Finding Anonymous Mail


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Not so long ago I had a need for a completely anonymous email address, which, even having access to the contents of the letter, could not be unambiguously associated with me. I needed to send several questions to the hospital about the treatment of the child, but I really didn’t want this information to remain conditionally forever associated with my and his names in the logs of providers, search engines, mailers, and some other Big Data operators who are working on the world wide web. The recipient was expected to receive files of unknown size with the documents necessary for hospitalization.


It seemed to me that with the registration of such mail there would be no difficulties, but, as it turned out, I lagged behind life. Well-known email services such as gmail and outloook now require a phone number, so I had to work hard to find an option that suits me. In this article, I decided to share my experience in solving this problem.


The requirements were as follows:


  1. Work through Thor.
  2. Lack of requirements to indicate the phone, existing mailbox, etc.
  3. Reliability.
  4. The ability to accept and store attachments.
  5. Free of charge.

The search led me to an interesting English-language page , where under the heading Free Webmail for Better Privacy 15 providers of anonymous email are listed and their main characteristics as of October 25, 2016. In the description of each service, many parameters are indicated. Among them: the presence of advertising, work through Tor, protocols, sizes of attachments and storages, etc., as well as two or three paragraphs with additional information. Interestingly, there is Yandex and Mail.ru! But on the first I have the main mail, and on the last there is a persistent internal distrust.


I ran through the list, checking my requirements with the proposed description, and began to try. I probably missed something undeservedly, but do not judge strictly - I needed the first working service that came across and I skipped some positions of the list almost intuitively.


Protonmail


The project is well known, they write and talk a lot about it. Money for this post was collected by the whole world. I thought that I would definitely achieve my goal there. To my great surprise, the guys require confirmation of registration from the phone or other mail, but they swear by their mother that they will not save this information. I had doubts about their sincerity, and I decided that I did not need mail on ProtonMail.


Then I thought that it would be possible to make a box on the same VFEmail, using it to confirm that I am not a spammer, on ProtonMail and continue to use the latter. But at that moment it was no longer relevant. Following!


Openmailbox


I have a weakness for any phenomena that have Open or Libre lines in their names, so I went to the OpenMailBox website with almost no thought. He noted with satisfaction the modernity of their site, full of hopes, filled out the form, clicked the SIGN UP button and ... received a message that the registration of new users has been suspended:


Please try again later, the registrations are disabled at the moment.

Sorry, but what can you do, let's go further.


Vfemail


Something I liked the description of this mail in the general list, and I decided to try to register a box with them. Their site looked somehow out of date, but, unfortunately, this did not stop me.


Registration passed without problems. The service offered a choice of several options for the web interface (Horde5, Horde (old), RoundCube and User Control Panel). I don’t know why, but by default, the first time I got in, I got Horde (old), which looks like it was made in the early 90s of the last century, which, however, may well be close to the truth. I wrote a letter, clicked Send, went into the sent ones and found with annoyance that it is displayed there as a sequence of four-digit digital codes. In the same form, it comes to the addressee. It seems that the problem is in the web interface itself. The other two (Horde5 and RoundCube) look better and understand Russian. But my desire to use the service had already diminished by this time. It also turned out that with free use, it adds ads to emails sent, which really doesn’t climb into any gates. In addition, it is worth noting that delivery can be carried out with a large (up to several hours) delay.


There remained a general feeling of the unreliability of the service and the excessive commercialism of its creators. Not the best option, but suitable for testing other boxes.


Yandex Mail


By this time, I had already begun to get angry, because I wanted to quickly close the issue, which I spent too much time solving. I began to think what the hell with him, I’ll do it on Yandex - there shouldn’t be any problems with him. True, I had concerns that this would increase the likelihood that my name would be associated with this letter, since Yandex knows a lot about my person, but by that time I was almost all the same.


I must say right away that I have constant problems accessing Yandex through Tor. Sometimes you have to change your identity 10 times to stop receiving the message “403 Access to our service is temporarily prohibited!”. Interestingly, is this so for everyone? I could not find others complaining on the Internet. I wrote in support, but they answered once, requesting information from the yandex.ru/internet page, and then disappeared.


Well, I picked up the output node that suits Yandex, registered, wrote a letter, click "Send", and in response they get the error "Incorrect contact address". The search for the error itself yielded nothing. Change of addressee also did not help. Support requests via Tor are not sent. Well, no, no, no. Not really wanted.


Tutanota


For the Russian ear, the name of the service sounds a little ridiculous, but for my task it did not matter. Registration was quick, a very nice, functional, minimalistic web interface opened, and a message appeared that in order to protect against spammers, my account will be checked up to 48 hours, during which I can neither send nor receive letters. Well what will you do! What are they checking there? This did not suit me at all, since I did not want to wait at all. But there was no time left for that further search that day, and I had to postpone the solution to the question.


When I again went to tutanota.com after about 36 hours, my mail was already operational. Several test emails on VFEmail went without a problem.


At the same time I decided to check the functionality of sending encrypted messages. It turned out that it works very simply and efficiently: a password is created for each external recipient, which must be somehow transferred to it. When you send a protected letter, in fact there is only a link to a special account on the tutanota.de website, where after entering the password received from the sender of the letter, you can enter the special version of the web interface, read the letter and send a response. Very, in my opinion, a convenient solution.


In the end, I settled on Tutanot. And there is no answer from the hospital yet, but I think the post office is not to blame.


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