EFF - November 28, 2012 | By Erik Bauman and Eva Galperin and Kurt Opsahl and Peter Eckersley
A Tutorial on Anonymous Email AccountsSo, just how do you exchange messages with someone, without leaving discoverable records with your webmail provider? This is an important practical skill, whether you need to use it to keep your love life private, to talk confidentially with a journalist, or because you're engaged in politics in a country where the authorities use law enforcement and surveillance methods against you.
Because webmail providers like Google choose to keep extremely extensive logs1, protecting your pseudonymous webmail against this kind of de-anonymization attack requires forethought and discipline.
You should use the Tor Browser Bundle when setting up and accessing your webmail account. You must always use Tor. If you mess up just once and log into the pseudonymous account from your real IP address, chances are that your webmail provider will keep linkable records about you forever. You will also need to ensure that you do not give your webmail provider any information that is linked to your real world identity. For instance, if prompted for an email account, do not use another real account during signup; use a throwaway address instead.
Download the Tor Browser Bundle
To use Tor, start by downloading the Tor Browser Bundle by going to Tor Download page:
https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en, shown in the screenshot below, and click on the Download button for the appropriate browser bundle for your operating system.
The Tor Bowser Bundle is a zip self-extracting archive. Click "extract" to extract the files from the archive.
To start the Tor Browser in
Windows, go to Local Disk-->Program Files-->Tor Browser and double click on "Start Tor Browser,"
When the Tor Browser launches, it will automatically test itself to see if Tor is working correctly. If Tor is correctly anonymizing your traffic, it will display a message saying,
"Congratulations. Your browser is configured to use Tor." It will also display the IP address that your traffic appears to be coming from. This is the IP address your webmail provider will see when you go to set up your webmail account.
Full article inc images and links