Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: llwrstlr on May 02, 2013, 11:37 am
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I'm looking for a new email service to use on Tor like Tor Mail where you can be anonymous. Any recommendations? I've read a lot of posts related to this and still can't seem to find an answer: between hushmail, countermail, etc., all seem to have some kind of issue. There has to be something that will allow bitinstant transactions and as a verified email for a wallet on blockchain. Please advise!
Thanks for any replies...truly appreciated!
Peace
My PGP Public Key Block:
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My guess as to why you can't find a viable alternative is because there is none.
Maintaining an email server is a major pain, even on the clearnet. Just in the past few years the number of sites offering free email on the clearnet has fallen dramatically. Developers are shedding this field rapidly as society moves into the post-email world. Think about it, email is getting closer and closer to the same pain as snail mail. The cherry on top, nobody expects to pay a single penny for email.
Think of the resources needed to keep a Torified email service operating, with zero revenue to boot! You get the pleasure of becoming a pariah to all governments, deal with constant uptime issues, surly users, the list goes on.
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There are no other email hidden services that interface with clearnet the way Tormail does.
However, if you use Tor and PGP, then you can use any clearnet email provider that allows you to create an account over Tor. I know that outlook.com, mail.yahoo.com and safe-mail.net allow you do this.
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Tormail has been unavailable on and off for some time but what the other posters are saying, there is no better alternative. It would be great if tormail introduced a subscription service so they could scale up the capacity of their hidden service. The addition of the use of onioncat or other methods of defeating flood attacks (like some of the ideas i suggest here: http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=155913.0 ) would help also.
I would love to see the number and robustness of hidden services continue to increase. It has been ruminated upon for years since the emergence of tor, the idea of a decentralised DNS system that adds names and secures the authenticity of name translation to hidden services, it would then be possible to have failover and load balancing on the tor hidden service network, which massively reduce the scope for shutting down tor hidden services by flooding them.
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I've had a lot of trouble with both SR and Tormail lately but if I am persistent I am able to log in. Sometimes it takes 30 minutes of trying though, which sucks- but like others have said it's all we have right now.
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I am now running a 15mbit non-exit tor relay, as well as having changed my firefox and privoxy 'http keep-alive' timeout to 3600 (one hour). This seems to hold an open connection through which you can get pages down much faster and more reliably. I highly recommend this.
As for tormail, I don't think the site has been suffering from attacks, for the most part, but incompetent administration. A lot of the time when I can't get on there I go check the web interface and see a page saying 'database error'. However, I will stick with them for now, and I just hope that they have the sense to realise that people can now anonymously pay for their service, enabling them to provide much better service.
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Bitmessage all the way. It's like Bitcoin, only with messages. No spam, no bullshit, fully secure, with 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography. I'm really surprised it hasn't caught on yet here.
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i tried bitmessage a while back but i couldn't get messages to relay at all, not even running it for several days. i think it was because i wasn't getting the inbound connections settings working. i run my pc directly on the internet now (my eth0 device has a proper routeable internet address) with a firewall up, it should be simple for me to get it running again, if so, i might start a thread about bitmessage and how to get it working so more people can start using it.
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Narco, do you use a VPN? Or is your IP "naked"? ;)
Bitmessage's indicator was yellow for me for the first couple of days after I first installed it. Then it finally went green, meaning that the app was (and still is) both accepting all peer connections and sending data of its own. Just like Bitcoin, it uses a proof-of-work, salted, cryptographic, hash algorithm. It's really a well-though out system with a ton of potential.
I've tried running it off of my Tor proxy (both SOCKS v4 and v5), but I keep on getting these idiot warning messages in Tor. So I don't use it with Tor, only with my (logless) VPN. Either way, I'm safe. One of these days they'll get the Tor portion right and running it through the proxy will be a piece of cake. Maybe over the next month or two...
Setting Bitmessage up is a complete no-brainer. Just install it, then use a passphrase to generate your addresses. Anyone can use one of the echo server addresses to run a test, or feel free to message me personally at BM-BcHeVvtYCPoszYE6GvUnwR86Zb5HsfjW
And no, posting a single address publicly won't in any way compromise one's identity. There's no way to obtain an IP address of the sender/receiver, let alone anything even more sensitive.
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I could never get the green light on it last time I tried, this time, I am directly on the internet, I opened port 8444 on my firewall and within 20 minutes it turned green.
I don't use a VPN, I show up in the clearnet out of tor exit nodes. I would like to get a VPN so I can stop using sites like bitstamp in the clear without having to deal with torwall pages. Having a VPN at the end of a tor connection might have saved me from losing 6 bitcoins at mtgox some weeks back because of their idiotic verification crap.
BTW what is the warning messages you get out of tor? I figured there was not much point in using tor to proxy bitmessage because it does not publicly announce the addresses on the p2p node, and all traffic between nodes is encrypted anyway, and peer to peer, messages don't get relayed through the clearnet, they bounce from one node to another until they show up at the node with the key, so there's no real way for an address to be linked to an ip address anyway.
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Bitmessage all the way. It's like Bitcoin, only with messages. No spam, no bullshit, fully secure, with 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography. I'm really surprised it hasn't caught on yet here.
Looks cool, hopefully sellers can get together in a Pow-Wow and make this thing popular, if it's as safe as the wiki makes it out to be.
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just use hotmail, or get a burner phone and use gmail. Nothin special about tormail other than no one knows who runs it
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Tormail is becoming notoriously unreliable. That's not good.
Consider the following:
1. Riseup Mail
https://help.riseup.net/en
2. Autistici Mail
http://www.autistici.org/en/index.html
http://www.autistici.org/en/services/mail.html
http://www.autistici.org/en/services/anon.html
3. And last but not least:
You REALLY need to look into establishing
a Nym at one of the Mixmaster Nymservers.
http://www.is-not-my.name/
Nym messaging provides total anonymity and privacy.
Messages are untraceable and unreadable.
It would seriously be worth the effort.
Mixmaster Nyms are resistant even to a powerful
adversary.
Be safe. Be well.
Keep up the good work.
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just use hotmail, or get a burner phone and use gmail. Nothin special about tormail other than no one knows who runs it
Nope, do not use hotmail. Comparing TorMail to hotmail is like comparing, oh, say Tor to clearnet? ::) Seriously, don't use it. There is no information recorded as on hotmail and they do not automatically lock your acc./ for sending an email to a Tor address. And they are cop friendly, they will happily hand over your information, personal details and emails included, if asked. Don't ever recommend using hotmail again. I like the burner phone idea though. But so we are really clear, no hotmail.
Piece, Love, and Fuck Haters.
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E-mail is the most insecure means of communication there is. It was never designed with any privacy or anonymity in mind, whatsoever. So why do privacy-minded people keep on using it???
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just use hotmail, or get a burner phone and use gmail. Nothin special about tormail other than no one knows who runs it
Nope, do not use hotmail. Comparing TorMail to hotmail is like comparing, oh, say Tor to clearnet? ::) Seriously, don't use it. There is no information recorded as on hotmail and they do not automatically lock your acc./ for sending an email to a Tor address. And they are cop friendly, they will happily hand over your information, personal details and emails included, if asked. Don't ever recommend using hotmail again. I like the burner phone idea though. But so we are really clear, no hotmail.
Piece, Love, and Fuck Haters.
Would accessing yahoo mail through TOR be any better or worse than hotmail?
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I was wondering if there was interest in an email service like Tormail, but it would be a paid service, like $10 or $20 a year.
The purpose of that is, if I'm getting paid, I have incentive to keep the site running in top shape, and it prevents massive account creation, overloading the server, which I'm sure is part of the problem with Tormail.
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Fuck YES there is an interest. Almost every day we see a new thread asking about a TORmail alternative. Please Please let me know if you do decide to get this service up and running. Please allow payments in BTC of course.
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I was wondering if there was interest in an email service like Tormail, but it would be a paid service, like $10 or $20 a year.
The purpose of that is, if I'm getting paid, I have incentive to keep the site running in top shape, and it prevents massive account creation, overloading the server, which I'm sure is part of the problem with Tormail.
Absolutely! Judging from your posts, you are one of the most knowledgeable and helpful members of the SR community when it comes to privacy and things of that nature. Due to your good reputation and seeming trustworthiness, I could really see the community getting behind this. There's certainly no shortage of money flowing here. Keep us updated.
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Wow really? haha
I would sell accounts on SR, of course. I've been looking into a domain name that doesn't have tor, anon, hide, hush, safe, etc in it too, so it looks totally legit to clearnet people. Would be something like beachmail.co. idk
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Wait, there are TOR sites that dont end in .onion? Excuse my n00biness.
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No, the hidden service part of it would be a .onion, but to send and receive emails from clearnet, it needs a regular domain name too, like tormail.org
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I've been playing around with setting up my IMAP server through Tor, an using SquirrelMail as a frontend, but issue after issue so far :P. although I'll continue to play around with it in my spare time..
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Despite what I've said, Tormail should go paid and I would definitely keep my account.
I was wondering if there was interest in an email service like Tormail, but it would be a paid service, like $10 or $20 a year.
The purpose of that is, if I'm getting paid, I have incentive to keep the site running in top shape, and it prevents massive account creation, overloading the server, which I'm sure is part of the problem with Tormail.
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I was wondering if there was interest in an email service like Tormail, but it would be a paid service, like $10 or $20 a year.
The purpose of that is, if I'm getting paid, I have incentive to keep the site running in top shape, and it prevents massive account creation, overloading the server, which I'm sure is part of the problem with Tormail.
Absolutely! Judging from your posts, you are one of the most knowledgeable and helpful members of the SR community when it comes to privacy and things of that nature. Due to your good reputation and seeming trustworthiness, I could really see the community getting behind this. There's certainly no shortage of money flowing here. Keep us updated.
Very much agreed!
For a year's subscription, I could certainly justify paying for a good service that stayed up.
Definitely keep us updated, astor. You're a valuable member of this community and I'm confident you could construct something like this securely!
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I would definitely be down to spend 10 or 20 a month for that service.
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just use hotmail, or get a burner phone and use gmail. Nothin special about tormail other than no one knows who runs it
Nope, do not use hotmail. Comparing TorMail to hotmail is like comparing, oh, say Tor to clearnet? ::) Seriously, don't use it. There is no information recorded as on hotmail and they do not automatically lock your acc./ for sending an email to a Tor address. And they are cop friendly, they will happily hand over your information, personal details and emails included, if asked. Don't ever recommend using hotmail again. I like the burner phone idea though. But so we are really clear, no hotmail.
Piece, Love, and Fuck Haters.
Would accessing yahoo mail through TOR be any better or worse than hotmail?
Accessing yahoo mail through Tor would give a Tor IP so in MY opinion, and in my opinion only, the IP would be useless to anyone wanting it and would therefore be better than using regular hotmail (or yahoo mail) through clearnet as clearnet WILL have a true IP.
Piece, Love, and Fuck Haters.