Type of site | Webmail, E-Mail service |
---|---|
Available in | English |
URL | sigaint.org, sigaintevyh2rzvw.onion (defunct) [1] |
Commercial | No |
Registration | Required |
Users | about 370,000 [2] |
Current status | Offline |
SIGAINT was a Tor hidden service offering secure email services. According to its FAQ page, its web interface used SquirrelMail which does not rely on JavaScript. Passwords couldn't be recovered. Users received two addresses per inbox: one at sigaint.org for receiving clearnet emails and the other at its .onion address only for receiving emails sent from other Tor-enabled email services. Free accounts had 50 MB of storage space and expired after one year of inactivity. Upgraded accounts had access to POP3, IMAP, SMTP, larger size limits, full disk encryption, and never expired.
The service was recommended by various security specialists as a highly secure email service. [3] [4] [1]
In April 2015, a number of user accounts were compromised in what was speculated at the time to be a government-sponsored de-anonymization attack from 70 different exit nodes. [5] [6] A SIGAINT administrator said that the hidden service was not hacked but malicious exit nodes had modified their clearnet page so that its link to the hidden service pointed to an imposter hidden service, effectively tricking users with a phishing attack that harvested login credentials. [2] SIGAINT has since added SSL to their gateway to protect against such attacks. [7]
The service is currently down. Both its ".org" website and its onion link return error code 500. [8]
Hushmail is an encrypted proprietary web-based email service offering PGP-encrypted e-mail and vanity domain service. Hushmail uses OpenPGP standards. If public encryption keys are available to both recipient and sender, Hushmail can convey authenticated, encrypted messages in both directions. For recipients for whom no public key is available, Hushmail will allow a message to be encrypted by a password and stored for pickup by the recipient, or the message can be sent in cleartext. In July, 2016, the company launched an iOS app that offers end-to-end encryption and full integration with the webmail settings. The company is located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a computer network. In an onion network, messages are encapsulated in layers of encryption, analogous to the layers of an onion. The encrypted data is transmitted through a series of network nodes called "onion routers," each of which "peels" away a single layer, revealing the data's next destination. When the final layer is decrypted, the message arrives at its destination. The sender remains anonymous because each intermediary knows only the location of the immediately preceding and following nodes. While onion routing provides a high level of security and anonymity, there are methods to break the anonymity of this technique, such as timing analysis.
Yahoo! Mail is an email service offered by the American company Yahoo, Inc. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. Business email was previously available with the Yahoo! Small Business brand, before it transitioned to Verizon Small Business Essentials in early 2022. Launched on October 8, 1997, as of January 2020, Yahoo! Mail has 225 million users.
A dark net or darknet is an overlay network within the Internet that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, and often uses a unique customized communication protocol. Two typical darknet types are social networks, and anonymity proxy networks such as Tor via an anonymized series of connections.
.onion is a special-use top level domain name designating an anonymous onion service, which was formerly known as a "hidden service", reachable via the Tor network. Such addresses are not actual DNS names, and the .onion TLD is not in the Internet DNS root, but with the appropriate proxy software installed, Internet programs such as web browsers can access sites with .onion addresses by sending the request through the Tor network.
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of notable webmail providers who offer a web interface in English.
Outlook.com, formerly named Hotmail, is a webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks services.
Tor, short for "The Onion Router," is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic via a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network that consists of more than seven thousand relays.
DuckDuckGo (DDG) is an internet privacy company. DuckDuckGo offers a number of products oriented towards helping people protect their privacy online, most notably, a private search engine, a browser and browser extension, email protection and app tracking protection for Android.
The Hidden Wiki was a dark web MediaWiki wiki operating as Tor hidden services that could be anonymously edited after registering on the site. The main page served as a directory of links to other .onion sites.
Tor Mail was a Tor hidden service that went offline in August 2013 after an FBI raid on Freedom Hosting. The service allowed users to send and receive email anonymously to email addresses inside and outside the Tor network.
The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets: overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. Through the dark web, private computer networks can communicate and conduct business anonymously without divulging identifying information, such as a user's location. The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the Web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web.
Proton Mail is an end-to-end encrypted email service founded in 2013 in Geneva, Switzerland. It uses client-side encryption to protect email content and user data before they are sent to Proton Mail servers, unlike other common email providers such as Gmail and Outlook.com. The service can be accessed through a webmail client, the Tor network, or dedicated iOS and Android apps.
Doxbin is a defunct onion service. It is a type of pastebin primarily used by people posting personal data of any person of interest.
Grams is a discontinued search engine for Tor based darknet markets launched in April 2014, and closed in December 2017. The service allowed users to search multiple darknet markets for products like drugs and guns from a simple search interface, and also provided the capability for its users to hide their transactions through its bitcoin tumbler Helix.
Clearnet is a term that typically refers to the publicly accessible Internet. Sometimes "clearnet" is used as a synonym for "surface web"—excluding both the darknet and the deep web. The World Wide Web is one of the most popular distributed services on the Internet, and the surface web is composed of the web pages and databases that are indexed by traditional search engines.
The Tor Carding Forum (TCF) was a Tor-based forum specializing in the trade of stolen credit card details, identity theft and currency counterfeiting. The site was founded by an individual known as 'Verto' who also founded the now defunct Evolution darknet market.
Ahmia is a clearnet search engine for Tor's hidden services created by Juha Nurmi.
The Facebook onion address located at facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onion is a site that allows access to Facebook through the Tor protocol, using its .onion top-level domain.