Email Clients
Our recommendation list contains email clients that support both OpenPGP and strong authentication such as Open Authorization (OAuth). OAuth allows you to use Multi-Factor Authentication and prevent account theft.
Email does not provide forward secrecy
When using end-to-end encryption (E2EE) technology like OpenPGP, email will still have some metadata that is not encrypted in the header of the email.
OpenPGP also does not support forward secrecy, which means if either your or the recipient's private key is ever stolen, all previous messages encrypted with it will be exposed: How do I protect my private keys? Consider using a medium that provides forward secrecy:
Cross-Platform¶
Thunderbird¶
Recommendation
Thunderbird is a free, open-source, cross-platform email, newsgroup, news feed, and chat (XMPP, IRC, Twitter) client developed by the Thunderbird community, and previously by the Mozilla Foundation.
Platform Specific¶
Apple Mail (macOS)¶
Recommendation
Apple Mail is included in macOS and can be extended to have OpenPGP support with GPG Suite, which adds the ability to send encrypted email.
Canary Mail (iOS)¶
Recommendation
Canary Mail is a paid email client designed to make end-to-end encryption seamless with security features such as a biometric app lock.
Downloads
Attention
Canary Mail only recently released a Windows and Android client, though we don't believe they are as stable as their iOS and Mac counterparts.
Canary Mail is closed-source. We recommend it due to the few choices there are for email clients on iOS that support PGP E2EE.
FairEmail (Android)¶
Recommendation
FairEmail is a minimal, open-source email app, using open standards (IMAP, SMTP, OpenPGP) with a low data and battery usage.
Downloads
GNOME Evolution (GNOME)¶
Recommendation
Evolution is a personal information management application that provides integrated mail, calendaring and address book functionality. Evolution has extensive documentation to help you get started.
Downloads
K-9 Mail (Android)¶
Recommendation
K-9 Mail is an independent mail application that supports both POP3 and IMAP mailboxes, but only supports push mail for IMAP.
In the future, K-9 Mail will be the officially branded Thunderbird client for Android.
Downloads
Kontact (KDE)¶
Recommendation
Kontact is a personal information manager (PIM) application from the KDE project. It provides a mail client, address book, organizer and RSS client.
Mailvelope (Browser)¶
Recommendation
Mailvelope is a browser extension that enables the exchange of encrypted emails following the OpenPGP encryption standard.
