DALLAS, Texas (PNN) - January 1, 2023 - If you are using one of the Big Tech’s free email programs, such as Google’s Gmail, or Microsoft’s Yahoo or Hotmail, you are exposing your private communication to prying eyes, including the Fascist Police States of Amerika government.

Hosting your own domain name and having your own private email is a much better option.

There are also companies that advertise private, secure email services.

PC Magazine has an article that evaluates many of these third-party email services:

One option that PC Magazine does not mention, however, is Lavabit, which is the secure email service that Edward Snowden was using when he left the NSA.

Ladar Levison, the owner of Lavabit, received an order from the FBI to turn over its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) private keys, which would have allowed the FBI to not only access Snowden’s emails, but also all the other emails of Lavabit’s clients, about 400,000 at the time.

Not only would the FBI have been able to retrieve Lavabit’s customers’ emails, but it could also have intercepted their emails retrieving things like passwords, credit card information, and pretty much anything it wanted.

Ladar decided to protect his clients by shutting down his business and removing all his clients’ accounts, effectively putting himself out of business after building one of the most successful private email services for over 10 years.

Then he “turned over the keys” to the FBI.

In 2017 Lavabit started operating again, using the new Dark Internet Mail Environment (DIME), which is an end-to-end email encryption platform.

Lavabit is not a free email service. It costs $30 a year for their Standard account, or $60 a year for their Premium account. They are still developing other products using the DIME protocol, such as web email, but for now you can use the service with your own email client.

I have signed up for an account to test it out, and it worked seamlessly and was easy to set up.

At this point, I would have to say this may be the best option for secure email from a third party provider, because of its encryption, which allegedly does not even allow anybody working at Lavabit to access clients’ emails, and hence they would have nothing to turn over to the government authorities who may try to access any of their clients’ emails.

Note: This is a totally unbiased evaluation of Lavabit, and I do not earn any income from them if you decide to use them.