Your inbox holds plenty of private information and in many cases secrets that when pieced together can build up a profile of your interests, movements and social connections.
While Gmail doesnt scan the content of your emails to collect information for its advertising machines, data from your Google account is used to serve ads in your Gmail inbox.
For instance, flight bookings can automatically be added to your calendar; local maps for areas youre travelling to, based on hotel bookings, can be downloaded to your phone. Theyre potentially timesaving and useful tools but some people may not be comfortable with how data from your email is used for other purposes.
For most people, security protections provided by the big emails providers Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail should protect emails more than sufficiently.
Alternatively, you might want to think about a totally different email account that puts privacy first and uses end-to-end encryption wherever possible.
For the online accounts that dont contain so much sensitive information, you may be able to set up forwarding from your old email to your new one.
If youre looking to pass on bigger files then a WeTransfer Pro account and SendAnywhere offer password-protected options for sharing files with your family, friends or colleagues.Original article