Common Questions
Lavabit Questions
When was Lavabit founded and why?
How can you afford to offer this service for free?
Do you send spam or support spammers?
Will I ever have to pay for this service?
Will you ever advertise in my outgoing messages?
Service Questions
Do you offer IMAP or webmail access?
I’ve lost my password, how do I reset it?
What are the size, bandwidth and quantity limits on incoming and outgoing mail?
Technical Questions
How are you connected to the Internet and through whom?
Do you support encryption?
What web standards do you support?
When was Lavabit founded and why?
Lavabit was founded during June of 2004 in response to Gmail. At the time, Lavabit’s founders felt Gmail was a great service but that Google was actively violating the privacy of its users by displaying ads related to keywords in their e-mail. Lavabit’s founders also felt they could provide a higher level of service than the competition.
How can you afford to offer this service for free?
Lavabit services use a custom built e-mail server. This custom server uses open source libraries and runs well on inexpensive hardware. Because of this, Lavabit has managed to keep its costs very low. Low costs coupled with the revenue generated from premium accounts and advertising enable us to provide services for free. The profits haven’t bought any of the founders a tropical island or an Italian sports car, but they are enough to keep the servers connected to the Internet—and cover the cost of an occasional late night pizza.
Do you send spam, or support spammers?
We don’t send any unsolicited commercial e-mail—AKA spam. People often think that because a spam message they receive mentions a lavabit.com address, we’re responsible. The truth is, our staff doesn’t send any e-mail unless replying to someone, or notifying our members of a critical outage.
So how can our domain show up inside spam messages? Unfortunately, being a free service has its price. Most of our users are good citizens of the Internet—a few aren’t. When we receive notification and evidence that a Lavabit user is abusing our service, we immediately lock the user’s account. We don’t like to do it but feel it’s necessary to protect our service for the majority who use it appropriately.
It’s also important to note that we limit all of our accounts to 256 to 768 outgoing messages a day. These limits are designed to discourage spammers from relaying spam through our servers. The limits don’t always discourage spam, but they do limit the damage a handful of rogue users can do.
If you encounter a spam message that mentions Lavabit, please use our contact page to let us know. Please be sure to always include the e-mail headers. The Lavabit Abuse Team can use those headers to determine if a message passed through our network (usually not the case), and if not, complain to the appropriate ISP.
Will I ever have to pay for this service?
We’ll never demand money in exchange for your e-mail. Like speech, we feel e-mail should be free, and we provide this service as a public benefit. If you’d like a premium account, please sign up. But we’ll always offer a free level of service.
Will you ever advertise in my outgoing messages?
No. We’ll never advertise in your outgoing messages. We use this service too and wouldn’t want someone advertising in our outgoing e-mails. We generate enough revenue to sustain this service through advertising in incoming messages (with your permission) and with small text ads in our webmail client (coming soon). We’re here to provide a quality service first and make a profit second.
Do you offer IMAP or webmail access?
Yes, as of February 2008 we offer free access to your account via POP3, IMAP and Webmail. Complete information is available on our settings page.
I’ve lost my password, how do I reset it?
Unfortunately, because of the encryption methods we use at Lavabit, it’s impossible for our administrators to change an account password without knowing the existing password. If you’re in the habit of forgetting passwords, take a minute to write it down and store it in a safe place.
What are the size, bandwidth and quantity limits on incoming and outgoing mail?
We have no limits on the number of incoming messages you can receive, only the amount of e-mail that can be stored on our server at any given time. Check out our plans page for more information on the different quota sizes.
For outgoing messages, we limit accounts to between 256 and 768 messages in a rolling 24-hour period. We do this to prevent spammers from abusing our service and ruining things for the rest of our users. Our limits aren’t perfect though. If you have a legitimate need and have been an active user of Lavabit for an extended period of time, you’re welcome to contact us to request a higher limit. We review and approve these requests on a case by case basis. Lavabit’s free e-mail service isn’t intended for commercial use, and we won’t grant requests based on a commercial need. If your business needs to send more messages please consider one of our corporate accounts.
Message size limits are also based on the account plan, and range from 32 MB for our Basic plan up to 128 MB for our Premium plan.
All of the limits mentioned are maximums. Most of these limits can be changed by users in the preferences portal.
How are you connected to the Internet and through whom?
We are connected to the Internet via redundant gigabit connections. Our primary service provider is Cogent, with two other providers available as backup.
Do you support encryption?
Yes, we support encryption and encourage our users to enable encryption in their e-mail client. We support POP3 over SSL on port 995 and SMTP over SSL on port 465. We also support using the STARTTLS command. Our SSL certificate has been granted by the Comodo Group.
What web standards do you support?
We make an effort to support web standards. The Internet only functions because everyone agrees to play by the same rules. If you find an area of our site or functionality of our software that deviates from a documented standard, please contact us. We support web standards because standards give individuals using assistive software easier access to our content. See our accessibility page for details on the efforts we’ve made to accommodate assistive technologies. You can also look at our XHTML and CSS validation pages to verify that our site has been built with standards in mind.
