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this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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Privacy
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Email is a very different thing.
You can't protect against emails being received in plain text.
Don't know the technicalities of the specific case you are referencing, but I know that if the government wants to they can middleman any received email before the provider can encrypt it for storage on their servers (by forcing the provider to let them).
On the other hand, if you use an end to end encrypted chat app, you can't middleman any messages from the providers side by force because the messages are always encrypted on the users device before being sent.
I don't know about lavabit specifically, but typically encrypted emails are encrypted on your client computer and decrypted on the recipient's computer. It is conceptually the same thing as an "end to end encrypted chat app".... just in email form.
Yes that works if both the sender and receiever encrypt the emails before sending them.
I specifically mentioned incoming plaintext (unencrypted) email.
Since mail is technically decentralised, not everyone is using protonmail for example, so protonmail can only perform e2e encryption on protonmail to protonmail email sending (they let you encrypt mail to people outside but it's not as seamless).
Nevertheless, I was mentioning incoming plaintext emails, which email providers have to encrypt before storing. The government can middleman that procedure and read the incoming mail before it's encrypted by your provider (protonmail, etc).
(This is one of the reasons why lavabit may habe shutdown, you can protect against incoming plaintext mail)
Ah.. I guess I didn't understand how services like encrypted webmail worked. I've only ever used local pgp with thunderbird or whatever. I was assuming (incorrectly) that those services operated in the same manner. Thanks for explaining it to me.
You are correct, encrypted mail providers should encrypt on-device, before sending the mail, but there isn't a solution to the unencrypted mail you could potentially recieve being intercepted.