Merry Chistmas! Small Sister is here!
Today marks the birth of our Small Sister application SmallMail, a mail system that delivers a lot of privacy to users. The software is now officially in beta. After some hard work Santa is dropping a system that hides the servers in the Tor-network, makes a mailbox anonymous and more over delivers encryption every step of the way the message floats.
We have played with the software for some time and now it’s your turn. Have fun with it and download it. Discover bugs, bring in new ideas, help us to port it to Mac OS X or Windows, build package for Linux, add code, bring documentation. Have fun with it. Join our mailinglist. Heck there is even some documentation.
This release does still require some technical knowledge to get the show on the road, but our aim is to deliver a tool that is very user-friendly and ready for use by a very wide audience.
You can setup your own server and work with friends or use our server for free (just configure cemwana5zuid4oq5.onion as the server in your application). We give you this option, but do not guarantee anything. But it might be helpful to get started.
Merry christmas to ya’all!
Thanks for developing SmallMail!
Here in Sweden application like this is really needed, as the government will scan all private e-mails crossing the country border and most likely store contact information of citizens to be able to generate sociograms. All this violating article 12 of UN human rights and a tremendeous intrusion over the citizens free mind and communication.
The problem today is to find an easy application and installation so that it can be used by the average “Joe” person. Perhaps SmallMail can be used as this. It’s good that the source code is free and open source, to be able to verify directly the Python script, and also that it can be run on all platforms.
Now, what I actually would like to see is, instead of a mail program, I would like to see a client proxy (similar to Omnimix) that you can send/receive your mail through with your favorite e-mail client program. This proxy should be written in Python and should encrypt/decrypt on the fly and communicate through Tor. I think Thunderbird and other e-mail clients can be configured to read from more than one e-mail provider: the client proxy server and the ordinary ISP mail server. So your secured and unsecured mail channel can be polled at the same time.
All this packed in a complete installation package or step-by-step installation instructions, for simplicity, for average Joe. Much can go wrong with 6 different components to work together: Python, Tor, GnuPG, PyMe, wxPython and SmallMail.
I’ve tried to install and use SmallMail for Windows XP. Variable HOME was not defined in my environment (HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH were). I managed to write an e-mail but failed sending it. Don’t remember what the error was – something that TOR server could not be contacted? I know that my ISP, Telia, the biggest ISP in Sweden has blocked anonymous sending on SMTP port. They seem to verify that mail headers are correct set according to Telia. This precaution to block SPAM sending. I have not checked this yet though. I’ll maybe later try to debug with Wireshark. If the proxy can send encrypted through HTTP or HTTPS to TOR so it will not be blocked that would be nice. I think many big ISP block sending of obscured mails on the SMTP ports.
I’ve not yet figured out how to send to the mailing list. Is there any forum for SmallSister? I could not send mail to the smallsister-owner. I get a return mail “Sender address rejected: Spam not accepted”.
Keep up the good work!