re: #102 abolitionist

If the sender of an email has not encrypted the body of that email, the entire thing would arrive at Lavabit unencrypted. In any case, the so-called metadata would not be encrypted —the envelope, if you care to call it that. Notwithstanding NSLs and such, Lavabit’s service involved a promise of keeping clients’ emails encrypted while they were stored on Lavabit’s own server(s).

And they also promised that even administrators couldn’t read users’ emails, which is the point of the article, because that claim is just false. They promised not to, but breaking that promise would have been trivially simple, and that’s why the government wanted access.