Email without a phone number

June 25, 2019 8:01 AM

Does anyone have suggestions for a secure email provider that does NOT require a phone number to create an account—and is extremely user-friendly to set up and use? No complicated work-arounds—just a straight-forward signup and begin using process for people who are not tech savvy and who don’t have a phone. Thanks!
posted by bookmammal to Computers & Internet (17 answers total)

Protonmail.
posted by Too-Ticky at 8:05 AM on June 25, 2019 [9 favorites]

I help people get set up with email. Protonmail is the right answer here. But! If you have someone who will need help with their email, it's often simpler to get them an email account with the same provider someone else they know has (if a possibility) so that they can ask questions and get help. I've signed people up with gmail accounts and just used my phone number to receive the initial text. The downside is if that person loses their password, they'd need to find me to restore it. In a small town this is a possibility. This twitter thread has a lot of people talking about options in the comments.
posted by jessamyn at 8:09 AM on June 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

outlook.com. 2FA is opt-in and not part of the sign-up.
posted by sageleaf at 9:00 AM on June 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

I don't remember Fastmail asking me for a phone number when I set up my account, there still isn't one recorded in my profile, and I have been using a strong random password generated and remembered by KeePass and no 2FA for several years now.

Fastmail's webmail client is the best I've ever used, and has remained stable for years; this is important for the non-tech-savvy. They also allow full access to mails, contacts and calendars using standard protocols that make Fastmail accounts trouble-free for hooking up to other things, and they have an excellent IMAP-based importer and de-duplicator for existing mails kept with other providers.
posted by flabdablet at 9:09 AM on June 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

By the way, Fastmail's web client doesn't offer end-to-end encryption (I gather ProtonMail's does). Here's their explainer on why not (tl;dr: actual security vs. security theatre), and here's how to do end-to-end encryption over Fastmail (or pretty much any other service, come to that) if you want to.
posted by flabdablet at 9:21 AM on June 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Yeah, Protonmail.
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:51 AM on June 25, 2019

If ease of use is more important to you than security, something like Outlook (this is kind of a moving target--for years, I recommended Yahoo for novice computer users, but then Yahoo stepped up their security game and started changing the default interface every other week) might be a better way to go. If, on the other hand, security is more important than ease of use, Protonmail and Fastmail are both good candidates.

To put it another way, what kind of security threats are you most concerned about? If it's someone else gaining access to the email account (phone left unlocked, keep-me-logged-in-used-as-default, etc.), or someone linking it to other online or real-life identities, Protonmail and Fastmail (or even Hushmail) are good options. If you're more concerned about the user losing access to it (lost or forgotten passwords or security-question answers, new phones and new phone numbers, etc.), it might be preferable to go with Outlook or similar.
posted by box at 1:12 PM on June 25, 2019

I wouldn't count on Outlook.com not requiring a phone number, though it looks like you can use an alternate email address with a different provider to use for account verification instead (which leads to a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem for you). Unfortunately, since one of the best vehicles for spammers is to piggy-back off of established email providers' reputations to send outbound spam, many providers are using things like phone verification to attempt to stem the tide of spammer sign-ups.
posted by Aleyn at 2:24 PM on June 25, 2019

I once opened an email account using the phone number 123-456-7890. It went through just fine; nobody is confirming phone numbers
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:21 PM on June 25, 2019

FYI --I signed up for an outlook.com email address (without putting in my phone number) about a week ago and this morning got an alert that I need to provide a phone number, and that it is required that I both provide and verify the number.
posted by sm1tten at 8:18 AM on June 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

Confirming that a Microsoft account, which is what you need in order to use an outlook.com email service, will indeed enforce provision of a valid phone number.

If you manage to find a way to sign up for a Microsoft account that doesn't immediately require a phone number, then the first time you change your Microsoft account password, they lock you out of your account for an unspecified "policy violation" and give you no option but to provide them with a mobile phone number to which they then SMS an unlock code and presumably retain for future 2FA.

At least I hope they retain it; if they're going to ask for one every time, the whole process is utterly pointless security theatre and I would expect MS to be a tad better at their job than that.

I ran into this two days ago while doing a Windows 10 installation for a customer who had just created a Microsoft account for the purpose of buying a Windows 10 licence key.
posted by flabdablet at 1:18 AM on June 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

I tried to create an account with Protonmail, but it insisted on a phone number, existing email address or donation.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 3:19 AM on July 1, 2019

I was a bit surprised that you said that, so I just created a protonmail account without an existing email address, or a phone number or a donation. There is an option for a recovery email. I skipped that. There was an option to choose captcha, SMS, email, or donation to confirm when signing up. I just chose captcha, and voila, a new email account with no pre-existing email or phone number or donation.
posted by fimbulvetr at 11:15 AM on July 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

Interesting, thanks for checking. So it seems that Protonmail sometimes requires a pre-existing email / phone number / payment (as per my screenshot) and sometimes doesn't (as per your experience). It would be nice if there was a mail service which never required these things to signup, but so far I haven't seen one.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 1:46 AM on July 3, 2019

Fastmail doesn't. Free trial for first 30 days needs only a username and password.
posted by flabdablet at 5:19 AM on July 3, 2019

It looks like somethimes protonmail will not give you the option of a reCaptcha if its algorithm thinks you are a spammer or an attacker.
posted by fimbulvetr at 6:28 AM on July 3, 2019

It looks like somethimes protonmail will not give you the option of a reCaptcha if its algorithm thinks you are a spammer or an attacker.

FWIW, I was trying to sign up from a non-incognito Chrome tab with very vanilla extensions on a corporate network which pops out to an IP address that (unlike my home ISP) has never led to me being blocked or treated like a spammer before.

Fastmail doesn't. Free trial for first 30 days needs only a username and password.

So my sentence should have read 'It would be nice if there was a mail service which never required these things to signup and keep a mail account for more than 30 days, but so far I haven't seen one.'
posted by Busy Old Fool at 4:51 AM on July 9, 2019