Paul O'Brien (CBCI) works in Corporate Resilience and writes about email privacy, infrastructure, and software systems. He delivers independent technical teardowns and practical guides to owning your digital footprint.
Free email feels effortless, but the real cost often shows up later. This piece explores the hidden trade-offs between free and paid email — from incentives and lock-in to control, privacy, and long-term trust.
Email breaches are inevitable. What matters isn’t whether your provider gets hacked — it’s how much damage is done when it happens.
Why many marketing emails force a binary choice — and how unsubscribe-only design mismatches what subscribers actually want.
DuckDuckGo Email Protection forwards mail through free @duck.com addresses and strips the trackers it recognises. Here is what it does, what it cannot do and when to choose something else.
StartMail puts unlimited aliases, open IMAP/SMTP and IP header stripping at the heart of a paid-only, Dutch-based inbox. We look at pricing, PGP, the Business plan and where it falls short of Proton Mail and Tuta in 2026.
Yes, Proton Pass works with YubiKeys and other FIDO2 security keys. Here is how to add one, what Proton says about browsers and limits, and how to avoid locking yourself out.
Messaging apps didn’t replace email. Here’s why email still matters for identity, recovery, and trust online.
Email began as a quick hack between two computers in the same room, and it still runs on rules written in 1982. Here's how it grew from ARPANET into the backbone of online identity, and what that history means for choosing a provider today.
