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Lavabit abruptly shuts down

lavabit.com

11–20 of 671 posts

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#11
post #3

Crap, I had just recently migrated all of my accounts to my new Lavabit address, paid for a year of service, etc. Although I've seen some mentioned, what recommendations does HN have for a new e-mail service? Preferably something stable and also respecting of a user's privacy. Or perhaps you can only have 1 of the aforementioned attributes.

I just lost access to my primary email account.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#12
From 2011:

> Lavabit processes 70 gigabytes of data per day, is made up of 26 servers, hosts 260,000 email addresses, and processes 600,000 emails a day. That’s a lot of email.

http://www.dbasoul.com/2011/1008.html

Update: According to their stats page, they had 410k email accounts hosted before shutdown https://twitter.com/georgemaschke/status/365553445538775040

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#13
post #4
post #3

Crap, I had just recently migrated all of my accounts to my new Lavabit address, paid for a year of service, etc. Although I've seen some mentioned, what recommendations does HN have for a new e-mail service? Preferably something stable and also respecting of a user's privacy. Or perhaps you can only have 1 of the aforementioned attributes.

[deleted]

Which will work fine until countermail gets an NSL too.

Hosting your own, in your physical posession, with mercury-switch or dead-man-switch triggered thermite self-destruct is really the only option left.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#14
post #3

Crap, I had just recently migrated all of my accounts to my new Lavabit address, paid for a year of service, etc. Although I've seen some mentioned, what recommendations does HN have for a new e-mail service? Preferably something stable and also respecting of a user's privacy. Or perhaps you can only have 1 of the aforementioned attributes.

I'm in the exact same position. It's quite frustrating.

EDIT: I turned my frustration into a $100 donation to his legal defense. I hope that more people do the same.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#15
For the unfamiliar: Lavabit was a webmail service, that (claimed to) encrypt emails in such a way that they literally did not have access to the content stored on their own servers. The linked email would lend some credence to those claims. It was originally designed in contrast to gmail scanning your email for targeted advertising, but my imperfect memory says that their system should also have been resilient to "we have a warrant, hand over the data."

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#17
post #11
post #3

Crap, I had just recently migrated all of my accounts to my new Lavabit address, paid for a year of service, etc. Although I've seen some mentioned, what recommendations does HN have for a new e-mail service? Preferably something stable and also respecting of a user's privacy. Or perhaps you can only have 1 of the aforementioned attributes.

I just lost access to my primary email account.

Me too. It took a long time to update all of my account information for every website and service I use. It took me a long time to get all of my friends, colleagues, etc. notified that I had switched.

I now have a trail of being under my Lavabit account. Commits, patches, websites, services, friends all thinking I'm still under that account. Now I've got to do it once again, only a few weeks later.

Sigh. I can't blame Lavabit really. Just a situation I'd hope to avoid.

Re: Lavabit abruptly shuts down

#18
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Which will work fine until countermail gets an NSL too. Hosting your own, in your physical posession, with mercury-switch or dead-man-switch triggered thermite self-destruct is really the only option left.

[deleted]
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