The Ultimate Guide to Anonymous Email Accounts / Services

11-Mar-2022

Email (electronic mail), serves to exchange computer-stored messages that are usually encoded in American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) text by telecommunication. The email, which incidentally was one of the initial activities the internet was used for, can also send non-text files such as graphic images and sound files if they are attachments in binary streams.

There is no doubting the fact that email remains the most popular means of communication. Unfortunately, cybercriminals have seen email as a means for launching phishing, spamming, spoofing, spear-phishing, ransomware, and business email compromise (BEC).

This is why email security and anonymous email accounts as means of protecting sensitive information are very essential for both organizations and individuals.

Always use a VPN to protect your privacy & use strong passwords

The world cannot stagnate because of the activities of cybercriminals; individuals must interact online; organizations must carry out business transactions, and email is the most popular way for people to communicate. Since you know what you will lose if your privacy is hijacked by cybercriminals, your only option is to turn to the virtual private network (VPN).

Fortunately, there are very reliable 100% free VPN service providers such as Urban VPN that are optimized for fast connection and unlimited bandwidth. Urban VPN also utilizes a huge network of fast VPN servers in 21 locations to ensure that your privacy is protected.

A VPN is essentially an encrypted tunnel that connects your devices to a network, especially if you are using a public network. Urban VPN uses the Open VPN that will help to secure your data. As a result, it will protect the system against any unwanted attacks and also protect the transfer of AES keys.

The server makes use of your public key to encrypt the key and then sends it to you. The client program on your devices then decrypts that email using its private key. The encryption of your email ensures that cybercriminals cannot interpret it, even if it accidentally falls into their hands.

Another security measure you need to protect your privacy is strong passwords. Cybercriminals tend to crack passwords by brute force; the stronger your password is, the harder it is for them to crack.

Generating strong passwords may not be very easy for the human brain; your password may be mathematically complex but still not strong or secure, however, with our Password Generator, you can instantly generate strong, random, secure, and unique passwords.

Even where you have a strong password, it’s always advisable not to drop your password carelessly and also to change them frequently. In addition to VPN and strong passwords, you can also protect your privacy by using anonymous emails.

What is an anonymous email?

When you want to send an email, and you want to hide the sender’s identity, you need an anonymous email. It ensures that your personally identifiable information is concealed.

The essence of an anonymous email is to ensure that you are sending an untraceable email. Usually, anonymous email service providers will encrypt the message you send; if your message falls into the wrong hands, they won’t make any sense of it.

Things like your email address, when you sent the message, the name of your device, and your IP address location will not be traceable.

Why do I even need it?

There are a lot of people who want to make incursions into your privacy, and you must try to ensure they don’t by sending and receiving anonymous emails. You can belong to any of these groups and want to communicate with other people.

• A journalist that wants to write on sensitive topics such as the war between Russia and Ukraine or even riots in countries that thrive on censorship and monitor emails that you want to send online.
• A human rights activist that is fighting for freedom of speech.
• A whistleblower who wants to reveal the identities of powerful, corrupt politicians.
• You want to conceal your email and identity from tech giants such as Google.
• Your privacy and security, as well as those of your clients, mean so much to you, and you want to send or receive emails that are not traceable in the case of a compromise.

While you may have some email service providers who promise secure email services, you must be wary about those that will not shield your identity. Even where your message is encrypted, you must ensure that your service provider can also hide your IP address and if you must release your personal information before you can sign up.

While it may not be easy for you to send and receive 100% untraceable emails, you can still go a long way to enhance your privacy by using an anonymous email account or service. To a large extent, your IP address will be anonymous while your service provider will encrypt your connections.

You can also protect your identity by using an alias system to create several profiles. You need to, however, understand that your security must not be completely left to your service providers; you must ensure that you use a VPN and also use strong passwords; be wary of clicking any link you think is suspicious.

Urban VPN is there to protect your traffic for free, so don’t hesitate to sign up and send untraceable emails.

What are disposable / one-time email addresses?

A disposable email address is a service that provides an email at a temporary address any time you sign up. When you use the temporary or throw-away address only once before it self-destructs or elapses, it is known as the one-time email address.

The basic reason for using disposable email addresses is for privacy; it’s very common now for online discussion forums, blogs, and websites to ask you to register before you are allowed to download white papers, post comments, or view premium content. If you register with a disposable email address, you will not be exposed to spam if the organization is hacked or sells your email address.

How to send anonymous emails

There are two ways you can send anonymous emails; you can consider the first the tougher way because you’ll have to do some extra work.

1. This involves opening a fake email with false information about yourself; if you do it rightly, it will be completely anonymous, if not you can be traced back with your IP address, and it may not be as private and as secure as you may want to believe. You may want to go for it if you don’t have a free anonymous email service provider, and you are short of funds.

The process is as follows:

• Obtain a new phone number, that will enable you to authenticate your account.
• Get an alias people can’t relate to you and other relevant fake information.
• Set up a new email account.
• You will need another browser and the incognito mode.
• You can now send your anonymous email.

Why this method is not so secure is that with some effort and the right resources, the person you sent the email to can trace the source and the sender. It’s not wholly an untraceable email, and it’s not absolutely anonymous.

2. To truly remain anonymous, you need to sign up with an anonymous email service provider; it is the best and most secure way to send untraceable emails. There are a lot of them in the market, some are paid, while you can still get free anonymous email service providers.

What you get when you sign up and wish to send your anonymous emails include:

• Encryption of your messages.
• Automatic email deletion from a server.
• Blocking IP addresses.
• Protection of your password when sending your anonymous email.
• Minimal or non-release of personal information.
• Ultimate privacy.

Service providers that will ensure you send your emails anonymously

ProtonMail

ProtonMail is a very popular and secure email provider. The encryption of your emails is based on PGP before they are sent or even at rest.

ProtonMail considers your privacy as crucial, even employees from ProtonMail cannot snoop on your message. However, your metadata, subject lines, and headers are not encrypted.

ProtonMail does not demand your personally identifiable information before you can open an account. In case you may forget your password, you can choose to link a recovery email.

You also have the option of sending self-destructing messages and how long you want your messages to last. ProtonMail’s free account gives you 500MB of storage, with the ability to send up to 150 messages a day.

If you need more than that, you can decide to go for the paid service. ProtonMail can demand your phone number to receive an SMS message to create or confirm your account.

Guerilla Mail

Guerilla Mail is one other great encrypted email provider that has been providing free and disposable email addresses to users for over a decade. With Guerilla Mail, you both send and receive anonymous emails.

Guerilla has a scramble address feature you can use to create a randomized address if you don’t want to create your own. You will not be asked to send any personally identifiable information to open your account.

If you think your account can be traced back to you, Guerilla Mail can also allow you to send an anonymous email even without an account. Any message you send or receive self-destructs after just one hour.

10minutemail.com

10MinuteMail is a secure, free, and disposable email service. You can have a private email address that anyone can email. For security, privacy and to ensure you don’t receive spam messages, both your address and the email self-destruct in 10 minutes.

Lavabit

Lavabit came into existence in 2004 as a free, security-oriented, and privacy-focused email service. Lavabit had to close operations in 2013 based on its refusal to hand over some information to the government; though Lavabit has resumed operations since 2017, It has, however, suspended its free services.

Lavabit can work over POP, IMAP, and through a web interface because it’s based on the Dark Internet Mail Environment protocols.

• To prevent snooping, Lavabit sends your email using end-to-end encryption technology.
• Lavabit goes all the way to ensure privacy and anonymous emails.
• You can access your mail in many ways.
• Lavabit comes with solid spam and virus filtering.

TrashMail

TrashMail is one email service that is very easy to use; you just need to create a new email address on trashmail.com. TrashMail then forwards all the emails that arrive at this anonymous email address to your real email address.

TrashMail has a system that self-destructs the email address you have set up with the organization whenever the limit is reached.

Temp Mail

Temp Mail goes a long way to ensure that you don’t get spammy emails, intrusive ads, hacking, and attacking robots. Your mailbox will be clean and secure. Temp Mail ensures your anonymity by providing you with a temporary, secure, anonymous, free, disposable email address.

Tutanota

A lot of people also see Tutanota as a popular choice amongst online security and privacy experts. Tutanota prides itself in using the organization’s encryption standard to encrypt the users’ entire inboxes, including their emails’ subject lines and their contact lists.

Tutanota enables end-to-end encryption between users, notwithstanding, you can still send encrypted messages to even people who have not signed up; the only requirement is a pre-shared password to decrypt your messages.

Like a lot of email providers who crave your anonymity, Tutanota does not require your personally identifiable information before you can sign up and create an account. Tutanota gives a free plan of 1 GB storage.

Tutanota has a measure for ensuring that if someone accidentally snoops on your traffic, your email will still be untraceable and that is by striping your IP from any email you send. With the open-source software, Tutanota ensures that you can confirm how secured its operations are by looking into its code.

Craigslist

When you send an email through Craigslist, it raises an entirely different email address to cover up your own, and that is the email address the recipient will see. However, Craigslist will know your real email address and that of the recipient.

This ensures that you are still anonymous if your recipient decides to play some fun games with your email address. Purchases you do through Craigslist’s website can only be successful through this two-way email relay.

Conclusion

Why anybody will want to go for an anonymous email account or service is because of privacy; threat actors know how important communication is in the business world; they also know how important email is in effecting communication. While all these anonymous email service providers will try to ensure your privacy, the ultimate solution is to use VPN.

Incidentally, Urban VPN guarantees you 100% free and secure VPN services. So, you don’t have to risk your privacy because of financial constraints.