There can be many times you want to send an email that is anonymous, yet you are put off because it may be traced back to you.
You could be pouring out your undying love to someone, or you may be sending sensitive information to someone, such as journalists often do when they find out something important.
The way email was invented was that two people could communicate with each other, and they know who the sender of the email was.
Nowadays, there are other reasons you need to keep your identity undercover when sending an email. Depending on where you live, you may be living in one of the 5-eyes countries.
With mass surveillance, every word you send over the internet can be seen, recorded and retained for extended periods.
This can make it all the more important to send and receive anonymous email on occasions.
Our guide will show why you may need to send emails anonymously, why not all free anonymous services are safe, and how you can hide your location when you send and receive an anonymous email.
Why Individuals Send an Anonymous Email?
Not all emails are sensitive information from crooks, cheaters or anything that should be lurking in the dark web. You find many regular citizens need these services for various reasons.
Here are some of the reasons an ordinary person may wish to send anonymous emails.
Cutting Out the Spam: When you sign up for various websites, most ask for your email address. Once you begin signing up for lots of sites, you may not want to be bombarded with their mail offerings.
All your spam can be directed away from your regular email account, and thus, you can keep a clean inbox.
Product Complaints: If you wish to send feedback on a product or service, you may want to use an anonymous email account to prevent any repercussions.
You Find You are a Whistle-blower: More than ever, there are security breaches, things going on in governments, or something else that everyone has a right to know.
If you land on such information, you will need to make it available, and using an anonymous email service can be the best way to keep your name out of the proceedings.
Contacting the Authorities: In some scenarios, you may be a witness to something and are scared to approach the authorities out of fear for your safety.
If you wish to remain anonymous, you can use anonymous emails, which can’t be traced back to you.
You Have Information Relating to a Court Case: High profile court cases have all manner of individuals trying to get the upper hand.
If you are holding vital information you need to send an email, and are worried the defence or prosecution may get hold of it, it will be safer to keep this away from your regular email service.
When you look at sending anonymous emails, you will find there are various services out there that offer different features.
Here, we will look at a few of the better ones you can choose from the anonymous email services online.
Best Anonymous Email Sender
If you want to send email, you can use an anonymous email sender. Most of these don’t allow you to receive, and they are purely for sending an untraceable email.
- Anonymousemail.me: With no activation or registration, you can send unlimited emails with attachments free. It is ad-supported, and if you use an ad-blocker, the page may not show correctly. It offers one-way email, and all you need is your recipient’s email and your message.
- CyberAtlantis.com: Cyber Atlantis does more than just allowing you to send an email which is anonymous. It strips out IP addresses so whatever you send, has another layer of protection.
- Send-email.org: If you want a basic free anonymous service, there is nothing easier than this. All you have to enter is your recipient’s email and the message.
Email Services to Send and Receive
When you need to send and also receive emails, you do need an anonymous remailer. While not being as basic as the above, they do offer a basic email client, and some offer the chance to create multiple email accounts.
myTrashmail.com: Create anonymous email with this service, and you never have to worry about accepting spam any longer.
It will stop all future spam from arriving at your regular email. You only have to select one of the active email domains, and send your email, or use this to prevent newsletters coming your way. It can also send emails to your usual account.
Tempr.email: Once known as Discard.email is one of the oldest burner email services there is. You don’t need to create an account, and all emails will be deleted after 30-days.
Guerrilla Mail: Guerrilla Mail is open source and one of the best anonymous email services, which works without a hitch.
When you create an anonymous email, you then have options to reply, forward, and you have an email size limit of 150Mb per mail. Once you head to the site, you are given a random email address.
However, you can change the domain from the ones given, and you can change the name in the address if you so wish.
While you can send emails, and receive, it is also ideal for cutting spam from your life. Every email received to this untraceable email account goes into quarantine. If you check your inbox, it is moved, or if not, every email here is automatically deleted.
One other feature for added security is ‘scrambled addresses’ when you come up with a hard to guess inbox ID, the more the email alias does for protection.
All the above are basic email services and do what they do very well. However, some users may need something a little more if they are sending lots of emails rather than on an ad-hoc basis.
Proton Mail
One highly secure free email service, which offers more control is Proton Mail. Once you sign up, you are protected by one of the most reliable services there is. You can send 150 emails per day and have 500Mb of storage.
It offers lots of features, and there is a paid-for version, so they are not making this a disposable email service. It is open source and creating a new email account is straightforward.
- Add a username and select from either of the two domains.
- Add a password (if you lose or reset the password, you won’t be able to read your previous emails)
- Add (optional) recovery email
- Click Create Account
Proton Mail asks for no personal information, phone number, and you can use it as a real email account.
The services use PGP encryption and have a zero-logging policy. It also allows you to send emails that self-destruct once you give them a time to live.
However, there is one downside to this. When you create a new email, Proton Mail won’t encrypt metadata, headers or subject lines.
There is a way around this, and that is to use a VPN. Proton offers a free VPN, but it doesn’t, unfortunately, come as part of the free plan and does need their premium subscription.
Sending Anonymous Emails with a VPN Service
Using any of the above services can enable all users to send anonymous emails. However, the thing they don’t offer is any encryption of connections to their service, and this can still lead back to anyone sending these emails.
The reason being, internet service providers, can see everything a user does online.
From the email to the receiver, all communication will be hidden, but to that point, users are still vulnerable.
For total anonymity, the use of a virtual private network is advisable because these deliver the utmost in encryption.
The way they work is to take your IP address and to replace it with one of their own. You find this comes from the outgoing VPN server where data flows onto the internet.
Now, from your device, you use military-grade encryption, so even your Internet service provider can’t see what you are sending, or accessing.
While this can be an easy solution, not every VPN caters for remote regions such as Australia or around the Asian continents.
However, the world’s number one VPN provider ExpressVPN is proven to serve remote areas as well as other VPN’s support more populated areas.
With the best encryption, no DNS or IP leaks, when you send an email, you will know it won’t be traced back, and you will remain anonymous.
The number one streaming VPN also happens to be the number one VPN service for security and sending those sensitive emails; you didn’t want anyone to know, was from you.
