Looking for anonymous email

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Not so long ago, I had the need for a completely anonymous email address, which, even having access to the content of the letter, could not be uniquely associated with me. I needed to send a few 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, comrade major and who knows what other Big Data operators operating 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 there would be no difficulties with registering such mail, but as it turned out, I was behind the times. Well-known mail services, such as gmail and outloook, now require a phone number, so I had to work a little to find an option that suits me. In this article, I decided to share my experience solving this problem.

The requirements were as follows:

1. Work through Thor.
2. No requirements for telephone, existing mailbox, etc.
3. Reliability.
4. Ability to accept and store attachments.
5. Free

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 there are many parameters. Among them: the presence of advertising, work through Tor, protocols, the size of attachments and storages, etc., as well as two or three paragraphs with additional information. What is interesting, there is Yandex and Mail.ru! But on the first one I have the main post, and to the last there is a persistent internal distrust.

I ran through the list, checking my requirements with the proposed description, and began to try. Something was certainly missed outright, but do not judge strictly - I needed the first available efficient service and I missed some list items almost intuitively.

Protonmail

The project is well known, much is written and talked about. Money for this mail was collected by the whole world. I thought I’ll get there. To my great surprise, the guys require confirmation of registration from a phone or other mail, but at the same time they swear by their mom that they will not save this information. I had doubts about their sincerity, and I decided that I didn’t need ProtonMail mail.

Then I already thought that it would be possible to make a box on the same VFEmail, with its help confirm that I am not a spammer, on ProtonMail and continue to use the latter. But at that moment it was already irrelevant. 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 little or no thought. He noted with satisfaction the modernity of their site, full of hope, filled out the form, pressed the SIGN UP button and ... received a message that the registration of new users was suspended for now:

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

It is a pity, 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 with them a box. Their website looked somehow out of date, but, unfortunately, this did not stop me.

Registration passed without problems. The service offered a choice of several web interface options (Horde5, Horde (old), RoundCube and User Control Panel). I don’t know why, but by default, when I first entered, 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, with annoyance, found that it is displayed there as a sequence of four-digit numeric codes. In the same form it comes to the addressee. Looks like a problem in the web interface itself. The other two (Horde5 and RoundCube) look better and understand Russian. But the desire to use the service I have by this time already diminished. It also turned out that with free use, he adds an advertisement to the letters he sends, which doesn't fit into any gate at all. In addition, it is worth noting that delivery can take place with a large (up to several hours) delay.

There remains a general feeling of unreliability of service and 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 question, on the solution of which I spent too much time. I started to think that I’m going to make a hell of it on Yandex - I don’t have any problems with it. True, I had fears that this would increase the likelihood that my name would be associated with this letter, since Yandex knows very much about my person, but by that time I was almost all the same.

I will say right away that I have constant problems with entering Yandex via Thor. Sometimes you have to change your personality 10 times to stop receiving the message “403 Access to our service is temporarily prohibited!”. Interestingly, is it all so? I could not find other complainants on the Internet. He wrote in support, but they once answered by requesting information from the page yandex.ru/internet, and then disappeared.

Well, okay, the output node that suits Yandex, picked up, passed the registration, wrote a letter, press “Send”, and in response receive the error "Incorrect contact address". Search by error did not give anything. The change of the addressee also did not help. Requests for support via Thor are not sent. Well, not so no. Not really wanted.

Tutanota

For the Russian ear, the name of the service sounds a bit ridiculous, but for my task it didn’t matter. Registration went quickly, a very pleasant, functional, minimalist web interface was opened, and a message appeared that, in order to protect against spammers, my account would be checked for up to 48 hours, during which I could 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 further searches that day, and I had to postpone the resolution of the issue.

When I went back to tutanota.com after about 36 hours, my mail was already operational. Several test letters on VFEmail went without problems.

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 addressee, which he must somehow convey to him. When you send a protected letter, in fact only a link comes to a special account on the website tutanota.de, where after entering the password received from the sender of the letter, you can enter a special version of the web interface, read the letter and send a reply. Very, in my opinion, a convenient solution.

In the end, I stopped at Tutanote. And there is no answer from the hospital yet, but I think the post office is not to blame.

References:

• Free Webmail for Better Privacy
• Comparing encryption
• ProtonMail or what is it really?