Hushmail
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| URL | http://www.hushmail.com/ |
|---|---|
| Type of site | Web-based email |
| Registration | Yes |
| Owner | Hush Communications Ltd |
| Created by | Cliff Baltzley |
Hushmail is a free web-based email service founded by Cliff Baltzley after leaving Ultimate Privacy. Hushmail offers PGP-encrypted e-mail, file storage, vanity domain service, and instant messaging (Hush Messenger). It was founded in May 1999 by Hush Communications (based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with offices in Dublin, Ireland; Delaware, United States; and Anguilla). The Hushmail.com servers are hosted in Vancouver.
As with any system, Hushmail is not completely secure. For example, keystroke logging could capture an unwary user's passphrase, or a user may accidentally or intentionally send sensitive information as unencrypted cleartext.
If public encryption keys are available to both recipient and sender (either both are Hushmail users or have uploaded PGP keys to the Hush keyserver), Hushmail can convey authenticated, encrypted messages in both directions. For recipients for whom no public key is available, Hushmail will allow a message to be encrypted by a password (with a password hint) and stored for pickup by the recipient, or the message can be sent in cleartext.
Hushmail has many added security features, such as hidden IP addresses in e-mail headers. Due to the small size of the free e-mail inbox, (2MB), and lack of IMAP or POP3 on free accounts, ordinary computer users are likely to prefer other e-mail solutions. To privacy advocates, however, it comes as the top recommended anonymous e-mail service by PC Magazine.
Users must trust, to a certain extent, that Hush's equipment or software are in honest hands, and always have been. Nevertheless, the design of the software, which is largely open for inspection, removes some of this need for trust. For example, barring unknown security holes, the Hush user's private decryption keys are not normally available to the operators of Hush's equipment.
Possible threats, such as demands from the legal system to reveal the content of traffic through the system, are not as imminent in Canada as they are in the United States.
