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Fedora Email

Someone just notified me about this one, and well, I thought I might squeeze it inbetween my more important work, so let's go. You can make an account through TOR and without enabling JavaScript, but cookies seem to be required. The page tries to load a recaptcha but it's not being used for anything, it seems. You can login to the webmail without JS, but much functionality is JS-dependent - like even reading the mail, or changing settings. Of course, in the end we want to handle our mail with our separate mail clients, and Fedora does support that option; sending and receiving both work properly. Fedora allows creating aliases through the web interface, but they reveal the original identity in the headers. This provider also leaks your IP address to your contacts (with the header X-Originating-IP), so you better use it only through anonymizers! You can enable 2FA, as well as GPG encrypted storage of mail (this would protect against hackers reading your messages, but not against Fedora itself), but I'm not going to test that. So, technically this provider seems pretty good; any other problems?

Well, it requires a real name for signing up, and the ToS prohibits giving fake data:

When you create an account with us, you must provide us information that is accurate, complete, and current at all times. Failure to do so constitutes a breach of the Terms, which may result in immediate termination of your account on our Service.

Zero idea how well they check up on this, and I won't get to learn, as I don't intend to use this provider. The entire ToS is auto-generated - "Terms and Conditions for Fedora Email based on the T&C example from TermsFeed." - so the administration doesn't seem to be taking anything too seriously. There is no privacy policy, either; the only thing you learn about their data handling is this tidbit from the main page:

What is this?

An email server that doesn't sell your data.

Amazing. It might still give it away for free, though. And you never get told what is stored and for how long. Who actually knows who's running this? It's not listed anywhere. Usability-wise, Fedora seems adequate - but there are some suspicions because of the lazy ToS, no privacy policy, and shadowy administration (assuming it's run by one guy, it might just go the way of dismail soon, so I don't recommend relying on it long term). However - if all you need is a provider that doesn't discriminate against TOR, is free, and works with E-mail clients without hassle - then Fedora should fit the bill.