Your email isn’t the website

5 minutes. Nothing to install. Nothing to click.

If you’ve only ever checked your email at gmail.com or in Outlook, it’s easy to think the website is your email. It isn’t. Once you see the difference, a lot of privacy advice suddenly makes sense.

Your mailbox lives somewhere else

Think of your email account as a post office box. Your mail is delivered there, and it stays there, whether you look at it or not.

Gmail.com is just one way to walk up to that box and look inside. The Gmail app on your phone is another. A program like Thunderbird is a third. They are all windows onto the same box.

That means:

• You can use more than one window at the same time. Read on your phone, reply on your laptop.
• Trying a new window doesn’t delete anything. Your mail stays in the box.
• If you stop using a window, nothing happens to your mail. Uninstalling Thunderbird doesn’t erase your Gmail.

So why use a different window?

The website window is built by the same company that runs the box. They decide what you see, which ads appear next to your mail, and what gets tracked while you read.

A separate program, like Thunderbird, is built by someone else. It just shows you your mail. And because it runs on your own computer, it can do things the website can’t, like lock your messages with encryption before they ever leave your desk.

How mail actually travels

When you hit Send, your message doesn’t fly straight to your friend. It goes from post office to post office:

You --> Your provider --> (servers in between) --> Their provider --> Them

Normal email is like a postcard on that trip. Every post office along the way can read it, and most keep a copy.

Encryption puts the postcard in a locked envelope that only your friend can open. The post offices still deliver it. They just can’t read it.

Two words you’ll see

You don’t need to understand these, but you’ll see them during setup, and now they won’t scare you:

• IMAP is the method your app uses to look into your mailbox. Everything stays in the box, so every window sees the same thing. This is what you want.
• POP is an older method that takes mail out of the box and puts it on one computer. Skip it.

Do you need a new app?

Honestly? Maybe not. If you use Proton Mail, its website and phone app already encrypt for you, and that’s enough for most people.

A program like Thunderbird is worth it if you want to:

• Check several email accounts in one place
• Use encryption with an account that doesn’t have it built in, like Gmail
• Keep a copy of your mail on your own computer

Ready to try one? Set up Thunderbird with your Gmail.