Securely encrypt email traffic
Bank statements by postcard!
We receive thousands of emails every year, hardly any of which are encrypted. Clients send contracts, patent and trademark descriptions, bank statements, and many other confidential documents unencrypted via email. This is exactly the same as sending these confidential documents as postcards through the mail.
Emails are sent via countless intermediaries across the internet. At each of these points, the email and its attachments can be read in plain text – just as the sender and recipient can.
Install email encryption – secure your electronic mail!
Instructions:
- Windows: How to properly encrypt your emails (PC World)
- Apple macOS / iPhone / iPad: How to sign and encrypt emails (Macworld)
Update 2026: Today it's much easier.
When this article was written in 2020, encryption usually meant manually setting up S/MIME or PGP certificates – too cumbersome for many. That has changed. Now there are ways to do almost all the work for you:
End-to-end encrypted email providers. For services like Tuta (Server in Germany) or Proton Mail (In Switzerland), encryption between users of the same service runs fully automatically in the background – you don't need to worry about keys. To send messages to recipients outside the service, you send a password-protected message: The recipient opens it via a link with a password that you provide to them by other means (e.g., by phone). This is the simplest way to securely transmit a confidential document to any recipient.
German data protection providers with integrated encryption. Posteo and mailbox.org (Both with servers in Germany, GDPR-compliant) have OpenPGP built in. Posteo additionally simplifies automatic key exchange (Autocrypt) and provides S/MIME certificates with just a few clicks.
S/MIME remains useful – just simpler. For communication with law firms, authorities, and companies, S/MIME remains the widely used standard. Setup is now significantly more convenient (see the linked instructions above), and providers like Posteo offer certificates almost instantly.
Our tip: Choose a provider hosted in the EU or in Germany – this is also the cleanest solution from a data protection perspective (GDPR).
Email encryption is complicated? Not with us. We'll show you how to perfectly encrypt your emails for secure communication – and we're happy to advise you on which option best suits your daily work.