Mrs. Dress Pockets and I have been working on a cyber cleanse project to pass the cold short days of winter. We have been moving at our own measured pace rather adhering to the strict 21-day regiment. It was her proposal to do the project and my obsessive tendency to race ahead with technology change needed to be checked several times. Acknowledged and I’m working on it 😉 Slow your roll.
One of the biggest wins has been taking back control of our email. Several years ago, a bicycle riding friend had mentioned email masks and Proton Mail, and I wasn’t ready to embrace them. Now I’m onboard 100%. Change usually requires the dual spark of the right voice and the right time (being unemployed helps here). Thanks Paul!
When I looked at the recommended email service options the two front runners for us were Proton Mail which has best in breed encryption and data privacy practices based in Switzerland. And Fastmail which makes the list and I am an existing customer through Pobox.com. Remember if the email service is free, you are likely the product and your content is mined to sell your eyeballs and possibly your data to advertisers.
Pobox dates back to my college years. My college email address wasn’t going to last forever and my Internet Service Provider was changing almost yearly. Having a more permanent email alias to forward to my ever rotating email inbox seemed wise. Pobox.com was purchased by Fastmail several years back and they finally integrated their websites and backend email systems. For a long time I forwarded my Pobox.com email to Gmail then iCloud.
For personal correspondence I decided to upgrade our Fastmail email alias and forwarding only plan to a family plan with 6 accounts: one for me, one for Mrs. Dress Pockets, two for teenage daughters, two for future use. Fastmail will be used for all contacts and calendars and 90+% of our email. All bills, school correspondence and online commerce will use email masks. At current count, I have 100+ Fastmail email masks. If any one entity has their computer systems compromised and my email mask address is leaked, I simply delete that mask and create a new one. Also it is much easier to track which entities sell your personal information to 3rd parties with unique email masks.
I created a free Proton Mail and Drive account that Mrs. Dress Pockets and I share. This houses all banking, credit cards, investments, taxes, government, and medical claim correspondence to start. This money line was somewhat arbitrary but a decent starting point. After setting up the shared Proton email address, I updated all the accounts a second time with email masks. These Proton email masks will not be used for any personal correspondence. Their existence will not be known far and wide. Therefore any phishing emails pretending to be our banks and brokerages to our personal Fastmail email addresses can be completely ignored. I will likely pay for additional Proton Mail and Drive storage in the future to support their mission.
While I’ve mostly trusted Apple with all my personal data in the past, their recent decision to force Apple Intelligence onto my Macbook without my consent has led me to move all my email, calendars, contacts out of iCloud. I have turned off iMessages and deleted FaceTime. I’ve moved to Signal for secure messages and voice/video calls. Remember that time Apple forced the new U2 album into everyone’s iTunes libraries? It’s a beautiful day (yes I know that was a different album) moving on from my iCloud dependency.
Two final plugs. We’ve used 1Password for Families for a number of years. We have shared and private vaults and have encouraged the teenagers to use 1Password as they create and maintain online accounts. 1Password has iOS and web browser plugins to autofill our authentication and credit card data. 1Password has an integration with Fastmail to create new email masks.
Lastly another hat tip to Paul, he pointed me at the Pi-hole project recently. After extensive research and tinkering, we now have home network-wide ad blocking. It’s running on an old Raspberry Pi 3B that I had sitting around. No Disney+ nor Paramount+ ads have been the biggest win for the kids. Our video streams may not be ad free forever, but we’ll take it to the bank for now.
