[tor-talk] Secure email with limited usable metadata

[Mike Hearn]

On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 12:50 PM, grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:

> There were a few threads over on tor-talk in which a
>  gmail staff participated. Some community suggestion
> was made for refundable bitcoin deposit to appease
> the google claims, not sure where that went.
>

We're still paying attention. Actually I don't work on Google anti-abuse
anymore (different project these days) but am still happy to provide our
perspective and contacts. Google is not an enemy of the Tor project, we
just struggle with the same issues all other providers do.

The "community suggestion" to use Bitcoin was actually my suggestion. It
didn't go anywhere partly because it's fairly complicated and partly
because Mike Perry and others from Tor felt Bitcoin wasn't anonymous
enough, and desired a different system. So it's not really clear what the
right approach is, technically.

You may be interested in checking out Pond, the work of another
crypto/Tor-friendly Googler:

https://pond.imperialviolet.org/

It is an email-like messaging system that runs over Tor, has forward
security, tries to beat traffic analysis, TPM integration to beat log
structured filesystems that can't erase data and also has a variety of
other interesting features. It's not a drop in replacement for email by any
means, but with some more work it might be a reasonable alternative for
specialised use case.