Although the idea of an anonymous email may sound quite sinister, it doesn’t have to be. There are many valid reasons why you may want to send an email without disclosing your identity to the recipient and, despite what some people say, it is not too difficult to do.
In addition to this, many people simply want to keep their personal details personal – especially in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations – because the internet just isn’t as safe as we once believed. These people may include political activists or normal people who just want to be safe in the knowledge that a regular person cannot trace their email back to them.
Email is one of the modern day’s primary methods of communication, and it makes sense that people want to remain anonymous when using it. The most popular reason people send anonymous emails today, however, is not because of political activism but rather the avoidance of spam emails! Spammers can easily harvest personal information sent via email and use it to build email lists for distributing their junk. With all that said, here is how you can send emails anonymously.
#1: Create a New Email Account
This is the most obvious way to send an anonymous email. Your emails cannot be anonymous if you are sending them from a personal or work-related email account.
Making an email address under the guise of a pseudonym is not illegal, so long as you are not impersonating another person. You can easily use services such as Yahoo! and Gmail to create a new email account. When you do this, avoid using any of your personal information that could be used to identify you. It is fine to make up a name and phone number; you don’t need to verify your new email address to use it.
#2: Anonymous Email Services
There are many anonymous email services on the internet which let you create an account and send or receive emails without disclosing your personal details. Some of these services are 100% free whereas others have a premium subscription service.
It is worth researching all of the best anonymous email services before you settle on one because some operate differently to others. For instance, Guerrilla Mail deletes all your emails after one hour and for Tor Mail, you need to have Tor to use it.
#3: Mask Your IP Address
When sending an email, the recipient can quite easily find the IP address it has come from and use this to identify you. If you are sending an email which you have particular concerns about and want to remain completely anonymous, it is well worth taking measures to mask your IP address.
A VPN would be the most obvious and easiest way to do this. A VPN will hide your IP address by creating a secure connection to any number of servers dotted around the world. When you send your email – or transmit any data whatsoever – when connected to a VPN, it travels through a secure network, which hides your IP address.
Tor would be the go-to choice for very sensitive emails where privacy is paramount. Although Tor has received a lot of negative press for its association with the Dark Web, it is legal to use, and it keeps you anonymous by relaying any data or traffic you are sending through nodes positioned all over the world. By bouncing your data through all these different nodes prior to it reaching its final destination, it obscures its original location and keeps your identity and location anonymous. Click here to see if you’re protected.
#4: Hide Behind a Remailer
Remailer services send your email on to its final recipient and remove any trace back to you. Like anonymous email services, there are lots of remailer services online, and they are a great alternative to VPNs or creating new email accounts.
The remailer does not know where an email it is resending came from, the content of your email or the person behind it, so it is a viable way to send completely anonymous email messages. For maximum effectiveness, you can send your email to a remailer, which forwards the email to another remailer (these chains can get very big). By doing this, you are eliminating both the remailer knowing where the email came from and where it is going to, allowing for maximum anonymity and removing any chance of the email’s source being discovered.
Sending an anonymous email doesn’t always mean you are up to no good. Many regular people opt to send their emails anonymously to remain private on the internet. As we hear more about how our data is sneakily harvested and used by large corporations, it makes sense that more people are actively trying to remain anonymous on the internet.