Last week, FBI raids on Freedom Hosting and child porn distributors took down Tor Mail, a secure email provider for users of the Tor network. A few days later, secure email provider Lavabit, which had previously provided whistleblower Edward Snowden with an email address, closed its doors. Its owner left a cryptic message stating he’d been forced to choose between betraying the American people and shutting down. It’s possible that Snowden wasn’t the target — a search warrant for child pornography was executed against Joey006@lavabit.com on June 10 — but it’s possible that the two cases together had an impact on the decision to shut down the service. The day after Lavabit closed, Silent Circle announced it would also discontinue its own secure email client. With multiple vendors dropping out of the race at the same time that consumer interest in secure email services is heating up, what are your options?

We’re going to discuss them, but before we do, there’s a larger point that needs to be made. If you need secure end-to-end communication, email is probably the wrong way to do it. This has been driven home with the most recent leaks from Snowden and the Guardian, which reveal that the NSA has loopholes (under Section 702) that allow it to retain data gathered on US citizens and possibly search that data without a warrant. The documents that have leaked specify that agents are not to do this until appropriate oversight is in place, but there’s no information on whether the data was used in this fashion previously or what the current status is.

Intrinsic insecurity

The problem with email security is that the email system is designed on to facilitate the communication of any two people with an email address, even when those two addresses are on entirely different networks separated by thousands of miles. Emails themselves must be stored on a server somewhere until retrieved and read. The requirements of this asynchronous communication are part of what make email extremely useful, but they make it more difficult to secure. Therein lies the problem — most of the methods used to make email more secure make it less useful.

Users can install their own encryption software and encrypt email sent through services like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo, but such methods are only useful if you’ve exchanged encryption keys with the recipient. These methods aren’t particularly easy to configure and using them necessitates convincing each and every recipient of the need for such encryption. These problems are part of why more people are interested in secure email in the first place. The NSA’s scope and the secretive nature of data sharing agreements with other foreign organizations makes it extremely difficult to estimate the degree of protection offered by using a foreign service.

The bottom line is this: If you’re going to communicate with someone, and you need it to be really, really secure, email is probably the wrong way to go. But given that, what are the options? We went looking for services that weren’t based in the US, offer end-to-end encryption, and that offer the option to use your own keys, stored offsite. This last helps ensure that the email service provider is unable to provide information, even under pressure. US and Canadian services, like Hushmail, were not considered. Keep in mind that foreign countries are not guaranteed to protect your security. Germany has some of the strongest privacy laws and protection methods in the EU, but the German BND and BfV (foreign and domestic intelligence agencies) both partnered with the NSA and used resources like XKeyscore.

It’s imperfect, but such criteria are the best we have. After searching through online documentation, reviews, technical documents, and security forum conversations, there are two services that seem to top everyone’s lists: Countermail and Neomailbox.

Next page: Countermail