Silent Circle confirms end of secure email service

 The secure voice and communication service, headed by PGP founder Phil Zimmermann, announced in a blog post that it was not able to offer the same security for email as it was for phone, video and text services, and has decided to shut down Silent Mail.

Jon Callas, Silent Circle co-founder and CTO of said that the voice communications were designed to be completely end-to-end secure with all cryptography done on the clients and our exposure to your data to be nil. “The reasons are obvious — the less of your information we have, the better it is for you and for us,” he said.

“Silent Mail has thus always been something of a quandary for us. Email that uses standard internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees that real-time communications has. There are far too many leaks of information and metadata intrinsically in the email protocols themselves. Email as we know it with SMTP, POP3, and IMAP cannot be secure.”