New safe email (http://www.countermail.com)

I'm not Steve either. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

 

I guess in the end, for me, I have the same problem with this services as HushMail, Mailvault, and many others... I would rather take the time to learn how to use S/MIME certificate encryption (really minimal effort) or learn OpenPGP and use the tools myself, rather than trust someone else to do it for me. Really, I do not have a need for encrypted email, but I do have personal S/MIME certificates set up and installed if I do need to transfer securely via email. With OpenSSH file transfer capability as well, I really do not need to email anything "that sensitive." If I am transferring money-related data or something else, I just transfer via OpenSSH.

It seems to me that if such special precautions are needed, people can just learn how to use S/MIME and/or OpenPGP and do it all themselves, taking their security into their own hands? Really all anyone needs is a very well designed, highly randomized password and 7zip and you can make a foolproof encryption transfer by calling the other party with the password by some other means than email.

 

But If you don't trust 3rd party tools, then you need to develop your own applications, and that takes time. One good thing with standards like OpenPGP is that it's possible to analyze every byte and verify it's content, by using tools like www.pgpdump.net.

Yes, you can achieve security in many ways, but lots of people appreciate when it's done as easy and transparently as possible.

 

Snowdrift,
I've been where you are right now, with the S/Mime-certificates.
But I stopped using it, because other people found them hard to use or confusing atleast when receiving mails from me.

Take note that not everybody is as tech-savy as I am, or as security-conscious as we are.
Not rarely I got phonecalls from people who use Outlook Express on Windows XP that got huge "warnings-messages" upon clicking one of mine S/Mime-signed e-mails.
I don't know if you know what I mean, but OE gives a statement regarding those kinds of emails, which is a serious threshold for your everyday user.
This is ofcourse not so much a problem regarding S/Mime as well how OE handles S/Mime- signed or encrypted e-mails.

I don't know about the other mailclients, but most people I know use OE or Windows Mail.
So here the added security turned into a hassle for others, which is never a good thing.

 

Now, there is an important feature I have not seen yet in any other privacy email service. Although TLA may not be able to read the encrypted messages, finding out who is emailing who is also important data that they would love to have, delayed sending of emails should be mandatory.