The main question one may solicit on perusing the heading from this post would be Why?, Why might anybody need to send a mysterious email when there are huge amounts of other email specialist co-ops like Gmail, Yahoo, and so forth with a suite of premium elements to offer?
There can’t be a conclusive response to that question since we don’t use mysterious email benefits every day and, the utilization case which the vast majority may consider is for the most part ruinous (eg. Spamming).
[ad type=”square”]I would first try to modify how we think about these services, agreed that there are many ways in which these services can be used for incorrect purposes but think about this, your present email account wherever it might be held be it on Google, Yahoo or any other site like that serve ads, and not just any random ad. These ads are personalized and battered to your online presence. What this means is, if you are signed into your Google account and you’re a sports fan and you continually read, search and share about sports, it’s pretty obvious that the ads that Google would populate on your search results and on Gmail will be regarding sports products and fitness brand. The entire idea of targeted ads might not seem to be a big deal to most of us, but considering the not so recent NSA fiasco which revealed about the government doing a massive surveillance on user data and companies involved in actually giving them access to it, it’s not sure how safe our online identity is with these companies. Hence, anonymous emails ensure that your emails are untraceable and cannot be tracked.
Pointing out towards the use cases, here are some of them.
- For signing up on websites that someone would use only once for eg. Downloads websites that ask for email address.
- For posting comments on blogs which require you to sign in.
- For maintaining anonymity on the web, protecting your original identity from mass surveillance programs
Having said that, let’s take a look at a couple of ways in which one can send anonymous emails
By Creating Aliases to Your Email ID
This won’t not be the best alternative, but rather Microsoft’s Standpoint email benefit permits you to make nom de plumes to your email. A nom de plume is simply an extra email address for a similar record. This implies while your unique email [email protected] is known to your friends and colleagues, you can create an alias to the same account as [email protected] and still utilize your original email to send anonymous emails. Let’s take a look at how.
1. Sign in or Sign up forMicrosoft Outlook
Click on the gear icon on the upper right corner and click on Options
Under Managing your account, Click on Create an Outlook.com alias
Create a new email address and click on Add alias
Now you have your alias ready which you can manage from this page
Now, whenever you’re making a new email, just click on your name on the upper left corner to see a drop down of all your aliases.
By Creating An Email ID Which Has No Relation to Your Original Account
If you’re not sure if you should go for websites offering anonymous email services but still need to use an anonymous email address, you can always sign in on Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook etc with an ID that has no relation to your social profiles or your primary email address.
This is not the best way to do so, as signing up for a legitimate email service is a time taking process, especially when you want multiple email addresses, this is why the 3rd option would the be the best of all.
Using An Anonymous Email Service Provider
There are well over a hundred websites which allow you to send anonymous emails, while the concept behind it remains the same, i.e, creating an email address which has no relation to your original account, the services mentioned below remove the hassle of signing up. They are free to use and we are going to cover 5 of the best anonymous email providers
1. Mailinator
One of the most famous service Mailinator is used to keep anonymity over the web. It provides users to generate a disposable email account out of the box, without signing up.
You can arises up with a random email address of your choice, and then utilize it to sign up to websites which you don’t trust with your primary email address. All emails from those websites will directly go into your nonrefundable email account which you can check at any time.
[ad type=”banner”]2. Anonymouse
One of the older provider of online email service is Anonymouse. You receive the luxury of sending the email right from within their home page, although you still can’t add attachments. While the website seems like a static HTML page created years ago, Anonymouse serves almost 1,00,000 mails each day.
3. Anonymous Email by HideMyAss
In the event you are a college student or a resident of Mainland China, HideMyAss is no more bizarre to you. HideMyAss is one of the most famous proxy service and VPN provider online, which enables you to access to websites which have been blocked in your area. From the similar people who brought you HideMyAss VPN and HideMyPhone, comes an mysterious email service, rightly called Anonymous Email.
Unknown Email permits you to create an mysterious account, although the trade-off here by running with the brand and its popularity is that you need to sign up for the service for which you need to sacrifice your real email address, and everytime you need to check/send an email you need to experience a regular sign in system. However, you do get the option of specifying when your account expires.
[ad type=”banner”]4. Guerrilla Mail
Guerrilla Mail offers a throwaway and self-destructing email account which automatically gets deleted in one hour. While one cannot use it for a prolonged period, it still remains useful for immediate use.
5. 10 Minute Mail
10 Minute Mail is similar to GuerrillaMail in a several ways, but you get the elasticity of extending the duration of access to your account by 10 minutes on this site, before your account self-destructs. You can use the unique throwaway email address that the website generates to “receive emails” only (You can reply to the received mail, but cannot compose a new mail). This might sound not that useful, but it surely helps you out when you quickly need to sign up for a website/post your comments and reviews on an online article.
Conclusion
While there are several websites offering anonymous email services, the biggest obstacle that comes up while encouraging users to use it is, lack of knowledge of such services and also belief issues with the providers. The lack of legitimate use cases makes it clear that these websites/services do not have a large user-base as compared to conservative email providers. But considering the current scenario of online security, it’s worth giving them a try.