Lavaboom

» see lavaboom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Lavaboom was a zero-knowledge webmail service out of Cologne, which in 2014 meant the encryption happened in your browser and the company holding the mailbox could not read what was inside it. The technical claim was that it had solved the part of PGP that keeps normal people away from PGP, which is key handling and the general business of having to understand any of it.

The post-Snowden encrypted mail wave is one I watched closely and joined not at all. In 2014 I had a Gmail account and the same low-grade unease everybody else had, and these services registered with me about as firmly as a gym membership does in January. The German angle was the part that registered. The pitch was not better cryptography, it was better jurisdiction, and in 2014 that argument was being made by a dozen startups at once across Germany and Switzerland. I stayed where my mail already was, and so did nearly everyone.

Lavaboom's site went up in February 2014 with a signup form, 250 megabytes of free storage promised and a blog whose first post explained that an unencrypted email is a postcard. Press came quickly, including the Wall Street Journal's piece on the post-Snowden boom in German and Swiss privacy startups. The product took another fifteen months. The public beta opened in early May 2015, and the company filed for insolvency in the middle of August.

~ the case file ~

~ after lavabit ~

Lavabit is why this existed at all. Ladar Levison's encrypted mail service shut itself down in August 2013 rather than comply with a US order connected to Edward Snowden's account, and the closing notice became one of the most-read pages on the internet that year. The lesson a lot of people took from it was about where the servers sit.

Germany was the obvious answer in 2014. It had data protection law with teeth and a population that had just learned its chancellor's phone was being tapped by an ally. A wave of services launched into that opening. Tutanota and Posteo were already operating, Protonmail started in Switzerland the same year, and Lavaboom was one of several that never made it out of the wave.

What it promised on top of the location was usability. Browser-based encryption with the keys never leaving your machine, and a key exchange the user would not have to think about. The feature list on the 2015 homepage includes a line about metadata obfuscation, which the page itself spells obfusctation, and that typo tells you roughly how much of the list was shipped and how much was roadmap.

~ the hundred thousand that did not arrive ~

The money ran out in the ordinary way. Lavaboom went to Indiegogo in mid-2015 looking for $100,000 and did not get it. That left a company with a payroll and a running mail service, and nothing coming in to cover either. By the time TechCrunch wrote it up in August there were about 12,000 registered accounts pushing something like one and a half emails per second, which is a real service and nowhere near a business.

Two things Müller-Irion said on the way out are worth keeping. The first was about a criminal investigation touching the service, which could not be discussed for legal reasons, and the stated position on it was flat. No user data would be compromised, and no request for any had arrived. Filing for insolvency was better than sitting in that position with no money. The second came at the end of the TechCrunch piece and was shorter. A security company was not something worth doing twice, because it is really tough.

~ twenty-seven august ~

The farewell page went up and then stayed up for months. It is a heading and three sentences. Lavaboom has shut down its services on August 27th. The [email protected] address has been removed. I am sorry for letting you down. The service was kept alive for about a week after the insolvency filing so people could move their mail, with Tutanota and Whiteout Mail named as the places to move it to. lavaboom.com was answering 403 by March 2016, and today it redirects to a domain that does not resolve.

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