How do I send anonymous email?
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com. Here's the question.
There are problems at work that I need to inform my main office about.
The problem I'm having is that the emails
sent to the office are seen by several people
if I send them at work. If I send from my home,
my personal email address will be be revealed and I need to remain anonymous.
The politics at my workplace are vicious, to say the least.
What software is available so that I can
send them an anonymous email and my email address be hidden?
To be clear,
there's not software that you're going to install or use or whatever.
It's more of a process.
It's a surprisingly common situation to be able to want to send an email to someone
and not have it be able to be traced back to you.
Unfortunately, it's complicated.
And as with all things, there are no guarantees.
Depending on just how sensitive it is, how big a target you may end up being.
There are sometimes ways to poke through
even the most complicated scenarios that we might throw together.
But let me give you the basics that will get your anonymous email out there,
and then I'll tell you what I would actually suggest you do instead.
Remember, you've already said this, but don't do this from work.
Doesn't matter what email account you use,
it doesn't matter what system you use, it doesn't matter.
Even if you use your own machine at work
using the work's network, anything you do at work should be
considered completely transparent to your workplace.
They can see what you're doing.
So step one, don't do this at work.
Step two, don't do this at home.
Again, anything you do at home could potentially be traced back to you.
It may take law enforcement,
which is why I mentioned it, depends on how important you may be.
But the bottom line here is that characteristics of your machine,
your IP address, other characteristics of the scenario that involves sending
from your home, is possibly something that could be exposed
and possibly something that could be used to identify who you are.
Of course then my recommendation then is, well, if I can't do it from work and I
can't do it from home, where am I supposed to do it from?
Do it from the library,
do it from a public computer, do it from a few cities over.
But the bottom line here is if you're
going to use a computer to send an anonymous email,
don't do it from equipment that has already been associated with you,
because that association could potentially be discovered naturally.
Don't use any of the email addresses
that you own or any email address that is in any way associated with you.
This is really a perfect scenario
for setting up a completely different email address at a completely different
service, perhaps one that you've never used before.
That has no information associated with you.
So when you create this email account
at this free email service, whatever it might be, don't use your name,
don't use your location, don't use anything that's related to you.
Fake absolutely everything.
Now obviously that means that your message
needs to be written in such a way that A, it doesn't identify you,
but still legitimizes whatever it is you're attempting to tell people.
But the bottom line is that when you create this fake email account that can't
be traced to you use completely bogus information from start to finish.
Like I said, there's still no guarantee.
There's an argument that says you should try using a VPN.
I'm not convinced.
If you are forced to use a machine
that you've used in the past, like your home machine or something,
then yes, use a VPN to at least obscure your IP address.
It'll make it somewhat more difficult
for anyone to identify where that email came from.
But it's not impenetrable.
Like I said, if you've got a situation where law enforcement might get involved,
it's a situation where they'd be willing to invest a lot of effort into trying
to figure out who you are, where you are, where it came from.
There are possibilities.
It absolutely could be.
Now there are a couple of pragmatic situations here as well.
One is, even if you go through all of these hoops, is anybody going to read it?
I mean, seriously,
what you've done is you've basically made your email share a number
of characteristics to what you and I would normally call spam.
We can't trace email back to spammers.
We're not going to be able to trace this email back to you.
That's not to say you're spamming, I'm not saying that.
But what I am saying is that then it is
very likely that either the email system or the potential recipient of your email
is very likely to treat your email as if it were spam.
In other words,
they won't read it and they'll just throw it into the spam folder without it having
your intended consequence or getting your message across.
So I alluded to something that I would suggest you do instead.
Go old school.
Print a message, put it in the mail, the physical mail.
I say that because it bypasses all of this
technology tracing that we've talked about.
Obviously mail it maybe from a different
city just so that it's a little bit more obscure.
Avoid using a printer of your own.
As it turns out, it's possible that there are some printers
that actually encode their identity in the pages that they print.
It's kind of weird, kind of spy versus spy
kind of stuff, but that's something that you want to avoid.
So don't use your own printer.
Use a printer somewhere else.
But the bottom line is that I suspect
that a piece of paper in the mail these days it's unusual.
These days it's potentially likely to get
a little bit more attention and it avoids all of this stuff that we're concerned
about, about being able to trace you back via the technology that you happen to use.
Hope that's helpful.
I hope you're using your anonymous email for good.
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I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.