Part of the issue is that the bar for subversive activities in the eyes of western law enforcement seems to be getting lower and lower. I don't know the specifics of this case, but it seems many authorities are also not shy about using these methods to identify and track peaceful protesters as well.

It's impossible to choose a "secure" email provider, unfortunately.

Email can't guarantee E2EE without a block cipher tool like GPG. Even if your provider stores and transmits only encrypted email data, once sent it does not maintain that guarantee while being passed by another entity's MTA.

If you email google, google gets to do whatever googly stuff it would like to do with its algorithm. If you email exchange, roundcube, ISP, hotmail, it could wind up being archived to tape, or simply be sitting for a long time in some unencrypted mail spool, maybe in a public cloud. If you selfhost, you would be forgiven if you find you have made a mistake or simply got pwned.

I've never selfhosted email, but I understand it is a lot of work to set up if you aren't familiar, and while maintenance is okay once you get rolling, there are occasional emergencies or hiccups that require intervention.

Aside from being much slower, regular mail is quite better since you can easily inspect the envelope for evidence of tampering, while email will be imperceptibly copied.

> I basically decided to just give up. Email is an insecure protocol and there's not much that can be done about it. Choosing a "secure" email provider feels like choosing a "secure" VPN provider: it's impossible to verify the provider's claims so it's a kind of security theatre.

Notionally, I would imagine something that looks like "email" and acts like "e-mail" (to the end user) could eventually exist that provides the same (conceptual) security that the Signal protocol provides (and perhaps a hosting provider option that's the same level of user confidentiality that we get the Signal foundation), although you're correct that foundationally it would be a different protocol. Backwards-compatibility would be required, at least for seamless transition (perhaps represented as "secure" and "plaintext")

Wasn't Ladar Levison (the individual behind Lavabit) working on something like this? https://darkmail.info/

I agree that one should not use it for private comms. But many people have to use it, and they would rather not use a provider like MS or Google. For those people, mailbox.org is a good offering (IMO).

It’s certainly possible that they store IP addresses.

Even if they don’t, as long as they have the email address then they can probably find the mail server even if the payment is anonymous.

You can't be compelled to incriminate yourself, but your server provider can very much be compelled to give access to the server. And once the server is physically compromised the battle is lost, anyway, but in that case probably with a larger papertrail leading to you.

One expensive but possible option would be to build a server yourself with sufficient traps to shut off when it's tapered with. Then set it up with full disk encryption and put it in a shared rack.

In most jurisdictions you can refuse to testify against yourself but you are still required to give up all physical evidence against yourself if an appropriate warrant requests them, the immunity only applies to things in your mind.

Things like hiding or destroying evidence of a crime generally are separate crimes of which you can be convicted even if you're acquitted of the original crime (e.g. burying a corpse in the woods or throwing a gun in the river).

Destruction of evidence with the intent to hide it from prosecution also may enable so called 'adverse inference' where essentially the jury/judge can assume that the destroyed evidence actually showed what the prosecution intended to find there. For example, if you're being prosecuted for possession of child sexual abuse material, there's a warrant for your hard drive, but it gets fully destroyed because you have rigged some device to destroy it (and the prosecution proves that you did that with the intent to destroy evidence) then the court may take it as a fact that the hard drive did indeed contain CSAM and treat it as sufficient evidence to convict you.

In short, self-hosted service on a rented service does not provide much protection.

From tutanota:

> Storage only takes place for IP addresses made anonymous which are therefore not personal data any more.

What the heck does "IP addresses made anonymous" mean?

I don't know what came of it, but they've been told by the German constitutional court that their approach ("we're using NAT, we don't know the IP on the actual server") doesn't fly and does not protect them from complying with a court order.