[tor-talk] Best onion email system?

[krishna e bera]

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