Free Webmail Services for Better Privacy

Yes, another one of these threads/articles but I tried to go just a little more in-depth than what we normally see.

Most of this is probably nothing new to you guys & girls but combined, you all know more who it can help out than I do alone. If anyone thinks any other providers should be added, be sure post here or somehow let me know.

http://www.thesimplecomputer.info/email-for-privacy.html

 

Thanks for this... favorited. I'll check them out one by one.

 

Excellent post! Thank you!

 

Hey, your RSS feed on your site doesn't work.

When I clicked the RSS feed it gave me a few options to have to install add-ons. Never had this happen before. So I installed the Google Reader addon for Chrome and then clicked your RSS button again and then selected View in Google Reader from the menu and then it loads Google Reader but in the viewing pane the following error: "The feed being requested cannot be found."

It's all kind of odd. You might consider fixing the RSS button so it directs the user to a page where they select their RSS reader, or can copy the RSS feed to manually update their RSS reader (like most sites do). What's the feed url?

That aside, I think your site is really useful and would like to keep track of your posts. Cheers.

 

Thanks for letting me know that. I had some '3am & no Redbull' quality code in there. It should be working fine now.

 

Thanks for the list. I tried vmail once because I thought it looked cool, but it didn't work right. Hopefully they have been able to get it up and running properly.

 

Very nice site.

I don't have a need for Free Webmail, but the article you wrote had me engaged until the end and I learned a lot. And after reading your article on DNS, I'm going to give HTTP-DNS a try.

Looking forward to seeing what you'll be publishing next...

 

Good job, awkwardpenguin.
Just wanted to let you know that I tried vmail and it really is buggy. I couldn't send any messages because it claimed there was spamming going on at my IP address.
This is not at all a criticism of you, awkwardpenguin, because you did mention this in your review. I just wanted folks to know.
Really good list!

 

I've been using vmail for about a month now and the only problem I've noticed was their site being down for 1 day (which someone in here mentioned, abruptly & on point ). Outside of that, no problems.

 

Well when I have time I'll try to figure out what's wrong on my end. I really like vmail's minimalistic approach.
Thanks for letting us know, luciddream.

 

Thanks for that. I'm going to give them another try.

 

I'll second what luciddream has said. I had no problems signing up or with the interface. It's all html, css and JavaScript --not even a captcha to sign up with.

The past few weeks I've been watching vmail's downtime and the homepage was inaccessible twice. Both times were Saturdays (this weekend most recently), were 2 weeks apart, and for pretty much the whole day. Other than that, vmail is a very good choice.

 

https://qip.ru
http://www.seznam.cz/
http://www.inbox.lv/?language=en
http://mail.ru/
http://www.sme.sk/?ref=post
http://box.az/
http://mail.lv/
http://www.mail.ee/
https://lavabit.com/
http://privatdemail.net/en/
http://meta.ua/

Offshore email providers, enjoy!

 

I had tried vmail several months ago. I gave it another try and it worked out just fine. I did a test email and I sent myself an animated gif with some text in the message. I opened the animated gif and it opened it up as a text document, so it was just a bunch of random characters. So I saved the gif to the desktop and it was okay. I put a link to a website and the link just showed up as text. I had to copy and paste it into a new tab to go to the link.

They say they destroy logs after 3 months and strip the IP out of the header. Looks pretty cool so far.

 

These look interesting. But I am a little confused about http://privatdemail.net/en/. How could an email provider in Egypt protect someone's privacy?

I tried to open a mail.ru account once and they wanted a cell phone number for text verification.

 

ht tp://receive-sms-online.com/

PD

 

I was concerned about who is behind that email service since they ask you to sign up from your home IP, proxies are banned. The privacy seal confused me first and made me think that some kind of privacy association run the service but then I realised that it is only a seal and there is zero information about who is behind the email service on their site. Anyone can add a privacy seal to their site, without verification it means nothing really.

I emailed the webmaster a few months ago asking for information about who runs the service, individual, company, etc. I never got a reply. So, someone is paying for a server in Egypt out of their own pocket to provide Internet people with a free email "anonymous" service that needs your home IP during sign up "to stop spammers". Good luck with that.

 

The seal has to do with a group called Der Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung, or AK-Vorrat for short. My German is fading, but it's something to the effect of The Workgroup for Data Retention.
http://www.wirspeichernnicht.de/

From the site (roughly), they're a "..nationwide union of civil rights activists, data protectors and internet users, coordinated for working against the planned logging of telecommunications."

The JonDo guys have one of the images on their site, so does the German privacy foundation. I'd say at least, that Privat is part of this network.
http://anonymous-proxy-servers.net/
http://server.privacyfoundation.de/

To be 'allowed' to use the seal on your site, you fill out an application form on AK-Vorrat's site, they check over your site and either approve you or not. I'd think they're not auditing logfiles, or lack thereof but only making sure the site isn't something malicious or other.

To attempt answering Caspian's question of basically, how are we SURE? I don't think we can be, same story as with any other provider. They're likely not operating out of some embassy's basement safehouse anyway, so Egyptian fuzz can raid the servers whenever they like. That can happen to a small company in the US too, just need to raise the right eyebrows. I'll postulate the chance of a raid or subpoena happening to offices in Mountain View, Ca would be less than Cairo, though. Such is the gamble we make.

I agree though, some more info from Privat would be reassuring. I sent another email out to both Privat and Vmail asking about how they're funded and to explain a bit of background info. If I hear anything, I'll of course post it.

Privat's FAQ says that they don't send account approval emails to IP addresses of open proxies, but you can sign up through Tor with them just fine.
http://privatdemail.net/en/faq.html#Keine Bestätigungsmail

Thanks for all the extra links, that sms site would be especially useful. I'm pretty sure there's a mail.xx domain for most countries in the world. Whether they're all hosted in that respective domain's country, I'm not sure.

 

yeah keep us posted id love to see what vmail has to say, i too would not trust an egypt located provider thou aka privatdemail , perhaps im just too paranoid

p.s : so we got by popularity

riseup
vmail <privacy policy being drafted ....
any others? has anyone used computersaysno recommendations?

thanks for the sms service pauly , this could come in handy , anything else you got dont hesitate to post or pm

 

I got a reply from Privat yesterday.

"This platform is supported by people from European Union who are against data retention, so it is obvious that there are simply no logfiles regarding any type of communication. Of course all filesystems are encrypted, even operator in Egypt does not have access to system keys. Certainly key for filesystem is neither located in Egypt nor European Union, in case of seizure, this key will be destroyed."

Nothing from vmail yet.

I'd add myopera mail to that list if you're in to webmail. Fast, light, reliable, no ip in headers, owned & funded by Opera software.

 

I tried to register at http://www.seznam.cz/ and this is what happened, LOL!



I tried to register at inbox.lv and it would not accept my captcha. No matter how any times I entered it correctly.

I tried to register with http://www.sme.sk/?ref=post And I got "Sorry, Post.sk is not available in your country. We appologize for any inconvenience."

I tried Mail.ru and they want a cell phone number.

I tried Box.az and it gave me this message. "Registration is temporarily suspended. Sorry, registration is currently not possible. Please try again later."

I successfully set up a mail.lv account! Woo Hoo! And I must say it's pretty cool. I sent my self a test email with a large animated gif. They allow attachments up to 50MB! Very cool, in my opinion.

I'll try the rest later.

 

Heres a list for people to look over, and take a look around at the encryption software reviewed on the site also

http://www.hacker10.com/email-encryption/