Have you ever needed to send an anonymous email? If you have a truth you need to reveal or just want to keep your online communications secure, we can help you keep your personal information safe. There are five ways you can send an email anonymously.
Read on to find out how you can communicate with someone without revealing your identity.
What Is an Anonymous Email?
An anonymous email is exactly how it sounds. You send an email without anyone being able to trace back the email to you. There are a few ways that people can trace your identity when you send an email. The first is through your email address.
When you create an email account, you make a unique email address. Your main email account has several personally identifiable indicators about you such as your phone number and name. Since email addresses are often public knowledge, it is easy for people to trace an email back to you if you use your regular email account.
Another way that someone can trace an email back to you is through your internet protocol address or IP address. Every device has a unique IP Address. It is a digital code generated to allow computers to send and receive information. IP Addresses are public information.
You can find yours by simply googling: “What is my IP Address?” An IP Address reveals an approximate location for your device. Through this, many people can narrow down their identity. Additionally, your IP Address can link people to your phone number and real name.
When you send an email, another way that someone can identify you is through the email header. Headers may contain routing information that can be used to find your name, location, and device.
Why Would You Need to Send an Anonymous Email?
There are several legitimate reasons someone may wish to send an anonymous email. You are a hopeless romantic who wants to confess his love for someone, but you are not quite ready to reveal who you are. Or perhaps you know some secret information that you want to tell someone but are afraid to tell them outright.
This could be the knowledge of someone cheating on their partner. Maybe you know about your employer committing a crime, and you want to report it. But you do not want to lose your job in the meantime. If you are a journalist, you will want to work safely and protect your sources with anonymous email communications.
Journalists can often get targeted by powerful corporations and governments who don’t like that their secrets have been made public. An anonymous email can give journalists a way to communicate their stories without these large companies monitoring or interfering with these communications.
People can also use anonymous emails to sign up for websites or communities they do not want to be tracked back to them. Anonymous emails can also help you to protect your personal information from third parties, advertisers, and data breaches. As of 2022, around 47% of emails are spam emails.
Every time you go into a store or onto a website, it seems that you have to sign up for a newsletter or provide your email address to access the content. If you want to avoid having an inbox full of spam, having an anonymous email can protect you from all the spam.
There are several other reasons you may want to reveal some truth without revealing your identity
5 Ways to Send an Anonymous Email
There are a few different ways you can keep a recipient from knowing who an email is from. These strategies will help you to send an email without identifying yourself.
#1 Create A Burner Email Account
An easy way to send an anonymous email is to create a disposable email account. Instead of providing your real name when you sign up for this temporary email, you would provide a fake name and other fake identifiers. This can help keep people from immediately identifying with you.
With Gmail, you can create a new email account without providing your personal information. Then, you can send an email from this account. Your IP address would show as Google’s IP, so it would be more difficult to trace you. However, the government could get your IP address from your Gmail account, so it is not a completely foolproof method.
Other email service providers like Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Outlook are also great options for creating a burner account. Just do not link this email account to any other accounts and do not use your real name. It would be to your advantage to use a different email provider for your burner account than you use for your personal account.
Even the most careful person could accidentally make a mistake and send an email from the wrong account if it is hosted by the same provider. If you want to make sure your disposable email address will be unique and in no way linked to you, you can use a random username generator online.
#2 Hide Your IP Address
Another way to send an email anonymously is to use a Virtual Private Network or VPN. When you use a VPN, you connect to a server that is located somewhere else, usually in another country. Instead of people seeing your actual location, your IP address and location are masked.
The way this works is your computer sends a request to complete an action. Instead of directly connecting to the website via your internet service provider, your computer will first connect to the VPN server that will then connect to the website you requested.
Since a VPN serves many users at once, it will be virtually impossible to identify your specific device and location. You may think that using Wi-Fi rather than your internet service provider will make your email more anonymous, your connection and email can still be identified.
A VPN service can help secure your email communications while in public to protect you from hackers. Public Wi-Fi is particularly vulnerable to attacks and interception by prying eyes. If you choose to use a VPN, it is important to choose a reputable provider, such as NordVPN or our own SekurVPN, to ensure your security.
VPNs can be used for much more than just sending anonymous emails. You can also use a VPN server to stream geo-restricted content and improve your online gaming. Many VPNs can be used on your iOS and Android devices with an app.
They are compatible with many gaming consoles and are a great way to add more security to your everyday online activity in addition to your email anonymity.
#3 Use a TOR Browser
Alternatively, you could use a Tor Browser, which is a free network of servers or nodes that route internet traffic randomly between each other to confuse your data origin. A Tor browser, originally called an Onion Router due to its layers of traffic, gives you more anonymity online.
Many people, especially law enforcement, view users of Tor as having nefarious intentions, especially since it allows you to access the Dark Web, but it can be used to send secure communications in whistleblowing cases, as well. You can also access a Tor Browser through a VPN connection to further secure your real IP address and online activity.
#4 Use an Anonymous Email Provider
There are several anonymous email providers you can choose to provide you with secure and encrypted email services. ProtonMail, Tutanota, StartMail, Guerilla Mail, and our own SekurMail are a few that people consider more private than Gmail and Yahoo.
There are some free anonymous email providers that you can use, as well. Yet, the functionality of the free versions may be limited, so based on how you plan to use this service beyond one or two anonymous emails, you may wish to upgrade to a paid anonymous email service.
When you use these encrypted, secure email providers, your communications will be more secure. Encryption protects your emails, inbox, and contact list. If you choose a service with end-to-end encryption (E2E), it will be difficult for someone to spy on your communications.
E2E works by creating an encryption tunnel that scrambles your message and makes it impossible for someone to access it without the proper authentication keys. When you use an anonymous email account, you will make it difficult for even the service provider to identify your location and IP Address.
It will encrypt not only your private email content, but also your subject line, email address, headers, and metadata. Anyone looking for a secure email service, regardless of the reason, should investigate an encrypted email service for better email security.
You want to make sure that the company doesn’t save your data or share it with third parties. You also want to make sure they have a reputation for secure connections and few data breaches. Encrypted email keeps personal data and sensitive information secure.
#5 Remove Metadata
Let’s say part of your anonymous email includes sending a document as proof. Believe it or not, files can carry a lot of your personal information that people can use to identify you. This personal information is called metadata and it can have your name, device, location, and other personal identifiers.
In the case of an image, it can include information about the camera you used, the editing software, the device owner, and your location. So, you will need to remove the metadata from your files to make sure you are keeping your email completely anonymous.
Otherwise, all your other precautions will be for naught. If you send a Word document, you can strip the metadata using a removal tool called Document Inspector.
To remove metadata from a document:
- Open the file.
- Select “Tools.” Then, “Protect Document.”
- Next, select “Remove personal information from this file.”
- Save as a Copy of the document.
For a .pdf file:
- Select “File.” Then, “Properties.”
- Next, click “Description.” Here you will be able to see your metadata and delete or edit it as you wish.
- Now, you can save the document and send it.
To remove metadata from a photo on Windows:
- Select the image and right-click.
- then, select “Properties.”
- Next, select “Details” and “Remove Properties and Personal Information.”
- Finally, click on “Create a Copy with All Possible Properties Removed.”
To remove metadata from a photo on macOS:
- Open your image in “Preview.”
- Select Tools.
- Pick “Show Inspector.”
- Click the “(i)” tab, then the “Exif” tab
- Here you can delete the metadata.
You can also take a screenshot of a document and remove the EXIF data to send a more secure attachment. With your metadata deleted, you can feel more confident that your email is completely anonymous
Sekur Makes It Easier
If you want to send an anonymous email securely, check out Sekur. Our encrypted Swiss-hosed email, VPN, and instant messaging is a 100% private platform. You can send encrypted emails outside of Sekur. You can also have the recipient reply without our Sekur environment. Email attachments can be an unlimited size and you can monitor your email activity with ease.
To make your email communications even more secure, we have SekurVPN which provides a Swiss IP address to keep you anonymous online. Our VPN uses the latest encryption technology to protect your data. We also are easy to use and set up. You only need a single license for all your devices.
Additionally, we provide self-destructing, fully private instant chats. There is no hidden storage or data mining, and the chats are 100% end-to-end encrypted. You can even have encrypted chats with non-Sekur users. For more privacy, try out Sekur for 7 days.
Conclusion
Whatever reason you have for sending an anonymous email, you want to know that your information will remain completely secure. There are 5 methods for sending anonymous emails. Combining one or two of these methods with a secure VPN is a great way to make sure your communications are untraceable.
