It is said Online that emails are being read not only by government secret service agencies but even by the service provider itself, or to put it in another way, the means & tools are available with a service provider wherein they can read your emails.
With the PRISM controversy breaking out, it has become all the more imperative to protect your emails, & hence, your privacy. There’s an email service called Lavabit with several security layers built in, & as it claims, even its own administrators cannot read your emails. But before we go ahead, it is said that Lavabit was one of the email accounts used by none other than the guy who exposed PRISM, Edward Snowden. So, well, now you, too, could use the email service he used!
Not many know about Lavabit because it is still a small provider wih a small subscriber base (at last count there were about 350,000 users). The focus clearly though is on preserving user privacy & security.
The service has paid & free accounts. There are in fact 2 free accounts – basic & personal. The difference is in storage & message size. The basic account provides users with 128 MegaByte of storage, & does not carry any advertisement, while the personal account offers 1 Gigabyte of storage and advertisement.
The paid account obviously boasts of more features such as increased storage & privacy/security features including fully encrypted email storage.
The security & privacy features include:
- Transport Layer Encryption via SSL
- Secure Mail Storage via asymmetric encryption so that emails, once on the server, can only be read with the user’s password. This means that no one can access them, and that they cannot be handed over either.
- ClamAV integration
- Domainkeys support to prevent domain impersonation.
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to verify that messages have been verified from a server that is authorized to relay messages for a domain.
- Greylisting and blacklisting support.
Image Credit: Lavabit
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