Anyone know of a reliable free/pay "privacy encrypted" web mail service other than Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail???

all I found was privacyharbor, lavabit, and some others, but some look "questionable."

The intelligence agencies have the keys to decrypt the ciphertext. Your emails would not really be private.

I use lavabit free for over ten years now. Back then it was called nerdshack. It's pretty reliable, with strong encryption. You can also use it with an email client.

[link to www.hushmail.com]

i would not trust Hushmail.

i'm not saying they are not to be trusted. but, some ten years ago i had a remarkable incident with their service, indicating that a whole lot of their technical setup is marketing tripe instead of solid engineering - or a honeypot by some intelligence community.

at that time i had a free account. i liked their service, although it was largely based on java. but they were active in the openpgp-community, so they had my trust.
my free account had a notifier setup, so when a mail arrived in my account, i got a notification on another account (stupid from a anonymous point of view, but i had my reasons).
their free accounts could be terminated at will by the enduser, with a guarantee that all data concerning that account would be deleted forever. i terminated my free account. i checked by trying to login again, and trying to send mail to it. both failed, so it looked good.
but after more than a year, i got a notification that a mail (some spam, oddly enough) had arrived in my (terminated) account. the notification mail had the details, so i could see that my terminated account actually had received that mail. i tried logging in with my old credentials, but the account was non-existant.

try and go figure why this could happen. i'll give you some hints: either huge technical fuckups and incompetence, or plain malicious intent. no other possibilities.

since Hushmail's platform is entirely online (webbased, even with the application you can run locally), there is effectively no way to check for malicious intent.

anyone trusting such a service, is a fool and a tool.

not the service i use ;)

hilarious.

on a so-called conspiracy forum, i give a real-life example of something that doesn't add up, and that should give plenty of reasons for paranoia with a solid ground... and nobody cares or comments.

good thing i gave up on the whole cypherpunk thing in the nineties. i'm fairly certain we already lost the battle in those days.

9y.com

Any hosted site would not be totally secure. Best chance would be to host your own, but even then if "someone" really wanted to get in, they would.

As an addition, there is a news story on the net about hush mail adding a keylogger to grab a persons password, then feeding that password to the feds.

[link to www.wilderssecurity.com]

There are tons of comments about this above..
I'm not saying steroids should be legal, but don't advertise "secure" if your going to hack your own system on a request....

give Countermail a try!!

"The most secure email service is Countermail. It covers some of the vulnerabilities and limitations that Hushmail has.

Some differences:
* CM does not log IPs. Whatsoever.
* CM has 100% MITM-protection.
* CM has the ability to use double authentication.
* CM stores all incoming and outgoing mail encrypted.

Your solution in the article above to use Enigmail and so on has some huge limitations. For instance, enigmail does not provide good protection if the attacker has physical access to the computer (ie search & seize order) and depending on mail provider used with Enigmail the ip-address is revealed to the recipient."
[link to www.makeuseof.com]