Hushmail

What We Found

Our first observation, made while searching for the mentioned review, was an article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) using Hushmail as an example for creating a secure anonymous email account. Hushmail was cited as being the best for their needs.

It is also worth pointing out that the TekAdvocates goal is to create Social Normalcy online, not to establish CIA worthy communication strategies far beyond the needs of the typical online participant. Having said this, the EFF review did raise a point of concern for us:

• Provider Cannot Read - We are assuming Hushmail failed this criteria because of an event in 2007 where Hushmail turned over the data of customers to authorities in response to a Canadian court order. The action itself is not of great concern to us because it falls within the realm of Social Normalcy. We are more concerned that marketing statements of "not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail..." could be considered misleading. The Hushmail privacy policy does state that they will turn over information under court order, we would however like to see a bit more congruency between the privacy policy and the marketing materials.

What We Found

The referenced review, to be perfectly blunt, is a load of crap. The review is a thinly veiled jab directly at Hushmail as evidenced by numerous discrediting factors:

• False Pretense - This is listed as a "free email service" comparison. Hushmail is not a "free email service" and should not even be on this list. Hushmail is a "try before you buy" email service. To legitimately include Hushmail this should be listed as an "email service" comparison (without the "free" qualifier) with full feature sets available within each product's business model.
• Apples & Oranges - A number of features are given points that have nothing to do with email (the supposed core topic) like "Video Chat" and "Social Media Feeds."
• Concluding Article - The article after the review is no summary at all, but rather reads like an ad for the Google product suite. The opinions presented slant heavily to being a Social Media Dashboard review and not an email specific review as advertised.
• Misleading Terminology - "Security" is used in such a way as to imply "privacy." These terms are not equivalent. Had "Privacy been broken out as a separate criteria the scoring would have looked much different.

In summary, this whole review is in identity crisis without real focus in what is being reviewed and reads suspiciously like Google PR repackaged under an affiliate, or at least sympathetic company name. To consider the Hushmail trial feature set in the review as compared to the full offerings of the other companies is akin to comparing the social merits of CostCo to those of a soup kitchen because CostCo gives away tiny free food samples every Saturday. The CostCo corporation does quite a bit to benefit communities, but looking at the soup kitchen comparison alone one would think they were cold hearted, stingy misers handing out bits of food to people who aren't even in need. This review suffers terribly from the same subject matter categorical inconsistency.

What We Found

We agree with PC Magazine in general. The article is however quite old and outdated in some regards. Areas of note are:

• Storage - The storage for a basic paid account is now 1GB.
• Pricing - The pricing has changed to $35.00. An increase of about $5.00 a year.
• Data Accessibility - The article statement of "We love that the encryption engine is also used to store documents in your account." infers that stored data is unreadable by anyone but the intended recipients. As previously stated in the above Wikipedia comments, Hushmail can retrieve stored data in response to a court order. A minor clarification, but worth noting to correctly assess the level of trust you must have with your communication facilitator.

What We Found

According to Google's own documentation we found on the internet, they provide a 15GB total to "free" users for their use across all Google application offerings, including GMail. Hushmail offer 1GB of email storage for email alone with their basic $35.00 paid plan.

One consideration here is that it is in Google's own best interest to offer plenty of storage. The core Google product offering is data about it's user community being made available to paying customers such as marketing firms, corporations and behavioural scientists. The more data stored by their user base, the greater the offering they have for their paying customers interested in the data products produced from that storage.