Mail dot com

Do you know of any email providers that do not do this? Essentially which email provider is best for baiting?

Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, Yandex they hide your IP but ask for phone number. Outlook hides too but it doesn't ask for phone number as far I as know.

There are ways around the request for a phone number.

I'm trying to think of free ways, but all would need some form of pay with a credit card online. If you wanted a phone not tied to you at all it would be to buy a prepaid phone like tracfone. If your in the US it looks like a cheap plan and phone is going to run $60 online at walmart. If you go in store and spend in cash you wouldn't have a name attached. I'm just wondering if they would have to sign up with an email on the phone once it's active. If you pick this I would make a few emails in gmail and outlook. Give yourself plenty of characters/genders all that.
I thought that once the phone number was verified you could remove it from an account but maybe not on outlook or gmail.

^^ Late reply. I will try this. The problem with outlook is that it locked me out of my account after a week of emailing scammers. A good feature for sure but not helpful for me.

I wonder what the scammers do in this situation. They must face the same problems. Perhaps they use their own phones??

I've only looked through what this email provider claims and it looks pretty good. Free (there are paid plans but the basic one is free), no phone number needed, strips IP.

tutanota.com/

Yeah it was problem with outlook/hotmail when I started too. They have some anti abuse system that locks you out, last guyman I baited that had it got locked out of it too for many times.

I don't know about baiting with tutanota or protonmail. I've avoided them because smarter guyman sometimes suspect and notice that its not usual email address like @outlook.com, @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, etc. 

Its an trend that email providers move to phone verifications, you either have to find an email provider that doesn't require verification or get an pre-paid sim. What you could try is to get an email address from another country. Some of them still don't have phone verifications, but their interfaces isn't in English.
Like I said earlier in my posts, IP is smallest thing you need to worry about if you don't break local laws and abide by rules and ethics. Scammers cant trace your real life identity just with your IP, its coincidences that give them your location away like using your work IP that will most likely point bounce back. Most of the IPs in service are dynamic ones that don't point directly at your location as they get rotated as its expensive for ISP's to give every user an unique static IP.

I use protonmail as my main admin account - I have baited with it in the past but if you forget your encryption key you are screwed. I have the Protonmail Plus paid account and that gives me I think 10 email addresses, and a choice of domains. Most characters I use have gmail or Yahoo accounts. I get round the phone numbers by having PAYG sim and a spare handset for initial verification etc, or use authenticator keys on my computer, I prefer computers to phones anyway as I find phones intrusive. I do have one with it's own complete "character" account set up so I can use that number if needed. I do have to remember not to give out to too many scammers as I sometimes bait the same scammer with two characters at the same time, and it would be odd if they had the same number. I also have a couple of additional Skype numbers which are geo located to my main characters JIC, I can use the US number to receive texts as well.

I also run a couple of VM's as well as virtual android phones if I need to use additional whatsapp installs - again this is rare for me or my characters.

^^ I'm glad proton mail was helpful, I've seen scambaiters suggest it, so i thought it would be good one. I LOVE free apps and programs and try to use them as much as I can, helps the creators out as well as me.