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but you could have done it with a bit more professionalism than just disappearing one day

Don't feel bitter, they didn't even tell their staff what was happening. From Thursday:

We started moving mail to a new storage system today, but this is taking longer than expected -- we hoped to get everything finished during the off-peak times but things didn't work out that way. Sorry.

Peter Lavabit on E-mail Discussions Forum

My name is Anthony Coulter. I signed up for Lavabit on October 5, 2009 with the address anthonycoulter(at)lavabit.com. I chose Lavabit very consciously. My university email address was about to expire and I had concerns about Google's privacy policies. Lavabit was created specifically for privacy-conscious people. They offered server-side encryption to paying customers; when I became a paying customer a year or two later I decided to check that box because, hell, why not?

[Note that I never did ask how server-side encryption worked. They said that things were rigged up so that they could not decrypt my on-server email even if they were coerced into it. My guess was that they used a hash of your login password to decrypt your email. I didn't know whether it was true or not, but I didn't think it really mattered. Apparently it did matter.]

I use my Lavabit account for everything. My bank statements are mailed to it. Most of my internet login IDs created since 2009 depend on it. All of my friends use it. And now it's gone.

I last checked my email around 9pm on Tuesday, August 6. When I woke up the next morning my connection attempts to the Lavabit server timed out. That was inconvenient; I had to send some information to my parents about an upcoming family reunion, so I sent them a text message promising to email it to them when the service was restored Wednesday night. It wasn't; I finally sent the email from an old family account I used back in the late 1990s. When I woke up *this* morning and Lavabit was still down, I did a couple of Google searches to see if anyone else noticed that an email provider had been gone for twenty-four straight hours. I found this discussion, which I quote for the benefit of people who will read this post long after the forum has ceased to exist:

RobertPaulsen
Junior Member
Join Date: Aug 2013
has anybody considered that if edward snowden did use lavabit then the Gouvernment is maybe interested in his mails which he wrote and sended to Glenn Greenwald. Maybe they seized the server and waved with a national security letter. just a thought !

This was posted at 10:55pm last night; when I saw it this morning I instantly dismissed the poster as a childish Internet revolutionary. The idea that the Federal government would clog up Lavabit for an entire day and a half just to get at Snowden is silly! They can't disrupt business like that!

Then I ran another Google search for "lavabit down" before getting off work today, and... here we are. Emails sent to my lavabit account still don't get bounce warnings, so noone who's emailed me since 9pm on Tuesday will know that I didn't get their email, or that I never will. I also have to go through the long and tedious process of reassociating all of my Internet accounts with a new email address. But which provider will I choose? I still don't trust Google. I don't know what I'll do yet; it was only two hours ago when discovered that my four-year-old email address had been taken down by the Federal government.

I just donated two thousand dollars to Lavabit's legal defense fund. (The confirmation email from Paypal just arrived in my old Cox account.) I cannot prove this to the Internet, and it's debatably silly for someone so privacy-conscious to want to do so. But at some point we will have to take this issue seriously. I watched the Snowden news from a distance; I didn't say or do anything about it because it wasn't really my problem. Now I lost my email, and if I had used IMAP this would have been a tragedy of enormous proportions.

--Anthony Coulter, a.k.a. Red Jesus

Outlook has a cute little bug associated with IMAP folders and using more than one mail client..... Outlook will send a "The email was not read" read receipt if the email is deleted from the imap folder before you've read it in Outlook... even if you tell Outlook not to send read receipts. This is rather annoying if you routinely use an alternative email to delete your spam. The next time you load Outlook it sends out a load of read receipts to the spam merchants, therefore confirming you (my!) email address.

P.S. Check out:
here,
here,
and
here. It's not just me!

The webmail is the old-school bit -- no AJAX, but you can edit Sieve scripts and do lots of other fun stuff from the Options screen. I recommend them.

And apparently the owners read Slashdot. Oh wait, that's me! ;) OK, so that makes me a little biased...

But I should add to your comments above that a new interface full of Javascripty goodness is on the way - it should be in beta in the next couple of weeks. You can see a mockup here: http://mockups.neilj.fastmail.fm/revision30/inbox.html (some things like the images on buttons aren't working in the mockup). There's lots of keyboard shortcuts, like '/' to search, and '.' to bring up an action menu. And of course, being FastMail, it downgrades gracefully - so if you don't have Javascript you can still use every feature.

To find out what other folks are saying, see this thread on the (independently run) FastMail forum: http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=1560. It has over 300 comments about the service, written over the last seven years.

Likewise, I've been a happy FM user for about 6 years. It's fast. It's very, very reliable (ever since they added good redundancy after a nasty outage a few years ago). Free accounts are available, but they are a paid service and they don't try to pretend otherwise. $25/year lets me host multiple domains with them (with full control over the DNS), gives me good storage, excellent spam filtering, custom rules, IMAP access, file storage accessible via web, webdav, ftp. IMAP is really their specialty; POP is just tacked on because people are used to it.

Seriously. Check them out. And register your own domain, whether you go with FM or not. It's cheap, easy, and worth it, even if it's just for a catch-all email address.

Also, these forums might be a useful resource: http://www.emaildiscussions.com/

Fastmail.fm is the real deal and thoroughly recommended. Do not confuse them with fastmail.com, a completely different, and inferior, service.

To get a feel, take a look at the independent (though Fastmail representative visited) forums at http://www.emaildiscussions.com/forumdisplay.php?&f=27

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showpost.php?p=433703

I think this move certainly does put a lot of pressure on us, good IMAP support has been one of our long term advantages which this clearly impacts.

Which really leaves support, features, reliability, security, privacy and openness as things we have to concentrate on.

(Rob is my boss)

In this forum post Rob Mueller of Fastmail.fm explains why they stopped using the SpamAssassin plugin for DomainKeys.

Their largest account comes with 2GB's of space, IMAP/POP, Spam Assasin, Sieve, 250MB of file space and tonnes more other things. All for only 40bucks a year. They have other plans, so you can pick and choose what you need.