This is bound to be frustrating if you go on a trip for a long time and come back to find that your account is closed and you have lost/missed some important emails that you were expecting.

Of course, the simple answer to this problem is to purchase a subscription. But we will see below, that given the observed privacy issues and a relatively high price, we generally recommend other alternatives.

It must be said that registering for Hushmail did not put us in good shape, from the start, concerning this service. To get your “secure” Hushmail account, you need to give them your current email address. This is annoying in itself because it gives Hushmail some initial personal information. However, we turn to this type of service to benefit from certain anonymity. So it started badly between us.

Then came the second Kiss Cool effect: you must also give them a phone number, to activate your account. This is the most anti-private registration requirement that you will be allowed to meet.

While you can always create an email address for the registration process, using a fake phone number is usually not an option. And with a phone number, you can get a lot of information about a person just by doing a reverse lookup on a dozen websites.

Once our registration was validated using the SMS code received, our account was created and we had to go to the login page.

Interface

Messaging

With its 2-pane configuration, the Hushmail messaging interface takes us a bit back in time, unfortunately not in the future.

We call it outdated, as the interface doesn't offer drag and drop as you find with services like ProtonMail. Here you check the box to the left of one or more messages and then you select what you want to do to that message (Mark as read, Move, Delete, whatever).

In addition, we have observed unusually long runtime and display times.

Also, note that the client displays buttons for Desktop or Mobile at the bottom of the panel on the right. Select Mobile to see the Hushmail client in an interface designed for small screens.

This mobile view is handy and should work on any Android or iOS device, but is not a separate app, just a different view of the browser page.

A real mobile app, like the iOS app that Hushmail also offers, will only work on certain devices, in this case, iPhones. On the other hand, it will be safer than a responsive web page, even if you are using a secure browser.

Sending and receiving messages

You will have no problem composing a message in Hushmail. It's classic and looks like any other email client. The options you need all appear in the compose window.

Due to its lack of features, it can be said that there is not much of a learning curve with this email provider. Unless, of course, you are not familiar with handling PGP keys. You will then either need to do your research or use Hushmail's helpful Help Center (FAQ).

There are, however, two options on the screen that are not usually encountered with other suppliers. These are the “Form Builder” button and the “Attach secure webform” link. They allow you to create secure forms and attach either your custom forms or some of the pre-built forms that come with Hushmail.

Send messages to Hushmail users

Sending messages is also easy. Apart from clicking the Send button, the only thing you need to consider is whether or not to send this encrypted message.

By default, messages sent to another Hushmail user will automatically be sent encrypted.

Send messages to external users

For a non-Hushmail user, however, you can check or uncheck the “Encrypted” box to send encrypted or unencrypted. If you send the encrypted message, Hushmail sends the recipient a link to a secure web page where they can read the message.

By clicking, next to the encryption box, on the link “How does the encryption work?” (how encryption works) you will be taken to a page that explains how it all works.

To send an email to a non-Hushmail user through PGP, the recipient will need to upload their public key to Hushmail's servers. There is a guide to doing this in the FAQ.

Receiving messages

Receiving messages does not require any special action on your part. Hushmail automatically decrypts all encrypted messages you receive from other Hushmail users, making the encryption transparent for you.

If you plan to use Hushmail often, you will probably want to turn off the email notification option. With this option enabled (which is the case by default), every time you receive a message in Hushmail, you will also receive a notification in your “other email address” - the one you were required to provide them when your registration to Hushmail ...

During this Hushmail review, we've received dozens of these notifications, clogging up the other email address. If you don't want this to happen to you, here's how to disable this option:

At the top right of the Hushmail window, click the Options icon (three horizontal lines in a box)
Select Preferences from the menu that appears
In the “About you” tab in Preferences, go to the bottom of the page and disable the email notification option

IMAP and POP are also available to sync between devices, and they are available for both iOS and Android. Guides are also provided for using these useful functions.

For those who wish, IMAP can be used to configure Hushmail to work with a standalone client such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, or Mozilla Thunderbird. And, it will improve the security of the platform overusing the browser-based webmail system (and its inherent JavaScript vulnerabilities).

Search for messages

The Hushmail search function is simple and efficient. Type the word or phrase you are looking for and the search function will find all messages that contain it, whether in the header, body, or any other field of the message.

Note that the search function scans the current folder, not the entire folder structure.

Calendar

As mentioned above, Hushmail does not provide a schedule or file storage capacity. This is, for us, a big lack in terms of expected functionalities for this type of service. Most other secure email services, such as Mailfence, Posteo, provide one or both of the features and also charge a lower monthly start-up fee.

Tutanota and ProtonMail offer a Calendar in their free offer.

Contacts

Hushmail offers you a traditional contact system with an input form and its 12 fields in addition to the contact name, which leaves no room for any graphic fantasy.

On the other hand, the page that lists Contacts has the particularity of displaying a lot of information about each contact, instead of a simple list of names and e-mail addresses. You can very well choose the information you need about a particular contact right on this page, instead of having to open the contact to find it.

You should test the value of this presentation with a page with a lot of contacts, but the search box on the page should fix this problem.

As seen above, Hushmail can also import contacts from other services using the CSV format.

Hushmail Preferences

We previously showed you the Preferences section of Hushmail when we needed to turn off email notifications. But there would be a lot to describe here, which we'll spare ourselves from doing while revealing to you the long list of tabs included in Preferences:

About you
Reading
Composition
auto-reply
Email aliases
Spam
security
Billing

From our point of view, the functionality of automatic replies in the event of absence places Hushmail primarily in the field of tools intended for companies. We will talk about the capabilities of Hushmail for professionals later.

Hushmail apps

Hushmail offers a single application. It is mobile and on iOS. It launched in July 2016 but doesn't appear to have seen huge success, with only 20 comments so far.

The Application obtains a score of 3.5 / 5 with constructive criticism but for some not very positive. But hey, with so few reviews posted, that doesn't necessarily mean much. It appears to be fully functional, and probably worth a try if you use both Hushmail and an iPhone. Which we haven't done, to be honest.

The good news is POP, SMTP, and IMAP support, which will allow you to work with your Hushmail mail using many third-party mail clients. This allows you to use your Hushmail account with a real client app instead of going through a web page, no matter what computer or mobile device you are using.

Hushmail provides instructions for managing your Hushmail account using third-party applications on this page.

Is Hushmail secure?

Now that we've seen what Hushmail looks like, let's talk specifically about the security and privacy it offers. We'll start with Hushmail's logging policy.

Data Protection and Privacy Policy

Following Microsoft's loss in Microsoft Corp. against the United States, the United States Supreme Court concluded that American companies must extract data from their international servers when they receive a warrant from American authorities. For Hushmail, which is a subsidiary of a US company, this naturally raises privacy concerns.

These concerns are in addition to the fact that Hushmail is based in Canada, which is known to cooperate with other “five-eye” countries to carry out the surveillance. This largely calls into question the privacy protection you might get from using Hushmail, especially considering the closed nature of the platform.

In addition, to open a Hushmail account, you must agree to some processing of your data. The company also informs users that they will comply with authorities if they are given a legitimate mandate to do so.

To be fair, we have to tell you that Hushmail does a good job of showing what information it saves when it does, and what happens to the data after it is saved. Sadly, there are some things about his policy that you probably won't like.

Hushmail's data collection is detailed in its privacy policy and as we have seen the problems start when you create an account with the registration of your IP address, phone number, and email address:

"The Name, the account you are upgrading, the domain you want to use for your email, another email address, your billing address, and your credit card information. Additionally, we will record the address. IP from which payment is made. When we process your payment transaction, this information will be transmitted to our payment processor. We use PCI-compliant third-party services to process your payment transaction. When we process your payment, we share your IP address, city, country, and zip code with a third-party anti-fraud service to determine the likelihood that the purchase was a fraudulent transaction. We do not store your credit card number on our servers "

Additionally, Hushmail tells you that it will collect data as you log in and use its service:

"The information we record may include your IP address, browser type, browser language, date and time of action, account usernames, sender email addresses. and recipient, filenames of attachments, subjects of emails, URLs in the body of unencrypted emails, and any other information we deem necessary to record to maintain the system and to prevent abuse ".

As you can read, the company collects and stores all email metadata, presumably to be able to comply with warrants and requests from authorities if presented to them.

Regarding the OpenPGP encryption provided by the service, Hushmail tells us:

Please note that we may need to store a passphrase for an account identified in an enforcement order in British Columbia, Canada.

Due to the way the Hushmail encryption system is constructed, it is possible that the company can see and save an account's passphrase. In other words, the Canadian government can order them to record information that can be used to read your encrypted messages.

Sharing your data with the government and gag orders

Like most secure email services, Hushmail will respond to a binding order to deliver information to the local government (in their case, the government of British Columbia, Canada). But companies like Tutanota or ProtonMail record as little information as possible, which means they don't have much to give in response to an order. They also have no way of decrypting your messages, contacts, files, etc. encrypted, stored in their systems. This means that even if they are forced to hand over your data, no one will be able to read it.

Hushmail makes a full record of users' activities and their personal information and returns all of that information when asked. And in some cases, Hushmail can decrypt encrypted messages, contacts, and other data, and provide that information in clear text to the government as well.

Will Hushmail notify you if they are forced to hand over your data to authorities? Not at all. This is what they say:

As these requests generally state that we are not permitted to disclose the existence of the request to a user, we will not disclose to any user the existence, or non-existence, of any order we have received.

At least the Hushmail employees won't read your mail, will they? Maybe, maybe not. Read these two passages from the policy :

When there are urgent circumstances, for example when the safety or well-being of one or more persons is in imminent danger, and we believe in good faith that the disclosure of personal information and account data is reasonably necessary to protect against such harm, we will disclose the records. This may include, without limitation, the welfare of a child or an act of terrorism.

And also :

We comply with Canadian Bill C-22 as enacted in Canada. "An Act Respecting the Mandatory Reporting of Child Pornography on the Internet by Persons Providing Internet Service". This means that if we learn that a user is using the Shhh service for the transmission or storage of child pornography over the Internet, we are obligated to report it to the appropriate authorities and maintain records in the user's account. As a result of this notice, we may receive a binding order in British Columbia, Canada, requiring the disclosure of personal information or account data.

These statements give Hushmail employees an ad minimum opportunity to look into your account to ensure that the company is complying with these requirements.

So, is there any evidence that Hushmail passed data to the authorities?

Transparency report

For starters, Hushmail does not provide a transparency report and does not have a “ canary mandate ” like so many of its competitors. This means that consumers can't know how many data requests it is receiving that the service is complying with. However, with only a little research, it is possible to find evidence that Hushmail is passing information to Canadian authorities.

In 2007, Hushmail released 12 CDs containing emails relating to three Hushmail accounts. According to the sources in the case, Hushmail provided clear-text versions of encrypted emails that it should not have been able to access due to end-to-end encryption. This data was transmitted to US federal authorities, following a court order obtained through the US-Canada Mutual Assistance Treaty ( FVEY ). The case is extremely concerning and casts serious doubts on the service and the possibility that it has a backdoor.

Following this case, the technical director of Hushmail also admitted that the intelligence services were able to penetrate the encrypted emails of targeted accounts thanks to vulnerabilities in the JavaScript browser application.

To be fair on Hushmail, this is a problem for any browser-based encryption that is run with Javascript. For this reason, anyone who wishes to send and receive PGP-encrypted emails securely without the possibility of a man-in-the-middle attack that can force compromised encryption keys on the senders and web browsers. the recipient will have to opt for the use of an e-mail service with a dedicated client. Hushmail can also be used this way…. if you trust him.

However, frankly admitting that this javascript flaw is being exploited on Hushmail users goes far beyond just saying that it is possible in theory, and it bluntly reminds us that it is very difficult to do so. trust in US services that claim to provide confidentiality service.

Since Hushmail logs a lot of information about you, and in some cases can even decrypt your messages when the government requests it, this is one of the less secure email services we've looked at so far.

But is Hushmail secure enough for your needs? This will of course depend on your threat model. And Hushmail gives you real help in this area. Because one of the advantages of this service is that it publishes several articles on how it ensures the security of your account. Their article “How Hushmail Can Protect You” discusses their security from a layman's perspective, while their security analysis enters a more detailed technical discussion. Examining these documents should quickly reveal whether Hushmail is protected against the threats affecting you.

Finally, we especially hated having to provide a phone number at the time of subscription to receive a verification code by SMS. Having to provide an email address and a phone number is too intrusive for us.

How secure is Hushmail?

Hushmail implements encryption for sending and storing emails on its servers. And, any email sent in the clear is stored in clear on Hushmail's servers. Which means they could be compromised if the company gets a mandate. This is not very serious for a private company, as there is absolutely no reason why Hushmail cannot encrypt all emails that are at rest, including those that were sent in the clear.

When users send emails using Hushmail, their real IP address is removed from the header and replaced with an IP owned by Hushmail. This is good for security because the recipient will never see the real IP address of the sender. However, it should be noted that Hushmail always logs your IP address when you connect to its services. Thus, the data is recorded and could reach the authorities at a later date.

Although Hushmail uses proprietary, closed-source software, it implements fully audited OpenPGP standards for email encryption. Hushmail ensures that the main body and attachments contained in emails are protected. OpenPGP encryption is available through Hushmail's webmail service and in its iPhone app. It is also available when accessing Hushmail in IMAP or POP3.

The company also implements TLS / SSL (Transport Layer Security) encryption for all data that is communicated in a transmission to its servers. This security should make it possible to prevent “Man-in-the-Middle” attacks from taking place.

As is the case with Tutanota, Hushmail has a feature that allows you to send encrypted emails to users who don't have Hushmail (or another PGP-compatible email account). When sending an encrypted email to a non-Hushmail user, the encrypted email is stored on the Hushmail servers and the recipient receives a link to access this email which can be decrypted through a system of questions and answers to which the recipient must know the answer.

This system is generally considered to be safe. However, this does mean that you have to trust Hushmail which might leave some users confused. You will need to make this judgment yourself based on your threat model.

To log in to an account, hushmail suggests that users enter a passphrase. The company specifies that these passphrases are never stored on its servers. Instead, they are transformed into a hash value from which the passphrase can never be derived.

If users want, they can also set up two-factor authentication on their accounts. This allows them to receive a code via a secondary email account, via SMS, or by using an authenticator app like Authy. Hushmail provides another security measure by locking out accounts if too many attempts to access an account are made in a short period. This protects the accounts from brute force attempts.

Overall, the security and encryption of the Hushmail service appear to be good. While it is true that we have seen even better implementations that include Perfect Forward Secrecy and other security measures such as HSTS, CAA, CSP, MTA-STS, and X-XSS.

How private is Hushmail?

From our perspective, it's hard to pretend that your Hushmail account is private. Here are our reasons:

1. The United States and Canada are the founding members of the international intelligence organization Five Eyes. This means, among other things, that they share information about their respective citizens.

2. As a result of a US Supreme Court ruling and a law called the CLOUD Act, in most cases companies like Hushmail are required to provide user data to US authorities, even when these data resides on servers located in another country.

3. Most of the computer code that manages your Hushmail account is proprietary. This means that there is no way for outsiders to see if your data is protected in the Hushmail system.

4. Hushmail's OpenPGP encryption is implemented on their servers, rather than in your client software. This means that you have to trust Hushmail to implement it correctly, without saving the data in unencrypted form or the passphrase used to encrypt your data.

Note: Usually at this point we would recommend using a good VPN service that secures and encrypts the data flowing between your device and Hushmail's servers. The VPN will conceal your real IP address, making your identification much more difficult for a snoop. While it is safe to use a good VPN service with Hushmail, with all the other information the company logs about your activities, as well as your phone registration, hiding your IP address with a VPN might not be enough.

Hushmail Company

We have already seen that Hushmail has certain business-oriented features, such as automatic replies. But the real bonus is its secure forms.

One of the features that make Hushmail stand out from the crowd of other email services is “Hush Secure Forms”. As the name suggests, this is a feature for creating secure web forms from Hushmail.

Although it is a bit confusing at first, a few sample forms that you can create have helped us better understand their purpose.

Here are some sample form templates you can fill out and use:

For a secure contact: your customers and prospects can use this form to initiate a secure conversation with you
For secure file transfer: a form you can use to receive confidential documents and other files from your customers.
To survey customer experience: After a date, send this survey to your customers to find out what went well and how they think you can improve.
To make an appointment with a practitioner: you can link to this form from your website, social networks and signing your email. Your clients can use the form to request an appointment with you.

Customer Support

Hushmail provides e-mail and telephone support in addition to a documentation base in the form of FAQs. Phone support is available Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific Time and is only available to Premium subscribers.

For email support, unfortunately, it is not done using a ticket system. After sending an email, you will need to be patient and wait for a response from support.

We have gleaned mixed reviews from users on the web. This is probably due to the lack of telephone support for people who try the service for free.

For our part, in addition to the FAQs provided with many guides and articles, which we found well written and very useful, we tested the support by e-mail and received the answer to our question in less than a day. However, considering the high price of its service (compared to the competition), it is a shame that Hushmail does not have a live chat feature on its website.

They also post service status updates and other information on their Twitter account: @hushmail.

Tariffs and packages

Hushmail offers a free trial which allows users to get a feel for its service without having to spend a dime. Users get 15MB of storage and an @ hushmail.com email address for free as we showed you in this review.

The Premium version, which corresponds to the basic, standard version of the service, costs $ 49.98 per year or $5.99 / Month and allows users to use an unlimited number of aliases and 10 GB of storage. The service also has a secure forms feature.

Note, however, that even with Hushmail Premium, you are bound to the domain names provided by Hushmail. If you want to use a custom domain name, you will need to subscribe to one of their professional offers.

And this is where pricing for Hushmail gets a bit tricky, due to the different options they offer.

Professional offers

The confusing part is that to determine how much it would cost you, you first need to select the professional category that you are looking for the prices for.

To do this, you will need to go to this page and select your category in the top navigation bar: small businesses, healthcare professions, law firms, nonprofits, or just businesses.

Is Hushmail the best secure email service for you?

As always, the answer to this question will be conditioned by your threat model and your specific needs. But here are a few factors to consider:

Jurisdiction: The company that manages Hushmail is based in Canada, but is a subsidiary of an American company. In at least one instance, Hushmail provided data to the United States, apparently by decrypting supposedly secure messages at the behest of the government.
PGP Support: Uses a verified version of OpenPGP.
Import functionality: can import contacts in CSV format.
Mail apps: a web client and the iOS app.
Encryption: Emails and attachments are encrypted in transit. Messages that do not have the optional OpenPGP encryption are stored unencrypted on Hushmail servers. As OpenPGP encryption is applied on the server, Hushmail can save your passphrase, giving them access to your supposedly secure messages.
Features: Offers some unique features for certain types of businesses.
Open Source Code: Hushmail is not Open Source.

Alternatives to Hushmail

If you don't need any of the special features of Hushmail including its secure forms, several secure email services are functionally richer, more secure, more anonymous, more private, and less expensive. Here are five other options:

ProtonMail
Tutanota
Mailfence
Posteo
Mailbox.org

And some of these email providers even offer free accounts up to a certain storage limit.

Our review of alternatives to Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, or Yahoo also discusses these options and more.

Conclusion

Overall, we found this email provider to be easy to use and easy to sync between devices. And, while it can be considered a good option for beginners, in terms of ease of use, it can be considered expensive compared to other more reputable email providers.

Its lack of features like a calendar and file storage, which are standard on most competitors, may also put off many consumers, given what is available with Mailfence, Posteo, and many other providers.

Hushmail, however, offers unique features for businesses as well as medical and law firms. And it appears to be secure against many types of attacks.

Unfortunately, due to the OpenPGP encryption that is done on their servers instead of the client, Hushmail can save your passphrase, giving them the ability to decrypt your messages. And, they have at least once decrypted users' messages and provided clear text copies of emails to authorities. Which is extremely worrying and makes your messages much less private than on other services that can't decrypt them for you. They may also be required by law not to disclose these privacy breaches to users.

In many ways, Hushmail is similar to Fastmail, an email service in Australia that is also not as private or secure as other options.

In other words, if you don't mind that Hushmail employees, as well as the governments of the United States and Canada, read your encrypted messages, and pay a high price for the features they offer, Hushmail could work for you.

More seriously, the fact that this email provider is based in Canada and that its parent company is American leaves too many question marks about the protection of your privacy and security. And, since it's possible to get a better anonymous email account for half that price, we recommend looking elsewhere for another service.

Hushmail won’t save you from unauthorized access to your account or legal warrants for your email. But it will save you from situations where the mail server is exploited, breached, or otherwise falls into the wrong hands.

Good security requires many layers. There isn’t one thing that will fully secure your email, but there are steps you can take to make it harder. Unless you’re being specifically targeted by someone, the tactic of making your email harder to get than the next guy can significantly add to your security.

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