Lavabit is a free e-mail

E-mail

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 service founded in June 2004 (originally as Nerdshack and Mailshack) intended to be a privacy-sensitive alternative to Gmail

Gmail

Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as secure webmail, as well via POP3 or IMAP protocols. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though...

. According to the Lavabit FAQ, "Lavabit was founded... in response to Gmail. At the time, Lavabit’s founders felt Gmail was a great service but that Google was actively violating the privacy of its users by displaying ads related to keywords in their e-mail. Lavabit’s founders also felt they could provide a higher level of service than the competition." For paid users Lavabit prevents even the company's ability to access users' email accounts by using asynchronous encryption. Lavabit offers free, ad-free accounts, non-targeted ad-supported accounts, and two levels of paid accounts. Lavabit currently serves over 210,000 customers.

History

Lavabit LLC was founded in June 2004 as Nerdshack LLC. It was created as a free email service to provide both large email quotas and high security. In February 2005, the company initiated a proprietary mail server for SMTP and POP3, and the company became Lavabit LLC one month later. IMAP has been supported since Nov 2007. In 2009, Lavabit added advertisements from advertising company Branchr to the bottom of incoming emails on the ad-supported class of accounts.