Lavabit.com Down

[PeteLavabit]

Originally Posted by submarine89

So you were able to contact him midway through your post or are you assuming he is working as fast as he can? Is Ladar the only admin Lavabit has?

I have not heard anything more recently than when I last heard from him yesterday. At that time he was working as fast as he could to restore service.

Ladar is the owner and the sole admin. Lavabit is a small organization.

[kijinbear]

Originally Posted by PeteLavabit

1. I have not heard any news from Ladar (the admin). I work remotely and can't go knock on his door or anything. I'm just the minion and have no insight into the technical status of things.

Originally Posted by PeteLavabit

I have not heard anything more recently than when I last heard from him yesterday.

Now that's very alarming. If what you're saying is true, not only is there a lack of communication between Lavabit and its users/customers, but also a lack of communication within the company.

[gre]

I have been a user of Lavabit far longer than Mr. Snowden and I wish he had NOT USED Lavabit or recommended their services to anyone!!!!

I did not know he used Lavabit until about 5 minutes ago but this really does bode badly for us all I think.........

There are lots of other things most of could 'spill the beans' about but most of us have the sense to keep these things to our selves. It usually works out better in the long run.

Lavabit I doubt you are listening or care. Just get your act together!!!! Work around the clock until this is fixed - If it is your power of course to do so???

Anyone who really wants ''''secure'''' email should Encrypt their emails before sending suing something half decent like
http://www.softpedia.com/reviews/win...w-341261.shtml
and a good long password produced with a password generator.
Maybe this will screw up the 'Dark Forces' or at least tie up their computing power. If we all start doing it......

[submarine89]

Okay, that's really all I needed to know. Lavabit has a single admin. That's it. If Ladar gets hit by a truck, or falls in the shower and breaks his damned neck, everyone is just screwed. Those of you hosting your business email here should be scared to death. I just have my personal email here and that terrifies me.

[mve]

Thank you for posting an honest response Pete.

Here are MY two bits about this situation:

*** How it should have played:

1) You should have sent a mass e-mail a week before scheduled outage indicating nature of outage, estimated outage time, and giving the option to temporarily forward all lavabit.com e-mail to an alternate e-mail address of the user's choosing.

*** How it can still be played:

2) Hourly INFORMED status reports until this situation is normalized.

*** What should happen henceforth:

3) A clear policy regarding maintenance and full transparency with your users.

4) A mass e-mail written by Ladar explaining what happened, including technical details, and stating whether Lavabit can still be trusted for privacy and encryption after this episode.

*********************
This is the second outage since May. The one in may was bearable but should have given Ladar the idea to create strong procedures for future upgrades.

On your website you claim +400,000 users. Low ballpark estimate: 10% * $8.00 = $320,000, High ballpark estimate: 50% * $8.00 = $1,600.000

so:

Lavabit is not that small. You must instil trust in your users, as this is the lifeline of your service (as you obviously do not compete with services like gmail in usability technology). What makes you stand out is your concern with privacy and supporting the little guys.

I am willing to continue my service if you and Ladar are willing to change your service standards starting right now: 11:35AM CST.

The fact that Snowden allegedly used your service made me feel retroactively that I had made a good choice regarding Lavabit in terms of privacy. I am assuming it gave you major positive marketing. Perhaps you should limit your growth to something that is sustainable and not risk your whole business venture trying to grow too fast.

Finally, how about a super premium account with server redundancy? I might be willing to pay a bit extra for that.

I do hope you can communicate this to Ladar. I understand you are not the owner and you are trying to handle this as best as you can. A clear line of communications between you and Ladar would be a good start.

MVE

[awji]

Pete, when are going to update Zendesk - i only just stumbled across this forum after stumbling across the zendesk.

As mentioned by a previous post, why is the zendesk not mention on the webpage - perhalps next to the 'System is down for maintenance.' news item.

Most users will feel put out by this maintenance work, but the majority would surly be appeased if they could find out information easily without having to scour the net

[pwnfest]

While the site remains ****ed how easy would it be for Lavabit to set up a redirection service, so that incoming mail sent to lavabit.com addresses gets redirected to alternative customer accounts (upon request)?

Or would this in itself be a retarded and or mammoth task?

[Wilt]

Originally Posted by mve

On your website you claim +400,000 users. Low ballpark estimate: 10% * $8.00 = $320,000, High ballpark estimate: 50% * $8.00 = $1,600.000

10% paid? I don't think so. Maybe 10% active including free accounts.


I think I'm going to give Ladar the benefit of the doubt and say that he didn't email because the storage system was at risk of imminent failure and not because he thought he could do it without anybody noticing. The fact that even Pete seems unable to contact him at least daily does concern me, though.

[mve]

Wilt: You may be right. In the end it all boils down to transparency.

[PeteLavabit]

Originally Posted by mve

Thank you for posting an honest response Pete.

You're welcome.

2) Hourly INFORMED status reports until this situation is normalized.

As I mentioned before, I will post updates both here and at the Zendesk announcement page as soon as I hear anything.

*** What should happen henceforth:

3) A clear policy regarding maintenance and full transparency with your users.

Agreed. I will discuss this with Ladar when things are restored.

4) A mass e-mail written by Ladar explaining what happened, including technical details, and stating whether Lavabit can still be trusted for privacy and encryption after this episode.

While a mass email is unlikely, I will push for a full post-mortem being published online.

On your website you claim +400,000 users. Low ballpark estimate: 10% * $8.00 = $320,000, High ballpark estimate: 50% * $8.00 = $1,600.000

Not all 400,000 user accounts are active. That's simply the total number of user accounts in the system, including inactive ones. Even among active users, the percentage of paid users is less than 10%.

I do hope you can communicate this to Ladar. I understand you are not the owner and you are trying to handle this as best as you can. A clear line of communications between you and Ladar would be a good start.

I am making notes about your (and those of others) concerns and suggestions and will discuss them to Ladar as soon as possible.

[PeteLavabit]

Originally Posted by awji

Pete, when are going to update Zendesk - i only just stumbled across this forum after stumbling across the zendesk.

As mentioned by a previous post, why is the zendesk not mention on the webpage - perhalps next to the 'System is down for maintenance.' news item.

Most users will feel put out by this maintenance work, but the majority would surly be appeased if they could find out information easily without having to scour the net

See post #59 -- I will update the Zendesk ticket as soon as there's any updates.

[Wilt]

Originally Posted by mve

Wilt: You may be right. In the end it all boils down to transparency.

Yup, communication is key. It's not that hard, really - there will be times when Ladar is just waiting for data to transfer where he could give Pete a call with a progress update.

Though I do think Pete is doing a good job, under the circumstances, and appreciate his efforts to keep us as up to date as possible.

[kijinbear]

Originally Posted by mve

On your website you claim +400,000 users. Low ballpark estimate: 10% * $8.00 = $320,000, High ballpark estimate: 50% * $8.00 = $1,600.000

Your ballparks are way too high.

According to this interview from 2009 (alternate link), Mr. Ladar Levison claims to have about 1,500 paying customers. Assuming about half of them pay $8 and the other half pay $16, it would add up to ($8 x 750) + ($16 x 750) = only $18,000 per year. That's not even enough to pay for one full-time technician. The owner probably does other projects to supplement his income.

Although the number of free accounts has increased a lot since 2009 (from 260,000 to over 400,000 if you believe the published numbers), I doubt that Lavabit has acquired a whole lot of paying customers between then and now, since they produced zero new exciting features during that time.

[mve]

Thank you. Looking forward to further updates and service being restored.

Good luck.

[morphea00]

Two days without email is just too much. Fortunate is, that I havent used my lavabit account for business purpose...

You should at least notify us before the process..