This article is more than 4 years old

GhostMail, a site that offered “military encrypted and self-destructing email accounts”, has announced that it is closing down:

GhostMail in its current form will be closed down as per 1. of September 2016. Since we started our project, the world has changed for the worse and we do not want to take the risk of supplying our extremely secure service to the wrong people – it’s simply not worth the risk. In general, we believe strongly in the right to privacy, but we have taken a strategic decision to only supply our platform and services to the enterprise segment. Sign up to our newsletter

Security news, advice, and tips. We hope you understand this decision and we refer to other free services available, as an alternative to our platform i.e. Protonmail. PRO users will be refunded and contacted directly.

If we take GhostMail’s statement at face value, one assumes that GhostMail is concerned that criminals and terrorists might abuse its services to hide their communications. As GhostMail has no way of perusing its customers’ encrypted conversations it wouldn’t know who would be up to no good, and who wouldn’t.

So, bad news for regular folks who were using GhostMail for their secure, private webmail (switching to alternatives like Switzerland-based ProtonMail sounds like a natural next step) but potentially the company might be able to offer a more focused offering for enterprise customers.

If you are a GhostMail user make sure to download any messages from its servers that you wish to keep before 1st September.

Found this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter to read more of the exclusive content we post.