What Are Your Email Rights?

When it comes to email privacy issues, many email users often fail to recognize their ownership over their own messages. Whether we’re using it for personal or professional reasons, when we hit “send” and shoot an email message off to its recipient or sort a new message in our inbox into a folder, it becomes fleeting, and we may lose sight over the fact that these messages are tangible and real. The sheer volume of messages that pass through our email systems daily often keep us disconnected from the reality that such communications should be treated as our property.

Americans have a constitutional right to privacy, and that guarantee extends to email. Email privacy laws in the United States generally dictate that users essentially own the content of their inboxes, and neither government entities nor any member of the public can intrude upon that without significant cause. However, such laws aren’t universal. Employers often are given certain exemptions regarding email privacy issues, as do public email providers. Large, free services may sacrifice users’ email rights for the sake of the company’s profit, leading to significant email privacy issues and concerns.

The best email for privacy respects a user’s rights, treating digital communications with the respect any individual’s property would receive. Private email services embrace that idea, as they are founded on the notion that users deserve to have their rights protected. Such providers offer features like end-to-end encryption to ensure no one but the sender and receiver can access the message, and they also avoid the trend that so many public providers have adopted of storing mass amounts of email on external servers. A private email system safeguards users’ content because it is rooted in an understanding of email rights.

Email and privacy don’t always go hand in hand, but with private email, users can trust that their rights are at the forefront.