Sad News: Lavaboom Will Shut Down

2015-08-21
We were rather shocked when we heard about the upcoming Lavaboom shut-down next week. The Lavaboom team was building an encrypted webmail service similar to Tutanota, which seemed very promising. We express our sympathy for Lavaboom and wish their team all the best for the future.

Lavaboom was doing a great job in bringing privacy to the world and in raising awareness for its importance. It is a shame to see the privacy-focused start-up Lavaboom stop its service. We don't understand why they could not find investors while so many projects for tracking and marketing tools around the world are being lavished with money.

We thank Felix and Andrei for fighting for our privacy, and also for recommending Tutanota to their users. We need more privacy-oriented services, not less. We need to make the world wake up and everybody to realize that they do have something to hide, and that the internet should not be a place where whispering is prevented by default.

For this, we would have very much liked to build interoperability with Lavaboom. If we want everybody to encrypt their emails, we have to let the encryption happen automatically. Not just within one service, but across all services available. And we have to achieve this in the easiest way possible. Because - as much as we like pgp - the history of pgp has shown that it is not feasible for the general public and that it will never lead to a massive use of encryption.

We hope that many share our passion for privacy, and that we can achieve that Tutanota and all other email services will one day share an API that allows automatic encryption with anybody.

For now, you are very welcome to join our fight for privacy: Sign up for Tutanota and use a fully encrypted mailbox right away.

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