Anonymous Email

At some point, everyone would like to send an email where he or she would not want to reveal his or her identity. Other times, we might want to send off a prank email or even a fake message. Privacy matters increasingly in this age of identity theft and ever mounting piles of spam delivered fresh each morning to our inboxes. Fortunately, there are anonymous email services available both for free and at a premium to those who would like to use them.

The anonymous mail services often consist of remailers hosted inside the country, or even abroad, to protect your privacy from legal regulation. You send your message to the service, it strips your identity from the packet of information, and then a unique anonymous code is applied. After that processing, your message goes out to your recipient. On replying, your recipient sends his or her mail to the server’s unique coded email address, which it matches to your own email and forwards the reply to you.

Keep in mind that remailing services are not fool proof. Interested parties could trace your personal mail account in theory, if they obtained a list of anonymous email codes from the server with a list of linked email addresses. For that reason, you should consider several factors when choosing an anonymous email service. Search online for information about the history and reputation of the service you plan to use. Be sure to look at how long it has been around, and problems that users have had with data loss or privacy breeches. Look up the geographic location of your service’s physical hosting; to ensure location in a different legal jurisdiction, if that might concern you at some point.

If you don’t want to go through the bother of finding a reliable anonymous remailer, you might consider signing up for web-based email under a fake name. This does not prevent the webmail service from recording your IP address and any other information revealed by your browser. In addition, signing up under a pseudonym may violate the terms of service for the webmail program you use. If you still want to proceed, you might want to give Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! Mail a try. Make sure that you don’t list your real name under your profile with the service, where it will end up attached to your email messages.

Privacy is your prerogative, and you should take steps to protect it online. A second reason, just as compelling, exists for using fake email addresses. Every time you sign up for a service, or buy a good online, a company sells your name and email address to another company that resells mailing lists. Today, we conduct more of our business, and buy more products and information online than ever before. Be sure to give out your valuable personal contact information only when you trust those you do business with online. Everyone should maintain a second email account for signing up for offers and opportunities online, to capture some of the resulting spam, and preventing it from reaching your main inbox.

Fake Send lets you send anonymous emails, for free. What are you waiting for?