Advice: Email Privacy Noob

Hi everyone,

Can I switch to a product like Countermail and still keep my email addreses? I have an address (for business) at my own domain which I understand that I can port that over to CM. But I also use a .mac address for personal email. I forward both to my gmail account.

Is email forwarding defeating what I'm gaining with CM? Or can I keep the .mac address and forward it to CM?

Some background on me:

Let me disclose that I am totally green to cyber security. It has always been a casual interest but I never really took it so seriously until we learned of Prism (and eventually XKeyscore). Not that there weren't reasons before then to dive in but for whatever reason that was my tipping point. I am coming from a position of having my pants so deep around my ankles it's been a real uphill climb learning about all of this stuff in a meaningful way. For instance I use gmail as my main account, I am using most of apple's productivity services such as ical, icloud, address book, etc. But I'm trying to ween myself off these very convenient yet potentially dangerous services. I recently switched from safari to iron. I also search using duckduckgo now instead of google and mapquest instead of google maps. I just discovered this site recently and am really enjoying all of the relevant topics.

Sorry for the country road tour of my background but maybe it's relevant to my inquiry (and at least explains my ignorance). I am curious about encryption and email security/privacy. Privacy is the priority here since i'm not a journalist or a spy (just a concerned citizen). I don't believe I am a target any more than the next guy. I do however want to stop leaving my cyber crumbs everywhere I go so, among other things, I have been looking to change my email service to something like Countermail. I have so many questions but I'll spare you and only ask the one at the moment.

Also let me know if I'm being silly? I can appreciate that all of this is a knee-jerk reaction but silly or not I am truly freaked by what's going on in the world today......

ENTSEC

 

What's a .mac email address? Where do you get that? Apple? If you MX-point your own domain to our server, emails will go directly to our server. But forwarding will make it possible for the first server to scan your message (if they want).

 

The .mac address will go through Apple (NSA) servers and then go to Countermail servers.

 

hmmm i was afraid of that. Yes it is an Apple email from back in the days of their [retired] .mac service. I have quite a cyber trail at this point which is why i'm motivated to drop out and clean it up if possible (funny this is taking priority over cleaning up my credit).

so guys, being the experts, are there any tutorials or best practices articles that you might suggest to someone in my position? my main goal is to drop off the cyber map as much is realistic. I don't do anything i think that would draw attention directly but that doesn't seem to matter anymore. as a filmmaker with a solid interest in politics, privacy, and the general crazy train this world is on i want to avoid the nat sec dragnet. but this seems like an artform as i read about it. i just want to learn all i can to make this happen. thanks

 

Short of faking your death, there's no way to "drop off the cyber map". What you can do is to start using a VPN service. That will hide your Internet activity from your ISP and other local observers. Just search Wilders, and you'll find many threads about VPNs.

But don't use the VPN for everything. Just use it for activity that you want to keep private. You can gradually shift such activity to it. To avoid correlations, don't mix activity using your true name with "anonymous" activity.

Once you're using a VPN service, you can further segregate activity by tunnelling other VPNs through the first one, and using multiple pseudonyms. It's easy to do that using VirtualBox VMs. You can also add Tor to the mix. There are also many threads about that on Wilders.

 

I'm new to this as well. My understanding is that you can't achieve that 100% until you unplug your computer from the internet.

Here is what I learned in the past few weeks:

1. my top email choices counter mail, riseup and a/i
2. use email client and set it to download email from the server and delete it on the server ASAP - I believe this can be set up with POP
3. use Start Page instead of Google

Im also making it my goal to stop using anything Google, MIcrosoft, Apple.

 

I have a funny riseup story. When you apply for an account your supposed to give them a reason why. I wanted to see what happened and chose to just put "Gimme an email, I'm great!" I got one within 24 hours which is actually quick by riseup standards. Just funny to me that people think you have to give your political agenda but really they will just give you one if you ask.

 

You can't achieve it until you unplug yourself from civilization and government eyes. Or you could just try zero communication outside of face to face with no spying nearby.

I say that, because telephone, snail mail, any communication you don't have control over isn't private (except by luck). The Internet actually makes it a lot easier for pseudonymity and encryption.

 

Indeed!

Using -https://ns1.anonbox.net/ through some complex chain of VPNs and Tor, I can receive fairly anonymous email. Using Mixmaster nyms and alt.anonymous.messages via VPNs and Tor, I can receive highly anonymous email.

Receiving even somewhat anonymous snailmail, on the other hand, is very hard.

 

While I agree that this is the best way of protecting yourself, on the other hand I find it a bit complicated to make it day by day.
I mean that I am not too worried about using a good VPN for everything. Their IP's are shared, thus I do not see the risk of using the same IP for example for wilders, my bank, youporn, etc.: the activity cannot be linked to a single user anyway.

 

It all makes sense now, I was raided by the VPN police for unsolicited youporn connections. It was you! It all makes sense now.

I use countermail now as its quite similar to lavabit. It costs a little much but whatever, I prefer it over my emails being stored in clear-text.