The Cyber Cleanse Continues – Email: Oof!

In January, I started Janet Vertesi’s Opt Out Project Cyber Cleanse. (Refer to my blog post for links to the Cyber Cleanse.)

The Cyber Cleanse is meant to help you reclaim some of your online privacy. If you’re active at all online, you give up your privacy, simply by being there. Even if you attempt to do everything anonymously with tools to hide your location, computer forensics specialists can track you down eventually.

The only way to truly remain private online is to not be online at all, but that’s no guarantee, either. Not with Elon Musk and his DOGE team digging around in the U.S. government’s computer systems, accessing our private information for their personal gain. (When is this billionaire and his team of hoodlums going to be kicked out of our computer systems?)

So, then, the Cyber Cleanse is about being online but reducing the sensitive information available to tech corporations for their profit. It’s about reducing which corporations have access to what information and finding services that aren’t vacuuming up your information to sell to third parties.

In January, I adopted Signal for encrypted texting with my family. Since that time, we’ve had SignalGate, with the highest level Trump regime officials, including National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and others, using Signal to plan a bombing attack in Yemen.

Signal is not approved by the Department of Defense for this use because, while the messages are encrypted en route, they are not encrypted on the devices they are sent from or to, which makes using Signal a high national security risk. Signal allows users to delete messages at intervals (a week, a month, etc.), but this feature is also not appropriate for federal government activities due to laws requiring these communications to be archived for the American people.

While Signal is not sanctioned for use by government officials, it’s still a better, more secure messaging app for average users than SMS texting apps. Just remember from the appalling SignalGate fiasco that messages sent on Signal are readable on sending and receiving devices, so if you want to communicate something really private, find another way to do it. BTW, Signal allows you to make encrypted phone calls through the app, so that may be more private that texting. Just beware of who may be hanging around eavesdropping during your call.

Continuing on with the Cyber Cleanse, at the end of January, I finally deleted my Facebook account. This was after years of wanting to leave but staying due to administering a work account. If you’re ready to stop giving Mark Zuckerberg your data, I have a guide to leaving Facebook here.

Prior to starting the Cyber Cleanse, I was already using several online services that prioritize user privacy. I adopted the Vivaldi web browser and the DuckDuckGo search engine. Vivaldi allows you to choose the search engine you want to use through a dropdown menu, so it’s easy to switch if you need to use a different one.

The default on Vivaldi is to keep your data private, so they don’t collect your data, which is great. Just what we’re looking for in the Cyber Cleanse. However, it has so many features that it can be overwhelming to use. Be forewarned that you’ll need to set aside some time to customize it and learn where to find all the settings.

That brings me to email. I have been using Google’s Gmail and Yahoo Mail for decades. Both are free to use, which is an attractive price. But, as has been said many times, free isn’t really free when it comes to tech. If you aren’t paying for a service, your data is the price you pay. Google and Yahoo comb through the contents of your email, learning all about you so they can serve you targeted ads.

For the Cyber Cleanse, you analyze how you use each email account, so you can adopt a more secure email service for things you’d like to keep private from Big Tech. Then, you sign up for a secure email service that doesn’t sell or use your data for its purposes. Several options are provided on the Day Four: Secure Your Email post for the Cyber Cleanse. Some of these have free, minimal plans to let you try things out, but if you need an email account that is more robust, you will need to pay for it.

I’m giving Tuta Mail a try. Having just signed up, I don’t yet have a good grasp of the service yet. If I like it, I’ll sign up for a paid account.

What took me so long to sign up for a secure email account when I started this Cyber Cleanse in January?

I wanted to clean out and archive my email accounts. This was no small feat and I’m not done yet. Over the past couple of months, when I’ve had spare time, I’ve sifted through two accounts, deleting anything I didn’t want to archive. One Gmail account had over 7,000 emails and went back 20 years. Oof. I whittled it down to less than 3,000 emails and made a backup that I saved to the external hard drive I purchased for the cleanse.

Reviewing over 7,000 emails is a daunting, tedious task, but I did find ways to make it more manageable.

If you make use of categories or labels for sorting email, you can review those folders to delete anything you don’t need prior to concentrating on the main inbox. If you are a zero-inbox person, yay! Delete what you don’t need from your folders, then do a backup to archive your emails.

If you’ve got an inbox packed with emails, as I do, it’s time to turn your attention to this Herculean task. I’m using Gmail as my example. If you have a different email provider, you may have to play around to figure out a similar process.

In Gmail, you have to find the All Mail tab in the left menu in order to see the total number of emails you have tucked into folders. The All Mail tab may be hidden from view. Click the More arrow to reveal it.

Once you are in the All Mail view, use the Any Time dropdown menu at the top and select Custom Range. In the boxes that appear, type in the date range you want to review. I went year-by-year, first trying to find how far back the emails went. Type the date range by starting with the year, then the month, then day, like this: 2005/1/1 – 2005/12/31.

After the emails for the date range appear, navigate to the last page of them. These will be the earliest emails for the year. By starting from the beginning of the year and deleting emails from there, you will avoid the annoying tendency for there to be just one or two more emails to delete at the end of a page if you were to work through them from the more current date backwards.

While I may not be doing the best job of describing this here, if you want to experience what I’m talking about, try deleting emails from the first page of results and you’ll see what happens as you come to the bottom of the page. You’ll find that past emails advance to the bottom as you go, and it seems to take forever to get to the next page. Working from the last page to the first avoids this.

Tackling the clean out one year at a time made it easier to track where I left off. It also allowed me to revisit interesting events in my life. It was like going through an old photo album. A real nostalgia trip.

Once you’ve deleted a bunch of emails, do a quick review of your trash to make sure you didn’t accidentally delete something you wanted to keep. Recover what you need, then empty the trash.

I kept track of the number of emails I started and ended with for each clean-out session, so I could watch my progress.

I knew dealing with my email accounts was going to be the most difficult part of the Cyber Cleanse from a time standpoint. Now that I’ve got two accounts cleaned and archived and signed up for a new, more secure email account, I can transition personal contacts, account contacts, and newsletters to different email accounts as needed.

Just one more email account to sort out and archive.

We’ll see how long this takes. Oof.