Anonymous email: How to send emails anonymously and securely

What is an anonymous email?

An anonymous email is an email that doesn’t reveal the sender’s identity. It doesn’t contain any personal information or technical details that can trace the email back to its sender. The primary goal of such an email is to ensure confidentiality and protect the sender’s privacy. However, no email is 100% anonymous.

How do anonymous emails work?

An email becomes anonymous by hiding personally identifiable information and using secure email services. Some of the personal info that could give you away is your name, details entered when creating an email account, the email address itself, and the IP address. If you choose an anonymous email service, they usually mask and do not log the IP address. These services often employ end-to-end encryption to protect the content of the emails to ensure that only the intended recipient can read the encrypted email.

How to send an anonymous email

You can ensure your email is anonymous and reveals no identifiable details in a few ways:

• Create a new anonymous email account.
• Use a disposable phone number.
• Use a burner email.
• Hide your IP address using a VPN or the Tor browser.

Create a new anonymous email account

To send an anonymous email, you should create a new email account without details that could identify you. Instead of using your name or initials, provide a fake name, date of birth, and home address.

Before you choose Gmail or Yahoo Mail for an anonymous email account, remember that these companies are also search engines and tend to collect user data. If the company collects your data, such as your IP address, your email account won’t be as anonymous as you think. Use a secure and encrypted anonymous email provider.

Anonymous email providers offer standard email service functionality while encrypting your emails, inbox, and contact list. Encryption means that no one who intercepts your emails can decipher them. However, you can still be in danger if you have spyware on your device. In the case of end-to-end encryption, this also means that anonymous, secure email service providers cannot snoop on you.

Anonymous email accounts are an excellent choice for secure ongoing communication. And these accounts are not limited to that. Various anonymous email providers offer different features like anonymous payments or self-destructing emails. However, you have to choose a reputable anonymous email provider such as Proton Mail, Guerilla Mail, or Tuta. Check out our list of the best free anonymous email accounts for even more options.

Use a disposable phone number

Some email service providers might ask for a phone number to send you a verification code. If you use your real phone number, the email address can quickly lead back to you. Burner phones or temporary virtual phone numbers are a solution for this. Burner phones are cheap and with no contracts to link them to you. However, the majority of temporary virtual phone numbers are for rent. When you pay, your billing information can reveal your identity, so you should have a way to make an anonymous payment.

Use burner emails

Various kinds of burner email accounts allow you to send and receive anonymous emails without revealing your identity. Burner email accounts expire and destroy themselves after a specific time. So, it might be the simplest way to keep the sender’s information private.

Another kind of burner email is a temporary “send only” account. Burner email accounts like AnonymousMail allow you to send a message without creating an account.

A temporary “receive only” burner email address can help you avoid drowning in spam. For example, you can use the disposable Trashmail account, which will delete itself after some time, or one of Mailinator’s public addresses.

Hide your IP address using a VPN or the Tor browser

An IP address can reveal your virtual location, so using your real IP address is incompatible with anonymity. Usually, you get your IP address from your internet service provider (ISP). An ISP employs the IP address to identify your device online, and every website, including all email services, can track your IP address. Furthermore, law enforcement can demand ISPs to provide information about specific IP addresses. Therefore, you should use a virtual private network (VPN) or the Tor browser to change your IP address. Both a VPN and the Tor browser provide more privacy by hiding your IP address, encrypting traffic, and routing it through servers. However, it’s important to know their differences to choose a way to hide your IP address that suits you best.

A VPN changes your IP address and makes it more challenging, if not impossible, to trace it back to you. A VPN encrypts all your online traffic, making it indecipherable to snooping ISPs and malicious actors. Moreover, VPNs often have other online security features for your privacy and protection. We recommend choosing a trusted VPN service with a verified no-log policy. Avoid free VPNs because some free VPNs may log your internet activity and sell or share it with third parties.

The Tor browser is famous for its privacy. This browser changes your IP address to a random location by default. However, Tor can slow down the internet speed significantly. Moreover, the Tor network is more anonymous and less regulated than the surface internet, making the network a hotbed for phishing sites and malware. We recommend visiting only verified URLs and being cautious of possible dangers.

More private email tips

Consider a few more privacy and safety tips before anonymously sending sensitive information.

• Don’t use personal info, even in the password, for the email to be anonymous. That means you can’t use anything that can identify you, like your dog’s name or favorite sport.
• Never use the same password on any other accounts. Use a password generator if needed.
• Keep your anonymous account’s login details and passwords safe. You can use a password manager to do so.
• Anonymous email accounts you use to send sensitive information should be used just for that. Don’t use these anonymous email addresses to log in to other services you use in your personal life, like Facebook or Spotify. If needed, create other anonymous email accounts to log in to other platforms.
• Before logging into your anonymous account, make sure your VPN is working and not leaking your actual IP address or DNS.

Privacy is important even when you send emails from your own email address, so these tips may be helpful daily.

Three reasons to use an untraceable email

You might send an anonymous email for various reasons. Let’s discuss the most common ones.

Whistleblowing

An anonymous email can be vital for combating violations of the law. Whistleblowers can help to stop cybercrime, corruption, abuse, fraud, sexual harassment, and other illegal activity. However, the accused party can retaliate by firing, blocklisting, bullying, or taking legal action against whistleblowers. The anonymous whistleblowing helps people to avoid risks and bring more justice to the world.

Investigative journalism

Journalists can often be monitored and targeted by powerful institutions, corporations, or governments that don’t want their secrets to become public. Anonymous emails give journalists the cover they need to communicate with their sources and reveal their findings while reducing the risk of reprisals.

Avoiding spam and tracking

Companies and spammers harvest publicly available email addresses from websites, discussion boards, and other mailing lists. Then, they use them for bulk email marketing campaigns. You may want to use a disposable email address for your inbox to stay clean.

Furthermore, logging in to other platforms with your email address gives tech giants a lot of valuable data about you. Companies like Google or Facebook collect this data and then share it with third parties or use that data to serve targeted ads. When using an anonymous email address, you give the companies fake information to track and avoid them knowing too much about you.

FAQ

Can you trace the IP address of an email?

Usually, you can trace the originating IP address of an email by looking at its header and checking the metadata. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the email header.
2. Copy all of its content.
3. Paste it into the header analyzing tool, which may provide you with the sender’s IP address.

Remember that many email providers hide IP addresses, and you can find the IP address of only the last server that processed the email. However, knowing the location of even the last server’s IP address could help you understand whether an email is legitimate. For example, if you received an email from Facebook that came from Belarus or Chad, it’s a red flag.

Is Gmail secure for sending anonymous emails?

The short answer is yes, Gmail is secure. Industry-standard 128-bit encryption protects your inbox, and Gmail encrypts your emails with Transport Layer Security (TLS) by default. However, the receiving server must also use or support TLS. Otherwise, the communication will be insecure. It’s not exceptional, but no significant risks are unique to Gmail. Still, Gmail is a Google product, and Google is notorious for gathering data about its users.

Is it legal to send anonymous emails?

It depends on the content. If the content of the email is breaking the law or intends to do so, it makes the email illegal.