Re: [tor-talk] Are webmail providers biased against Tor?

[grarpamp <grarpamp@xxxxxxxxx>]

There have been a number of threads on the email / phone issues,
as in another post, one of them is here...
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2012-October/025923.html


If anyone is able to create a new account with Gmail, Yahoo, or
Outlook via Tor without giving a phone number... please log
the exit fingerprint and post here or let me know.
The answer on this for years seems to have been no, or
ambiguously stated, or unverifiable through subsequent testing.

The same thing goes for creation via clearnet without phone.
Supposedly Gmail allows this. Status of Yahoo and Outlook
seem not to have been mentioned or tested lately.

Though irrelavent to potential new users today, Gmail was generally
known to grandfather *old* accounts in regards to both Tor and phone.
Yahoo and Outlook seem unknown there.

The only reason to have any interest in the "big three", is that they
provide a suite of useful free services via one account. That's a valid
use case. Therefore properly testing the Tor/Phone combinations
and publicly pushing them on the issue is important.


The question was "Are [web]mail providers biased against [Tor]?"

AFAIK, those three have not gone on written record explicitly for or
against Tor. You'd need to do more testing above to determine the
situation. They obviously have IP=user blocking / phone issues in
their head whether or not Tor is involved.


There are over 6500 relays and over 1000 exits within tor community.
There's no reason some of those same relay operators, and you, could
not, instead of deploying a new relay, deploy a new Tor and Phone
friendly, even onion accessible, email service. It is clearly a needed
complementary service to Tor. And the more legit people that use such
third tier services, the more you force first and second tier (work / ISP /
school) to accept the principle.
Also, webmail sucks, eats bandwidth and CPU, and is a security
and maintenance risk. No reason you cannot offer only IMAP and
SUBMISSION with your shiny new service. Anyone who can
figure out Tor can certainly configure their mail client.
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