Everything About Anonymous Email You’ll Ever Need to Know

Imagine going through your day and someone behind you is recording your every step.

Where you went to work, who you visited, when you went shopping, what you bought, etc.

It wouldn’t be pleasant and if you say that person following you around, you would probably turn and tell them to stop it. 

Would you let that person continue this if they told you that, by collecting this information about you, your life will somehow be easier? 

Maybe the store you’re buying in will have more items catered to you based on what you purchased last time next time you come. Or, maybe the traffic will suddenly become much better than the last 5 times you visited someone.

Maybe this appeals to you enough to sacrifice your privacy, but would those be the only reasons that your information is collected for? 

Probably not and at the end of the day, you would try whatever is in your power to have them stop following you around and collecting information about you.

Well, maybe you are not being followed around as you go on with your life, but in many ways, you are being followed everywhere you go online.

And it’s not that hard since you are leaving digital footprints wherever you go on the Internet.

Almost every action that you make online, whether that’s visiting a website, filling out an online form, posting on Facebook, sending out an email, signing up for an account, using your credit card to order an item online and more sends your personal and potentially sensitive information out in the ether.

Do you have any idea who is seeing your information? Are you certain that it is just the intended recipient?

Companies and the government are collecting data about you all the time, but do you have any control over what they collect or how they use your data?

According to Pew Research, 81% of adult Americans believe they have very little or no control over the data companies collect and 84% say the same about the data their government collects.

Protect Your Privacy by Using Anonymous Email

With almost everyone on the Internet collecting and storing your data, it seems impossible to protect it online. 

Don’t worry, that’s not true. You can start to take your privacy back and the first step towards that is to get a free anonymous email account.

What is an anonymous email?

You are probably sending and receiving a few emails per day. These emails, like we mentioned before, potentially reveal your identity. Sometimes, you might not care, but other times, especially when this can reveal sensitive information about you or something that you don’t want to get in the wrong hands, you want to be able to hide your identity.

That’s what anonymous email does. 

Why Would You Want an Anonymous Email?

In a way, Internet users are trained to freely give their information online, often without asking how these will be used and by whom. 

If it’s just the website you signed up for using your email address, that might have been fine, but they could also be sending your personal information to a third party without your knowledge or consent. 

Or maybe need to send an email to someone, but without revealing your identity in the first place. 

For example, a whistleblower would want to be anonymous as he or she is sending information to an investigative journalist about a crime in their company or a government agency that they are privy to. 

That same journalist would also want to use an anonymous email as he is collecting more information about this from different sources to protect themselves and their sources from repercussions.

Another example of a person needing an anonymous email is a doctor or a lawyer trying to protect their patient’s or client’s identity and private information. 

Take, for instance, that you have a new physician. Most people still trust in the doctor-patient confidentiality, but is this always the case? 

Unfortunately, it is not and the amount of suspiciously accurate solicitations that you might be getting on your email or via phone is proof enough that your doctor is giving out your private medical records to someone without your knowledge or consent. 

If you’re communicating with your doctor or lawyer over email, your conversations must be secure and confidential. The only way to ensure this and that there is no info leak anywhere, is to use an anonymous email address.

Email Privacy in the United vs Email Privacy in the European Union

As your inbox contains a great amount of personally identifying data about you, you must protect your identity on it.

Depending on where you live, in the United States (US) or in the European Union (EU), the law might be protecting your email data better or worse.

Those in the EU are probably better off when it comes to data protection thanks in no small part to the GDPR. Thanks to it, EU data controllers have to take more effort to protect the user’s data and the repercussions for failing to do that can be severe (up to 4% of your global yearly revenue or 20 million euros).

Of course, this doesn’t mean that every EU country will protect your data the same. Many have bilateral or multilateral agreements to collect and share their citizen’s data with other countries for “security and legal purposes”. 

For instance, of the 14 EYes countries, 9 are from the EU, including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. These countries, together with the original 5 EYes – United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom – are freely trampling on their citizen’s privacy by collecting, storing, sharing and processing their information between each other.

The US citizens are probably even worse off than their EU counterparts. The European Union and its members at least update their data privacy laws from time to time, but that’s not the case with the United States.

The US, for instance, doesn’t have anything on the federal (for the whole country) level like the EU’s GDPR. The closest thing to it is the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), but for instance, this doesn’t cover the consumers’ consent like GDPR.

When it comes to email privacy, in particular, the US is still pretty much relying on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) which was introduced way back in 1986. Just think about how many things have changed since then.

How to Send Anonymous Email?

There are several methods you can try out to send an anonymous email. Of course, we prefer using an anonymous email service like CTemplar because we believe that it is the most bullet-proof and secure of them all.

However, for posterity’s sake, we will tell you about the other methods as well.

Use a One-time Gmail Account and a VPN, Proxy or Tor

Gmail allows you to use a fake name or a pseudonym when creating a new account. The problem is, you have to do a lot more than that to remain anonymous on it. The biggest problem here is that Gmail stores your IP address, which can be used to trace you. 

If you are using a Virtual Private Network or VPN, you can hide your real IP address and replace it with that of the VPN. This is because your traffic will be tunneled through the VPN server on its way from you to the final destination.

However, keep in mind that there are ways to detect if you are using a VPN, proxy or Tor network with apps such as IPinfo.io Privacy Detection API and services like Netflix will block you for using a VPN.

Use a Burner Anonymous Email

If you need to quickly send an anonymous email to someone, you can use an anonymous burner account like Cyber Atlantis or AnonEmail. 

The good side of these anonymous email services is that they will hide your IP address and are also free to use. 

However, the problem is that this is nothing more than a one-time, stop-gap solution. This way, you can only send an anonymous email, but you can’t receive them. 

Let’s say, for example, that you need to send more than one anonymous email to someone or several to multiple people. That’s simply not possible with these email services.

Creating an Anonymous Email Account with CTemplar

As we said already, we believe that only an email service like CTemplar can truly provide the privacy and security that you require. 

One of the biggest flaws of many anonymous email services is weak encryption. CTemplar uses 4096-bit encryption, which ensures that your email data is impossible to decrypt using standard methods and modern technology. Even quantum computers would find it an extremely difficult task to break such encryption.

With CTemplar, you don’t have to mess around with VPNs and risk getting detected and blocked from your favorite websites or configuring the VPN badly and revealing your IP address. Instead, everything goes through CTemplar in a much more streamlined way.

All you need to do to protect your privacy and security is to go to CTemplar sign up page and select your preferred account type in the next window.

CTemplar offers plans for everyone’s needs and budget. For example, our Free Plan is best suited for individuals as you can have 1 Alias, but if you need an encrypted email for organizations, with more storage, you can look into one of our paid plans like Prime, Knight, Marshall or Champion, which all offer more Aliases, but also custom domains and several other security features not available with the Free plan, such as the Dead Man Timer, Catch-All Emails, Self Destructing Emails and more.

Once you select your account type, you can create your new anonymous email in 3 easy steps:

1. Select your username and domain

This is how your name and domain will show up on CTemplar. We don’t mind if you don’t want to tell us your real name, so by all means, use a pseudonym, a fake name or an alias. 

For example, if you say that your username is Donald Duck, your domain will be [email protected]. 

2. Create your password

One of the main reasons why online accounts get hacked so much is because so many services don’t store data like passwords securely. Very often, they keep such data in a plain text format, which is easy for hackers to open, read and modify.

Don’t make that mistake! 

Create a strong password that only you know using a combination of letters, numbers and special characters.

3. Recovery email (optional)

We understand that it’s very easy to forget your password when you have dozens of online accounts to remember. 

However, that still no excuse to let someone store your login data where it is easily accessible to anyone.

At CTemplar, we don’t store your password and unless you set up a recovery email, we won’t be able to recover your account should you forget your password (so please don’t). If you’re afraid that you might forget your password, we recommend using a password management tool like LastPass or similar.

Bring Your Anonymous Email With You Wherever You Go

75% of people use smartphones most often to check their emails and 25.6% first check their email on mobile.

Younger people are much more likely to at least sort out their emails on mobile, before reading and replying on desktop, according to this graph on Email Monday.

We understand that many of you prefer to go online while in commute and that includes opening your emails. 

However, using email on mobile is often less secure than on desktop because of the insecure public WiFi. 

This is why we have developed CTemplar mobile apps for both Android and iOS devices that will not only protect your account while on-the-go, but are much easier to send thanks to a user-friendly interface our designers worked hard on.

Our apps are also “Zero Access”, which means that even CTemplar won’t know your password (thanks to the Hash & Salt technique that we are employing) and we make sure that your emails can’t be traced back to you with IPs as we won’t store their logs.

Our mobile apps are available on Apple and Google Play, so feel free to check them out and let us know what you think. We are always looking for feedback to improve our apps.

How to Create an Anonymous Email Account Using Tor

At CTemplar, we always support those that fight for online privacy and few do so better and with more heart than the Tor community. 

Tor is a free software that allows you to communicate and browse anonymously online. Unlike popular online browsers like Google Chrome, which record your every website visit, Tor will direct your Internet traffic through a series of relays and thus conceal your location and usage from someone trying to conduct network surveillance or traffic analysis.

To use Tor, you first need to go through a few steps (nothing difficult, don’t worry:

1. Download Tor from Tor Project. Tor is available on Windows, OS X, Linux and Android.
2. Find and execute the downloaded file and extract the Tor Browsers somewhere on your computer.
3. Open the folder you just extracted and start the Tor Browser.

Once you download and set up Tor on your computer, you can connect to our Onion site at this address: http://ctemplarpizuduxk3fkwrieizstx33kg5chlvrh37nz73pv5smsvl6ad.onion/. 

Keep in mind that, if you try to connect to a .onion address without Tor, you’ll only get an error message like this:

How to Best Protect Yourself When Sending Anonymous Email

Whether you are using our regular website, one of our apps, or an Onion site, there are a few things that you should avoid to keep it safe.

1. Never log to your public profiles from your anonymous email.

You probably know that you can log to your social media and other online accounts using your email. This can be convenient since it allows you to log in faster than using a separate username and password for them, but every time you do this it stores your login attempt and where you logged from. 

2. Don’t include any PII in your login credentials

Your login credentials (that’s your username and password) on CTemplar are completely up to you. We will never ask you for your real name or to verify your account using a phone number or SMS like most do.

3. Don’t mention to anyone that you have an anonymous email account

Look, we understand that it’s pretty cool that you have an anonymous email account and that you’re like a ghost, but let’s keep it hush-hush, okay. No need for everyone to know.

Conclusion

Ever since Edward Snowden revealed the enormous government surveillance activities back in 2013, many people had their eyes open to all the ways their privacy is being abused on the Internet.

The result of this is that the use of anonymity systems like VPNs, Tor browser, and yes anonymous email services have all gone up.

At CTemplar, we are fully dedicated to helping you take back your privacy and security because we believe that what you email and who you email to is your own business.

Ready to take back your privacy? Sign up for CTemplar today.