Anyone have any experience using this service? Can it be used to send mail to those who use unencrypted services like gmail,yahoo,etc. How exactly do these encrypted mail services work? What about mail coming in from unencrypted sources? I assume those will still be open to prying eyes? Is there some way that these services automatically encrypt mail coming to you?
MailVault has an internal PGP system. That means if you send an email from one @mailvault address to another, it is automatically encrypted. It also has PGP built into it if you feel like uploading keys. It is a webmail based custom-built platform. It has been around for years and years, and has some stability issues from what I've seen, otherwise it is great. Free accounts are limited to 4mb, and I am unsure if there are limitations beyond that. Paid accounts you can naturally send emails to anyone.
Thanks for the response Steve. Ive never used encrypted e-mail before, so if this is a stupid question Im sorry, but even if i have a paid account, if someone sends me unencrypted mail, like my bank, etc. The mail will still arrive unencrypted right. So I will have to instruct them to send me my mail in encrypted format right? And I assume I will have to set aside one set of keys for each institution I do business with, giving those institutions the necessary key, so that we can encode/decode messages. Have I got this right?
If they send it to you in plaintext from an external site, it is unencrypted. If they sent it to you from another mailvault address/account, it will have been automatically encrypted. if you send from mailvault to an external address, it should grab the recipient's key and encrypt it for you automatically.
You don't need a different set of keys for each institution. All you need is a key pair (public+private), and give the public key to anybody who needs to send you encrypted email. Google gpg and enigmail for more info.
So how does one "pay" for a larger account, and does it have POP3/IMAP/SMTP? Details are scant on that page.