> Does hosting your own email truly isolate you from government surveillance?
Not by itself, no; the government can still get to you by getting access to the machine you host it on, or the switch the mail flows through on its way in and out from the outside world. Hosting your own just reduces the number of third parties the government can try to shake down to get access to your data.
I guess my point is that unless you have the machine in your home nothing really changes: They shake down the hosting provider and they are in.
In other words, what's the difference between buying email service from GoDaddy and renting a VPS from them to host it yourself?
Not being critical at all, just trying to understand if there's something fundamentally different about Mail in a Box that makes it more government-secure than other approaches. The description seems to list privacy from government snooping as the primary motivator. Is it truly effective at that? If so, why and how?
As I understand things the very idea of being secure from snooping is an illusion so long as your email is on a machine that you don't physically control in your home or office. And, even then, the best you can do is encrypt all traffic to make it more difficult --not impossible-- to capture your data.
It also means that (assuming one has some understanding of computer security) you stand a chance (albeit small) of potentially catching them in the act of getting access to your data (for some types of surveillance).
Not by itself, no; the government can still get to you by getting access to the machine you host it on, or the switch the mail flows through on its way in and out from the outside world. Hosting your own just reduces the number of third parties the government can try to shake down to get access to your data.