Email accounts offshore and safe from U.S. prying eyes
 

I've looked into several non-U.S. email providers and wanted to know which you think are good?
Hush is in English and seems the most reliable.
GMX is kinda iffy, but their purchase of Mail.com makes me think they will stick around.
Outblaze was good but we know what happened to them :(
Mail.ru being based in Russia makes me think emails are probably the most safe.

btw, i'm not using the account for anything illegal. I am involved in the human rights scene & some of my clients would rather not be known to the DoJ or State Department.

What about the myopera mail account then? Same firm that now has Fastmail.
Opera browser company. Based in Norway so that seems okay to me.

Did them have to sign some secret document when them bought Fastmail?
I mean if the servers is in USA or Australia or something?

Have you tested them. It is beta still I think.
yourname at myopera.com is the domain and you use it to also reach the community of Opera browser users but one don't have to use opera to be a member I trust :)

Ahhh cool MyOpera didn't ask for a ton of info and has email. I shall try it.

WhoIs.sc brought up:
Registrant:
Opera Software ASA
P.O. Box 2648 St Hanshaugen
Waldemar Thranesgt. 98
Oslo, 0175
Norway

Just FYI: no email is safe from preying government eyes. If it isn't the US government, then it will be another government who can look over your shoulder. I mean, every single nation has laws which allow surveillance under certain circumstances. There is no such thing as a totally isolated email account where under no circumstance no authority could ever look into. Every provider is subject to the law of the country he's based in, and every country allows some surveillance. Knowing that, unless you have some malafide business to hide, it doesn't make much difference if you have your email account based in Belarus or Saudi Arabia, or in Germany or Norway. If you have nothing to hide, you won't be an interesting target for surveillance in the first place.

Bear in mind that the servers are primarily located in the US.

I am pessimistic that one really can send and receive emails without getting noticed.

They are payed to keep us under keen observation.

So one need to know how it works for to be able to slip in under the RADAR.

While I still wonder why this is suddenly such a big issue/hot topic: surveillance has existed for ages in different forms and ways, in each country or jurisdiction. Either by police investigations, by listening in to phone calls, storing your data in databases of local governments, ... Monitoring emails is just an additional rule introduced to expand already existing surveillance to new communication methods. It's not like surveillance by governments is something new ; it's been around for a very long time and will remain as such. The idea that there are countries where nobody under no circumstance has authority to look up private data of citizens, is absurd. Such place doesn't exist, and if it would exist it would end up in a total anarchy soon enough. Weither it is the US government, the Chinese government, the Australian government or the Swedish government (randomly chosen examples) ; someone will always look over your shoulder if it's considered necessary or justified.

I am much more concerned about commercial monitoring ; that is surveillance for commercial purposes and that does concern me. Government surveillance on the other hand is
a) less likely to happen
b) been existing for so long that we hardly realise that surveillance goes back way before email and internet even existed

Commercial surveillance however is a relatively new phenomenon (or at least, internet makes it easier to do so) which in my opinion is worrying. So I'd be more concerned about those social network sites than about governments and laws.

I'll take US prying eyes any day over Russian prying eyes, and if you trust anything dotRU, you're on your own.

Ditto, and I know quite a few Russians personally and they rarely use anything but the regular ole' U.S. services we all know....gmail, hotmail, etc. That tells me something anyway.

This is just too silly for words.

Not exactly on his own, I too would rather deal with the Russian government personally ... but that's irrelevant to the fact that people with no hidden malafide agenda will not deal with ANY government. I would feel safe enough to have an email provider based in Iran, Cuba or Belarus anytime. My mistrust with dotRU (or dotBY, a country I got a special interest in) would rather be the fear of mails not arriving because of non-Russian providers blocking the mails due to the spammer reputation of Russian mail services. But there my concern ends.

As for governmental preying eyes, there's only a reason to worry if you're doing something the government would be concerned about as being a threat ; as long as you're not doing things the average internet user isn't doing on the web, you should not worry more about neither US, Russian, Chinese authorities than you should about any other authority.

Reading all these topics, I'd almost begin to wonder what type of things people are trying to hide ; why be so concerned if you're not doing anything wrong? Your data are stored in your municipality, your medical data are stored in your local hospital (and sometimes beyond own area), if you work then your data will be stored in local employment registries, and if you walk along the street police are always watching out ... Does this make you stop coming out, go working, go to your local pub, ... ??

Especially odd when noticing that there's hardly any topic dealing with concerns about being surveilled by non-governmental insitutions who sell your data for commercial use. I see few people worry about that, which astonishes me because I'd consider that a lot more worrying than the very unlikely option the government will spend time on monitoring you and continue to do so even when you're not doing anything wrong.

You would rather deal with the Russian government...

Really?

Perhaps most don't agree with your assessment and consider governments less trustworthy than most businesses. Just a thought...

Our neighbor Finland have a lot of biz agreement with Russia.
Their close neighbor. So them don't want to writes secrets that
Swedish "Intelligence Services" can snoop up on the fiber cables
and email services so Finland now try to avoid Swedish email services :)

Interesting.