Hacker Email

by Sh0kwave

Hackers and other privacy minded individuals use Proton Mail (protonmail.com).  It is hosted in Switzerland to take advantage of Swiss privacy laws, and is encrypted end-to-end.  Go on the dark web and you will see that a lot of contact email addresses are @protonmail.com.

You say you haven't been on the dark web?  Why not?  Get a Tor browser and a personal VPN and check it out.  Why do you need both?  Using the Tor network will get you anonymity, but does not guarantee privacy.  It will hide your source IP address, but if you visit a site outside of Tor your traffic is not necessarily encrypted.  VPN will give you privacy (encryption), but not necessarily anonymity, which is why you should use both.  Be careful, not all VPN providers are the same.  You want one that does not maintain any logs, or they might turn over their logs of your activity to law enforcement if asked.

Back to email.  Two other services you should be aware of are Mailinator and Guerrilla Mail.  These are similar, but have a few key differences.  If you are being asked by a product or service to provide an email address so you can receive an activation link or code (and you know this will generate a never ending flood of spam in the future), give them: anything-at-all@mailinator.com

When Mailinator receives an email from anywhere with any name, it instantly creates that mailbox and keeps it around for about an hour.  It is not private.  In fact, there is no security.  Anyone who knows the name of the mailbox can read the contents.  You could try to give your mailbox a "tricky name" but that is security by obscurity, and it is not a good idea.  And that is not what Mailinator is for anyway.  It is disposable email, or burner email, just for one-time use type activities.  And, an important point, it is receive only.

The fact that you cannot send email from Mailinator is why you might want to use guerrillamail.com.  It is similar to Mailinator in that you can send mail to it with any name and a mailbox will instantly be created for about an hour.  But you can also send from Guerrilla Mail.  You can also pick your own address to send from, and there are multiple domain options to use.  Very rarely I have used Mailinator and the email was deemed not valid or blocked by the service or product I was trying to validate.

However Guerrilla Mail gives you some choices.  How about 1337hacker@sharklasers.com?  Or spamdump@pokemail.net?  You can create these.  You can send to a single email address, no CC or BCC allowed.  (So you cannot use it to generate your own spam.)

Mailinator and Guerrilla Mail can be handy, but remember they provide no security and no privacy.  If you want that, use something like Proton Mail.  And it you are really, really serious, use it with a Tor browser and a VPN provider that does not keep logs.