[tor-talk] Best onion email system?

[Mirimir]

On 05/31/2014 01:53 PM, krishna e bera wrote:
> On 14-05-31 12:59 PM, Tempest wrote:
>> Bobby Brewster:
>>> What do people who use .onion addresses use to communicate?
>>
>> bitmessage.ch, which runs the bitmail onion you listed, has been usable
>> for me. however, the accessibility of the onion has not been consistent
>> and, at one point, the project discussed taking it down for good.
>> vfemail.net also offers an onion at 344c6kbnjnljjzlz.onion.
>>
>> both stand out among the others listed in that they also allow for pop
>> clients and not just imap. if one wants to use a mail client like
>> thunderbird or icedove with torbirdy and enigmail, pop is ideal because
>> imap which still poses some privacy issues at times.
> 
> Any email system in which messages are stored unencrypted, or stored
> encrypted with anyone except the sender and recipient having the keys,
> poses serious privacy risks.  It is possibly worse on .onion servers
> because you have no way to know who is running the server and hold them
> to account or assess the potential for leakage.
> 
> The other issue is of course that even with strong message encryption
> the sender and receiver are known to server.  The mixmaster system[0]
> is/was supposed to address that problem.
> 
> The future:
> 
> Keep an eye open for lavaboom.com , they are a startup purporting to
> offer a secure email replacement for lavabit.  Perhaps they will have
> .onion accessible servers.
> 
> Whonix has some sort of mixmaster over .onion setup [1] though it doesnt
> seem easy to use.
> 
> [0] http://mixmaster.sourceforge.net/
> [1] https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Dev/Mixmaster

I've found VFEmail to be very reliable, and they seem very privacy
friendly. You can use them with Thunderbird and kin. And they accept
Bitcoin for paid accounts.

You and your correspondents must use end-to-end encryption, of course,
but that's easy with Thunderbird and kin. And it's true that message
headers must be unencrypted for mail transport. But that's not a major
issue as long as you and your correspondents are using strongly
pseudonymous accounts.

One can "easily" use Mixmaster remailer nyms in Whonix. There are two
Quicksilver GUI apps, one for sending messages to nymservers, and
another for retrieving messages from alt.anonymous.messages. Although
they are Windows apps, they work well in Wine. There are .onion
addresses for both nymservers and newsreaders.