Not finding any discussion of startmail. claims that it uses PGP and is both secure and private. apparenlty run by the same folks who provide startpage.com startmail has a free 7 day account and then you can upgrade, ie, pay yearly fee, currently about $60. no 2fa, yet, and support says no immediate plans to add 2fa. I have a trial_account, and what I notice so far is occasional server timeouts 404... has anyone here used and "tested" it, ie, reviewed it, other than pcmag http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2476909,00.asp https://www.startmail.com/
I never used it but checked the web site. I like offshore server but no mention regarding zero knowledge, encrypted attachments/metadata or frontend/backend audit.
Emails are stored in a "User Vault", which is an encrypted LUKS-volume and they are using PGP/MIME, so attachments are encrypted too. But parts of Startmail's Source Code is Closed Source ("as a security measure"). More information can be found in the Technical whitepaper: https://www.startmail.com/documents/whitepaper/whitepaper.en_US.pdf
thank you mood & compleo. I'll read the whitepaper, but always good to hear from knowledgeable users... I'm still on the fence.
You might also want to look into mailbox.org. I've been using them for about 2 years or so and am happy with them. I don't use them with PGP, though. Here's their security/encryption concept.
thanks, I'll checkout mailbox.org. I've been ok with cotse.net, maybe I should simply start using my gpg on that server, I can now see that might be the way to go.
good to know. Thanks. I saw a couple of unhappy user comments earlier today, but I just stumbled across them, don't recall where. Can I ask, did you sign up anonymously, ie pay anonymously? I guess you can be anonymous if you, eg, pay with a pre-funded visa card. I've never used one, but might. Seems like a purpose of using private encrypted account is to keep it as private as possible...