Getting your key for Icedove

Make sure to start Icedove (known as Thunderbird in 3.0) when Tails informs you that Tor is ready. If you’re privacy conscious it’s probably best to create a new email address to be used exclusively with Tails. If you’re feeling lazy you can just enter the details of a common mail provider such as Gmail and Icedove will do the rest. If, however, you want to keep all your email traffic inside the Tor network, it’s best to make sure you and your contacts use a mail provider that offers a dark web (.onion) address. A few providers that do this include Mail2Tor, Riseup and OnionMail. Just click ‘manual config’ and enter the server settings from the relevant website. Once this is set up. Select Enigmail from the Icedove Menu and start the Setup Wizard. Choose the ‘extended’ set up for Advanced Users and choose to create a new keypair. Even if you have used GPG before, it’s important to have a separate keypair for your dark web identity.

Next, you will be asked to create a passphrase for your GPG key. Size matters so do make sure to choose a good quality one.

Next Tails will gather some entropy to make your keypair. This could take some time. At this stage you may also want to generate a revocation certificate in case you ever happen to lose access to your key or want to change your key. You’ll need to make sure that you save the file to your persistent folder or to another medium such as a USB stick to keep it safe.