Guerrilla Mail has a new feature:

https://www.guerrillamail.com/bitcoin

The way it works is that all you do is fill in the “To” and “From”, and then click “Send”. Then deposit some bitcoins and an email gets sent to the other party with instructions for how to withdraw them. You can also track it, and receive a refund, should the other party fail to withdraw them.

There are a few services like these around. What makes this one unique?

The system will validate the email addresses, and probe each of the email servers responsible for receiving the emails to make sure that TLS is available. TLS, the successor to SSL, is needed to make sure that the email is encrypted as it travels through the internet.

TLS is not only good for encryption, it’s also useful to ensure that the server that we are connected to is indeed the server that we want to connect to, because we can check the certificate.

At present, it looks like a lot of email providers do not support TLS yet, but we don’t know how many. For example, Gmail & Hushmail are good, but Yahoo and Outlook/Hotmail are not. You would expect Yahoo and Microsoft to support such a basic feature in this day and age. Of course, all of the major email providers have switched their web interface to HTTPS, but most users are unaware that their email still goes through the internet in clear-text when it travels between servers.

Other notes about the system:

– A unique deposit address is generated for each ‘To’ and ‘From’ combination, for each session. However, the deposit address is remembered forever. So you could add it to your address-book and send more coins to it in the future. The system will look up the address to get the ‘to’ and ‘from’ and send back a confirmation with the tracking code to your address.

– Minimum deposit is 0.0001 BTC, because that’s the economical spendable amount at present. This can change in the future, depending on the exchange rate of bitcoin.

– The emails with withdrawal instructions are sent out immediatelly, no waiting for bitcoin network confirmations. Confirmations are only needed to complete withdrawals. Only 1 confirmation is needed for smaller values, otherwise 3 at present.

– The other party has 7 days to withdraw the coins, otherwise, they will be refunded.

– There’s no login or registration. Use straight away.