In a statement on their homepage August 1, Ghostmail has announced they will be terminating their service and closing their servers to the public – effective September 1, 2016. The company says they will only be offering service to businesses and corporations in the future, all customers have been assured they will be receiving a full refund.
Ghostmail’s official press release reads:
As of August 1st, within the last 24 hours, Ghostmail has deleted their social media pages and does not appear to be accepting requests for information. As someone who has promoted their services for months, AnonHQ News reached out to Ghostmail for a comment asking if they were closing due to data requests/pressure from foreign governments, or if it was discovered a large number of their customers were using their accounts to engage in illegal actions. At the time of this article, Ghostmail has yet to respond.
About the decision to close their servers, one Anonymous member stated “thats the price of doing business in anonymity.” Ghostmail has become a particularly popular email service of choice for the Anonymous community/AnonOps in recent times and needless to say, it disappointing to see them go. However, one can not help but wonder if these Anonymous operations in any way contributed to their decision to close?
According to noted cyber-security expert Graham Cluley, “if we take GhostMail’s statement at face value, one assumes that GhostMail is concerned that criminals and terrorists might abuse its services to hide their communications.” Ghostmail’s security features make it “impossible” for the company to read its users emails and the system is intentionally set up to make them (Ghostmail) unable to store records or activity logs.
This is why, according to The International Business Times, Ghostmail’s service may actually be in violation of the law – giving insight into the claim the company may be closing due to intense pressure from law enforcement authorities. The IBT also draws parallels between Ghostmail and “many encrypted applications, including WhatsApp and Telegram, which have been accused by law enforcement in the past for allegedly harboring terrorist activity” – implying that unlike the others, Ghostmail no longer wants the pressure of dealing with this.
In any instance, if you are one of Ghostmails former customers looking to make a change, here are your two best options:
ProtonMail. Offers free end to end encryption who’s services are located in Switzerland – outside of US laws and jurisdiction. Like Ghostmail, at no point in time are you asked for any personal information. If you are a fan of the Television show “Mr. Robot” this is Elliot’s email of choice. Sign Up Here: https://protonmail.com/
Tutanota. Another free encrypted email service that has become quite popular in recent times. Earlier this year, Tutanota surpassed 1 million accounts, becoming the largest online encrypted email service on the internet. Tutanota makes their encryption code open source so security experts can confirm the level of security they will be receiving and their servers are located in Germany. Sign up Here: https://tutanota.com/
Read More – Pro’s & Con’s Between Tutanota and Protonmail: https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/16671/tutanota-private-email-review-vs-protonmail/
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Ghostmail is indeed gone (except for the enterprise users) – but the main thing is the issue of recommending protonmail within the their homepage as an alternative. Well, there are other services which I believe are better – and one of them is Mailfence (https://www.mailfence.com) which provides “true” end-to-end encryption and digital signatures with a compelete email-suite (i.e., documents, calendars, contacts, …).
Moreover the company is dedicated towards fighting for online privacy and digital freedom via EFF and likewise platforms.