This is why I contributed to Mailpile(http://www.mailpile.is/)'s fundraiser and hang out in their IRC channel. We need more, better, easy-to-use distributed, crypto-friendly mail software, and we need them yesterday. :/

bitmessage may be our only hope.

Bitmessage is fairly atrocious to use in practise. It's slow (by design) and extremely difficult to use properly. Moreover, I'd bet my hat that it's not secure.

I just lost access to my primary email account.

Me too. It took a long time to update all of my account information for every website and service I use. It took me a long time to get all of my friends, colleagues, etc. notified that I had switched.

I now have a trail of being under my Lavabit account. Commits, patches, websites, services, friends all thinking I'm still under that account. Now I've got to do it once again, only a few weeks later.

Sigh. I can't blame Lavabit really. Just a situation I'd hope to avoid.

That's a nightmare. However, I do feel strongly that lavabit made the only right choice. The US government is entirely to blame.

Actually, I don't think so, if he was a paying user. Everything on-disk was encrypted for paying users, and since lavabit had to shut down completely to not "be complicit in a crime against the American public", I assume that the NSL wanted them to make a change like Hushmail did in the past, to send the user's password to the server on the next login so that they can decrypt all emails.

I would assume that the NSA had already forcibly installed something that would compromise all further access to lavabit mail. Therefore the only option that doesn't reveal data is immediate shutdown.

That's not how Lavabit worked.

Do what I do!

I have my own domain name, currently hosting with Google Apps. If I get the motivation to move to another host like myself, I can do it without changing contact information.

Yeah, I thank my stars that I had the sense to do this almost 2 years ago. It really is much better. Another neat hack of using your custom domain is when people ask for your email address you can make one up without you appearing in their chat list. So for instance on Google Talk you're registered as [email protected], you could simply give them [email protected] so they can still converse with you (catch-alls ftw) yet they don't annoyingly appear on your Talk list.

And yeah, changing providers is just a matter of altering a field or two in the host records page.

Yes, absolutely. Everyone here should do this.

Never have your identity tied to a mere provider.

Oh good, because Google will never be subject to an NSL.

At the moment, I accept the danger and resent myself for it. Moving to a custom domain is one step in the process, though.

And really, since all your email hops through relays constantly, the only truly effective anti-spy technology is message encryption, which wouldn't depend on where the messages end up.

Everyone you converse with uses gmail.

At least they're transparent (as one can be) about it: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/transparency-report-s...

Did you get a refund?

I did pay in advance for few years but I wont ask for a refund, I will consider it as a donation for those legal battles.

Ok thats your choice however the company wasn't liquidated so they should refund their customers who are asking.

I'm in the exact same position. It's quite frustrating.

EDIT: I turned my frustration into a $100 donation to his legal defense. I hope that more people do the same.

Run your own server, on your own hardware?

Which will work fine until countermail gets an NSL too.

Hosting your own, in your physical posession, with mercury-switch or dead-man-switch triggered thermite self-destruct is really the only option left.

And, snail mail.

Funny how the Fourth amendment still applies to the primary form of communication we don't use.