Generate a new email account
Most web services - including blog hosting services - require an email address so that they communicate with their users. For our purposes, this email address can’t connect to any personally identifiable information, including the IP address we used to sign up for the service. This means we need a new account which we sign up for using Tor, and we need to ensure that none of the data we use - name, address, etc. - can be linked to us. You should NOT use an existing email account - it’s very likely that you signed up for the account from an undisguised IP, and most webmail providers store the IP address you signed up under.
a) Choose a webmail provider - we recommend Riseup.net and Gmail, but as long as you’re using Tor, you could use Yahoo or Hotmail as well. Also, you can easily register a free and quick webmail account with fastmail.fm.
Why?
Webmail is the best way to create a “disposeable” email address, one you can use to sign up for services and otherwise ignore. But a lot of users also use webmail as their main email as well. If you do this, it’s important to understand some of the strengths and weaknesses of different mail providers.
Hotmail and Yahoo mail both have a “security feature” that makes privacy advocates very unhappy. Both include the IP address of the computer used to send any email. This isn’t relavent when you’re accessing those services through Tor, since the IP address will be a Tor IP address, rather than your IP address. Also, Hotmail and Yahoo don’t offer secure HTTP (https) interfaces to webmail - again, this doesn’t matter so long as you use Tor every time you use these mail services. But many users will want to check their mail in circumstances where they don’t have Tor installed - for your main webmail account, it’s worth choosing a provider that has an https interface to mail.
Riseup.net provides webmail with a very high degree of security. They support PGP encryption (Pretty Good Privacy) - which is very useful if you correspond with people who also use PGP. You can sign up for a free account at www.riseup.net and ask your correspondents (recipients) to register a free account as well.
Gmail, while it doesn’t advertise itself as a secure mail service, has some nice security features built in. If you visit this special URL, your entire session with Gmail will be encrypted via https. (I recommend bookmarking that URL and using it for all your Gmail sessions.) Gmail doesn’t include the originating IP in mail headers, and you can add PGP support to Gmail by using the FireGPG, a Firefox extension that adds strong crypto to Gmail. FireGPG brings an interface to encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of text in any web page using GnuPG.
A warning on all webmail accounts - you’re trusting the company that runs the service with all your email. If that company gets hacked, or if they are pressured by other governments to reveal information, they’ve got access to the text of all the mails you’ve received and sent. The only way around this is to write your mails in a text editor, encrypt them on your own machine using PGP and send them to someone also using PGP. This is way beyond the level of secrecy most of us want and need, but it’s important to remember that you’re trusting a company that might or might not have your best interests at heart. Yahoo, in particular, has a nasty habit of turning over information to the Chinese government - Chinese dissidents are now suing the company for illegal release of their data. Just something to think about when you decide who to trust…
b) Turn Tor on in your browser, or start XeroBank. Visit the mail site of your choice and sign up for a new account. Don’t use any personally identifiable information - consider becoming a boringly named individual in a country with a lot of web users, like the US or the UK. Set a good, strong password (at least eight characters, include at least one number or special character) for the account and choose a username similar to what you’re going to name your blog.
c) Make sure you’re able to log onto the mail service and send mail while Tor is enabled. It is most likely that Tor changes its circuit every 10 minutes and this could disrupt your webmail operations, so you should consider limiting the process of writing a new email to 10 minutes.
