I do understand your viewpoint, and agree with it at a high-level, but I'm working from a practical viewpoint. > a strong security guarantee: "As long as you d

I do understand your viewpoint, and agree with it at a high-level, but I'm working from a practical viewpoint. > a strong security guarantee: "As long as you don't let your private key get stolen or get MITM'd, it's impossible for anyone to eavesdrop on you." That's incredible! Governments for thousands of years have been wishing for such a thing, and now our generation finally has it, because we live in the future... and you're going out of your way to give it up. I'm keen on getting a system that makes that promise as well; but HOW can I get that today for my email? That is the practical problem I'm addressing. Your other comments about blind faith, etc. are somewhat out of context. There is a secret key, and it needs to be kept safe or your stored email can be compromised. Whether the private key is on your laptop or on your server, you cannot guarantee it is perfectly safe; if either computer is airgapped it's pretty useless for reading your email. Certainly, you don't trust to blind faith that your server is secure; but you don't trust to blind faith that your laptop is, either. If you set up a private Lavabit, in your favor, you have a private key that's encrypted with a key that's not stored on your server, so someone who gains read access to your server still cannot actually compromise you, and someone will full access still cannot compromise you until you sign in again. Also in your favor, nowadays it's fairly well-known how to lock down/harden a single-purpose server so that it would be very difficult to compromise; you'd basically need only 3 ports open, ever, you can disable root SSH and enable private key auth only, etc.. It's simpler than securing a laptop that you use for a billion different purposes. Against you are the facts that you don't keep the server with you (probably -- unless it lives at your house), and it's a more visible target -- it must be findable because that's where your emails are delivered. Your same arguments about your expertise in securing your server also apply to securing your own laptop. Using your own arguments, if you read email on a laptop that you also use for web browsing, you're "opening doors for the adversary", aren't you? > * In this case I don't know what the better solution is, because it hasn't been invented yet.* This is the real problem. I'm no Edward Snowden; I'm not an NSA target and don't expect to be. I want to secure my email because I think everyone should. Are you saying I should wait another X years before using email? A private Lavabit is the best solution I see right now -- I totally agree that anyone should deploy any solution with their eyes open (even if you keep the private key locally only, that does not guarantee security either...). But that said, I can imagine a server image and simple set of instructions that would enable someone to set up a private Lavabit that would be a better solution than anything I am able to set up myself, certainly better than the original Lavabit, and far better than what most people use to store email.