Mailvault: how does a secure email account work

[traveling man]

How does mailvault and sites like it work, I'm more than a little sceptical about a "secure" email account, again how does it work?

[freon]

The short story, as with anything else relating to trust, is reputation; it's widely used, and the author of PGP is well respected. The mathmatical parts have been subject to many years of peer reviews

If you're just interested in the concepts involved, Hushmail has a decent FAQ on their site, under "support" that should give you some details on how it works. The short story is, the encryption takes place on your machine, and hush basically moves this encrypted data between accounts, in addition to providing a program in the form of an applet that runs on your browser that does this encryption.

In the case of hushmail, it's possible to actually read the program that does the encryption, and what gets sent to the remote mail server, if you have the knowledge. This openness is the key to security.

[traveling man]

so does hushmail have a good reputation?

[freon]

Yes.