Lavabit alternative

In my opinion the best paid service, other than setting up your own mail server would be the Swedish based Countermail. I say that because from what I've seen from them over the past two years and tested myself, they do offer reasonable security for their pricing. Not to mention most claims on their site can be investigated by the client side user. Unless they've stopped this practice they also allow their user-base to furnish their own key pairs and it appears at least at the time of posting this response they are not dual encrypting the emails with their own key.

I will however post this remark as fuel for thought to the larger group here. In my opinion, if you are using another country's service provider to escape some of the legalities of your parent country, you open yourself up to the full extent and resources both countries have set aside for espionage monitoring. What do I mean by this? If both countries have a military, chances are they do SIGINT, if they do SIGINT chances are they try and consume/monitor as much electronic transmissions their budget allows. While these countries may provide some legal protections over their own citizens' communications, they more than likely log foreign metadata of traffic going in and out of their boarders. If you go that route, its paramount your service of choice takes encryption of your data in transit and at rest very seriously. You can probably double this risk factor if both countries are not on the best of terms with each other.

 

So Im pretty much between Riseup mail hosted in U.S. or Countermail hosted in Sweden.

 

Autistici/Inventati dont seem to be asking for new members anymore...

hushmail while good, have in past handed over logs to law...

riseup is us based so goodness knows

countermail will check them out, anything in europe sounds best and secure

Vmail is also in europe but very erradict performance its on and off half the time, but I like it because of this.... + they do not keep ip addresses of each email, no username also and I believe delete logs every 3 months.

 

They give up their users, and have done in the past. They also do not encrypt emails on their servers.

 

Yes Hushmail is total garbage.

 

Well I decided on riseup mail. Surprisingly I have been approved in less than 24 hours. Im very happy with my new email address and Im in the process of transferring all of my contacts and other information and completely ditching google. Couldn't have been happier.

 

Just remember to keep your email and contacts completely backed up. You never know if Riseup will have to disappear one day the same way Lavabit did.

 

i have the same concerns as you.

I am average user, definitely not getting myself involved in illegal activities, so i have no issue with authorities looking at my email.

However, i will be registering the email address for e.g. Paypal, banks accounts notifications, insurances, credit cards, Amazon , ebay and other online retailers etc

With the above usage and also sensitive information, I don't want the administrator / helpdesks looking at these information.

It should be reliable enough to stay in business. Imagine if one uses Lavabit for the above purposes.

thus i see Hushmail a good choice...considering them still in business though at the expense being cooperative with the authorities

However, their paid services are pretty expensive imo. $49 per year.

Considering the price...isn't countermail a better choice? But staying in business is a key factors for me considering what i am using the email for...

lastly..... still undecided....

 

Yeah I am downloading everything offline to my email client.

 

I would probably go with countermail over hushmail. The latter has been known to give away information to the authorities. Countermail is completely off shore.

 

cost to cost countermail is better.

But i considering long terms usage of the email... so staying in business is impt.

i registered Antivirus using lavabit email.... now i cant do much. Will let it expired.

 

Operamail.com/Fastmail.fm - servers are located in the USA.

What about https://secure-mail.biz
Servers are in Iceland
No logs and IPs are kept
Outgoing mails get a new IP

Any experience on that one?

 

I've been using Neomailbox for a little while. It works but I just don't trust them. They have a 30 day money back guarantee claim but it's a total lie and once you've paid up they will just ignore you completely.

I also have a Riseup account but I'm very nervous about using it as they're based in Seattle and I can see them being targeted next. I would consider Countermail next year but it seems like quite a lot of hard work to start off with and considering most of the people I know use Gmail, Yahoo etc I'm not sure what the point is.

 

Same here, had all my important eggs in one basket. I am very disappointed that no opportunity was given to retrieve my important registration emails for software etc. Its a real poor show that they just shut it with no notice, and leaves my unable to trust any of the so called more private and secure email services to not do the same again.

 

I've been using countermail for about 2 weeks now, and I like it. I rather pay for a service than go the google way again (already closed my other accounts at gmail).

 

or use vmail or riseup both are free and great privacy oriented email providers for no cost , thou if you like its service you may always donate to riseup not sure if vmail takes donations , heard theyre even working on a very secure email service implementation, or as mentioned Autistici/Inventati the italian alternative to riseup as far as ive seen, thou i do trust riseup more since its been through alot ever since its founding , but as with any online service that could potentially be attacked and taken offline, make sure to backup your important emails to your local storage, not even a pay service like countermail can guarantee not being attacked and theyre servers being taken offline , and gmail ...well its ok to use over an anonymous IP and userinfo but not for IRL stuff thats for sure , i use it for all my youtube contact needs thats about as far as gmail goes for me

 

I read somewhere that Lavabit mailboxes might go online at some point for message recovery. But I'm not sure how that would work, and what security they could provide. And maybe that's old news, given threats of prosecution.

As happyyarou666 and I have said, it's safest to use POP and keep all messages locally. That's less convenient, I admit, but it's necessary when using email providers that may be targeted.

 

Guys, for those of you who just want a private email for everyday use (financial sites, etc) just register your own domain name and then use that with Countermail. That way, if Countermail ever goes the same way as lavabit, you can just transfer your domain to another email host and you will still have access to your address.
Countermail supports this option: https://countermail.com/?p=support#48

The only downside is Countermail charges extra for each name. In fact, that's the problem I have with Countermail -- they are too expensive.

 

Is countermail any good?

Been considering them, but I guess using it as a normal daily email for lets say just about anything including your bank or form registrations to anything else, surely its just telling anyone hey am with Countermail ?

Also do they store logs/ips or ever handed any thing over to the law ?

 

Who cares what the banks have to say? If they don't like my email on the registration form then I will simply change my bank.

 

Well meant as in giving away an email address to someone like a bank could ID you, ie lets say the law or 3rd party checked for email xxx.cmail.com, they then find its registered to a bank in Sweden, they then query bank and get your name and address.

Just wondering is it best to use an different almost disposable email for other more normal websites?

Not sure if I am explaining it right....

 

Sounds about right. You can't have anonymous email address if you use it to register for anything that is non anonymous.

 

I'm pretty sure that most free email (or low cost) provider can't afford to go to court to protect their users. We have a lawyer and we have reserved some money for this, if it's needed in the future. We have registrated more than 50 domain names, which also can be used if something strange happens. Some of these domain names will also soon be available to register free aliases on. So, yes we are little expensive ($4.90/month) but I'm pretty sure you can't find any other provider which gives the same security.

 

Few questions:
1) Any chance that you guys are going to offer smaller storage for cheaper? The reason is that I dont use more than 20mb on my mailbox and there is no need for me to pay for something I dont use.
2) I noticed you have option to prepay for 2 years with a little discount. Any possibility of 3 or 4 years with greater discount?
3) You are based in Sweeden. Any contingency plans if you have to close your servers in that country? Id like to know that you guys have back ups spread out. So if you get raided and your servers get confiscated you still can recreate peoples emails from a back up.

 

1. That may be possible, but then we must also have some kind of throughput limit, because the bandwidth and the number of messages per day also affects the costs. When we find a good solution to this, we will add similar accounts.

2. No, 2 years is maximum length. Actually 1 year is the maximum length for pure VISA/Mastercard payments, they do not allow subscriptions above 12 months, because of some strange policy they have for subscriptions. So you have to use Bitcoin, Paypal or Wire transfers for 24 months payments.

3. Yes, we already have one backup outside Sweden. Next month we will add a serverpair in a third country. But as long as we follow the Swedish law nobody can "raid" us. However, we all know that we can't trust politicians, and we can't predict natural disasters, so we are improving our infrastructure.