The Blue Checkmark Comes to Email – And Costs $1,500 a Year

blue - red padlock on black computer keyboard

Gmail displays verified checkmarks next to authenticated senders who obtain certificates costing up to $1,500 per year. The requirement structure reveals how email authentication is adopting the visual language of social platforms while preserving a fundamentally different economic model.

E-Evidence and the Limits of Jurisdiction: What Really Protects Your Email

E-Evidence and the Limits of Jurisdiction: What Really Protects Your Email

E-Evidence and the Limits of Jurisdiction: What Really Protects Your Email On 12 March 2026, Germany enacted the law implementing the EU “E-Evidence package” — a pair of European instruments (Regulation (EU) 2023/1543 and Directive (EU) 2023/1544) that quietly redraws the map of how law enforcement agencies across the European Union can obtain digital evidence … Read more

Emergency Data Requests and Law Enforcement Impersonation: Onion Mail’s Position

Emergency Data Requests and Law Enforcement Impersonation: Onion Mail's Position

In recent years, a new category of abuse has emerged in the cybersecurity landscape: the impersonation of law enforcement officers and government agencies by organized criminal groups, carried out through the use of compromised or look-alike government email domains. The objective of these attacks is to obtain user data from online service providers through what … Read more

Onion Mail in 2026: What Changed, What Hasn’t, and How to Verify

Onion Mail in 2026: What Changed, What Hasn't, and How to Verify

Onion Mail has been criticized publicly over the years for login failures, Tor connection issues, mobile app problems, and concerns about security architecture. Most of those criticisms were written between 2015 and 2023. This article documents what has changed since then, what has not, and how the service operates today — with verification paths for … Read more

Post-Quantum Cryptography: We’ve Already Put It in Your Hands

Post-Quantum Cryptography: We've Already Put It in Your Hands

Why we’re talking about ML-KEM and ML-DSA only now, when our PQCServer platform has been live and open source for two months. The context On May 5, 2026, Proton Mail announced support for post-quantum cryptography for emails between Proton users. It’s an important move and deserves recognition: the email industry needed to see a mainstream … Read more