Ladar had a hard enough time making ends meet with the service as it was, adding something like that to the mix would have alienated a huge portion of his userbase.
You would think his users would be pretty savvy but he spent lots of time and money walking people through simple tasks like configuring Outlook or Thunderbird to check their email. I'm pretty sure support was his biggest operating expense.
I should have said for a product like Lavabit, ie mail as secure/private as SMTP likely gets right now, I hope it wouldn't be unreasonable. However, in my heart of hearts, I knew it was too much to ask for.
I guess anyone that knows how to create and setup a client side TLS cert and key would also already know privacy and SMTP can't really live together, and would setup a deaddrop for gpg encrypted messages.
You would think his users would be pretty savvy but he spent lots of time and money walking people through simple tasks like configuring Outlook or Thunderbird to check their email. I'm pretty sure support was his biggest operating expense.