Lavabit founder Ladar Levison is working to create a user friendly encrypted email service that will be difficult, if not impossible, to intercept and read even for the NSA. According to Fastcoexist:
”Last week, we learned that Levison has teamed up with Mike Janke of Silent Circle, another secure messaging service that also shut down its email provider, in order to work on Dark Mail, a new “privacy-by-design” email service. Dark Mail aims to provide a set of temporary encryption keys to users that disappear after each conversation. Theoretically, this means that even if a federal agency did come after Dark Mail with an information request, the service wouldn’t be able to provide those keys.”
According to the Kickstarter page the software would be free and open source. That means that, while Dark Mail plans to make the software available for all common platforms, the code would be available to others. Even a total shutdown of Dark Mail would leave the source code out there for others to use.