Email is an annoying necessity of life for pretty much anyone who does
much of anything online. Unfortunately, it is also extremely insecure. My
first advice is just to avoid using email as much as possible, especially
for personal communications, but since this is unrealistic for a lot of
people, there are a couple of things you can do to make email a little
more private and secure:
The first thing is to look for email service providers and clients that
support end-to-end-encryption. This is important for keeping the body of
your emails private. Keep in mind, though, that because of how email is
designed, important metadata about your emails can’t be encrypted, so an
instant messaging service built with encryption in mind from the start is
always going to be safer for sensitive or personal communication.
We constantly have to give out our emails for things like making online
accounts, and using the same email address for everything can make you
vulnerable to being tracked between these accounts, especially if an
address gets leaked. This can be dangerous for vulnerable individuals, and
the inevitable spam emails are annoying for everyone. Email aliasing
services allow you to easily create a bunch of email addresses (with silly
names, if you like) that will forward to your real mailbox. This makes you
harder to track, and by deactivating forwarding for particular aliases,
you can limit marketing emails from random accounts you made years ago.