Anonymous Email

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Anonymous Email

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Anonymity & Privacy Resources

If we think about it, anonymous emails are not a very foreign concept for most people. We can go mail a letter with no return address and in turn keep our identity unknown to the receiver. So it is no surprise that just as email grew in popularity, so did efforts to create anonymous and private services that could be used to send untraceable messages.

In a nutshell, anonymous email would allow you to communicate with people while protecting your privacy. So as a basic minimum, anonymous e-mail would not reveal sender's identity - from the above snail mail example, its like sending a letter without a "from" address. So the email would likely have a fake, disposible, or no return email address. Similarly, the anonymous email service would also protect your privacy by holding back key information about your internet IP address that identifies your location or atleast, the identiy of your ISP (Internet Service Provider).

Many people tend to assoctiate anonymous email with the many available free email/webmail services. Unfortunately services like Yahoo! mail, Hotmail, Excite, Lycos, etc are far from anonymous. In fact, anonymity is compromised using these services as the providers keep full records of the users and often use it for data mining. They do not protect sender's privacy and also collect personal information that can either be used in future investigations and surely for advertising purposes.

In most cases one only has to view the headers of a message to learn the IP address of the sender, the smtp server used and in turn, the likely geographic location and ISP details. Nearly all email headers can be forged and IP addresses spoofed, but this is not a failsafe way of protecting your privacy as a good investigator or a poor setup can easily give away key information (either about your identity or that of your ISP). Internet Service Providers may also be monitoring the activity on their systems so it is possible that they have stored your personal communications as part of their standard operating procedures.

There are several ways one can protect different levels of email privacy. One way is using a remailer - a remailer is a computer service that specializes in private email, usually by routing it without keeping records. Encryption can be used in conjuntion with a remailer and is a way to scramble the message when it is being transmitted. This ensures that unauthorised people cannot read the contents. Online privacy/anonymous services like Anonymizer Private Surfing and Iprive can also help protect you with anonymous email resources.

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