Anonymous e-mail accounts with Mozilla Thunderbird

Anonymous e-mail accounts

The reasons as to why using e-mail accounts together with JonDonym may be:

You have to use unsave networks like WLAN at the airport or hotel and need a secure connection to your mail provider.
Avoid interconnections between your e-mail identity and other data colletions.
You would like to have a data retention free email account. (IP addresses of JonDonym mixes are useless for data retention.)
You do not want to disclose your location to recipients and mail providers to avoid tracking of your movements.
You would like to use a pseudonym without linkability to your real identity (anonymous email account).

If you would like to have an anonymous email account, please create a new account first. Choose an E-Mail address of the form anonymous1234abcd@xx.yy, that is "anonymous" + numbers + letters. If all JonDo users create addresses of this form, they are much less distinguishable. You can use JonDoFox to create the account in the web interface of the new provider. Some recommendations for a mail provider:

fastmail.fm is recommended by Wikileaks.
secure-mail.biz offers anonymous e-mail accounts without data retention.
(free version without SMTP support, premium version full featured)
VFEmail needs a temporary mail address for account creation.
riseup.net is a service for political activists.
hushmail.com offers some more privacy features, see Keep your E-mail communication.
Vekja.net offers anonymous e-mail accounts for 100 Bitcoins per month.

Security Notes: Informations about long term communication partners can be used to feature out your real identity! If you need a highly anonymous e-mail account to do something – may be for whistleblowing – create a new mail account and use it only for this one job. Delete the account, if the job was done and never use it for other communication partners.

Mozilla Thunderbird configuration

Using an email client like Mozilla Thunderbird is more comfortable for anonymous email accounts than using the overloaded webinterfaces of some mail providers. Using OpenPGP or S/MIME encryption for your email communication is possible and well supported.

For using anonymous mail accounts we recommend the creation of a new Thunderbird profil for separating anonymous and non-anonymous communication. Otherwise you may compromise your anonymous mail accounts by sending a mail without switch your proxy settings to JonDonym.

You can start the prifil manager of Thunderbird at command line or in the DOS box with the command line option -P.

> thunderbird -P You may choose "Create Profile..." and disable the option "Don not ask at startup".

Proxy Settings for anonymous Profil

At first start with the anonymous profil the account creation wizzard will start too. Because the network connection is not anonymous you have to close the wizzard and set the proxy. After proxy configuration you can run the account creation wizzard again.

Open the dialog "Preferences". The proxy settings you will find at "Advanced -> Network -> Connection button ".

Set ALL Thunderbird proxies to host=127.0.0.1, port=4001. Because of a bug in Thunderbird 3 you have to disable the option Use this proxy for all protocols and set for each protocol the proxy host and port.

Aditional you have to set some configuration variables in the "Advaced Options" to get a secure configuration. Open the Config Editor for advanced options and modify the value of the following variables. Open "Preferences Dialog -> Advanced -> General" and click on the button "Config Editor". Some options you can set in the "Preferences Dialog" and main menu, too. But I want to keep this turial small as possible and list it here.

Important security settings
network.proxy.socks_remote_dns	true
network.cookies.cookiesBehavior	2
mail.smtpserver.default.hello_argument	localhost (create a new variable of type string)
mailnews.start_page.enabled	false
Remove informations about your prefered language and your regional provenance
mailnews.send_default_charset	UTF-8
mailnews.reply_header_type	1
mailnews.replay_header_authorwrote	%s
Write outgoing messages in plain text
mail.html_compose	false
mail.<identity>.default.compose_html	false
mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed	false
mail.default_html_action	1
Read incoming messages in plain text Otherwise dangerous e-mail attachments could compromise your computer.
mailnews.display.prefer_plaintext	true
rss.display.prefer_plaintext	true
mail.inline_attachments	false
You may apply these settings in the menu "View", too.
Recommendations for OpenPGP/Enigmail
extension.enigmail.mimeHashAlgorithm	5
extension.enigmail.addHeaders	false
extension.enigmail.agentAdditionalParam	--no-emit-version --no-comment --display-charset utf-8

Create a mail account

After setting the proxy and secure your Thunderbird you can create your mail account in Thunderbird. Open the dialog "Account Settings" and choose "Add Mail Account". A wizzard will ask your for your e-mail address and password and offers you some settings suitable for your mail provider. Mostly the wizzard will prefer an IMAP postbox. Please, choose a POP3 postbox for incoming e-mails and check the SMTP settings for outgoing e-mails.

Incoming e-mail

We do NOT recommend the using of IMAP postboxes because of privacy issues. All messages are stored on the mail server. Additional it takes a lot of JonDonym premium traffic because all messages are downloaded again for each reading. Please switch to a POP3 postbox.

Click on the "Edit" button and adapt the settings like shown in the screenshot above.

Outgoing e-mail

Because of spam protection all premium exit mixes block port 25. You can use port 456 (SMTP-SSL) or port 587 (submission) for sending emails with Thunderbird. Please check whether your mail provider offers these possibilities and replace the settings like shown above.

Re-test the configuration and if it works create the account.

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