Does anybody know a good alternative for Lavabit?
I'd like a free (or cheap Bitcoin-paid
) e-mail service which is
* reliable (running for at least a couple of years with very little downtime)
* has reasonable support
* is dedicated to privacy
* has no ties to the United States
* is preferably operated by people who are part of geek / free software / crypto culture
* has preferably only a low level of advertisement annoyance
The closest I'd be able to get to a site that meets your requirements is magnesium.net, which probably fits most of your requirements. Unfortunately, I can't really recommend it because it hasn't really been reliable lately. Most of the time it's up, but there are occasions when it's down for weeks at a time, so reliable it isn't.
If you can afford it, the easiest way to get something like this is to host your own website, then you can have an email address that you control more than you would otherwise since it's hosted on your own domain. I'm going to buy my own hosting eventually and would be happy to sell you an email address through it if you like, but I'm not planning on setting it up for a while so that doesn't really help you now.
Edited to add: Actually, I would be remiss if I didn't mention
Hushmail here. They're based in Canada and I think they meet all your requirements: PGP based email, good support, no advertisements. I don't know how reliable they are, but I've heard good things about them, so that's what I'd go for if I were you.