When Lavabit, the email service used by Edward Snowden, shut itself down, many people were worried that it was the end of secure privacy-focused email. Kim Dotcom has decided to capitalize on that by putting up a “highly-secure email service to run on a non-US-based server.”

“The biggest tech hurdle is providing email functionality that people expect, such as searching emails, that are trivial to provide if emails are stored in plain text (or available in plain text) on the server side. If all the server can see is encrypted text, as is the case with true end-to-end encryption, then all the functionality has to be built client side… On this and other fronts, Mega is doing some hugely cutting-edge stuff. There is probably no one in the world who takes the Mega approach of making true crypto work for the masses, our core proposition.”

According to Dotcom, his company Mega never holds any decryption keys. Which means that your emails would be unreadable by them, even if the government requested them to do so.

With Mega still up and running and looking healthier than ever with more than 4 million users, a secure email service from the guys behind it might not seem like such a bad idea.

[via Gizmodo, image via Peter Harrison]