[pdonis]

his customers most probably had a copy of the emails on their computers

Based on the fact that a number of them are talking about having lost data, I suspect that at least a significant number of customers only used webmail to access their accounts, so they never had a local copy of their data.

[iaskwhy]

I was thinking that using webmail would defeat the purpose of really private email.

[pdonis]

Not if you access it via https.

[iaskwhy]

It's still showing not encrypted on the screen which allows all sort of possibilities when done on a browser. For example, let's say you're using Chrome, hard to make sure page contents are not being used somehow.

[pdonis]

The same applies to any other email client; it has your data unencrypted, so if you can't trust it, you're screwed.

[iaskwhy]

That's why I assumed people that actually care about privacy use a desktop software, open source and with IMAP, so there wouldn't be no huge loss.

[pdonis]

a desktop software, open source and with IMAP

Which will still see your data unencrypted. And there are open-source browsers too.

In any case, as I said several posts ago, a number of Lavabit customers were complaining about having lost their stored emails; if they were using a desktop email client with IMAP, that wouldn't be the case.