API Network Corp

There are legit/legal reasons to send email anonymously.   The world is not always a fair place and voicing your opinion, as true/accurate/real as it might be, can also be a form of political suicide.     How many times have you wanted to tell upper management "the truth" that they're not being given by those who report to them?   Having a public opinion that goes against the grain is often a venerable position, but under certain circumstances can be very unhealthy for your career.   In such a case, anonymity becomes vital.

What you shouldn't do: Use your free email account and send it yourself.    If the topic is something you can't afford to be connected to, then sending from your Yahoo/Hotmail/gMail account is bad idea.

There are two methods to accomplish this:

• Use remailers
• Use online remailers
• Use someone you trust to act as a Human Remailer

Remailers Using a remailer, sends it on to the final recipient and removes all traces to you, the original sender.  Since the remailer does know where the message came from and the recipient (as well as the content of your message), too, the anonymity provided by employing one remailer is not airtight.

If you put two or more remailers in a chain and send the message in encrypted form, however, you can reach a very high degree of anonymity since no remailer knows both the sender and the recipient.

Here is an active list of remailers.   There are pages like this that are auto-updated so you know the remailer is active and the performance (approximate delivery time) of each.

If you wish to be fully untraceable, then you must accept the loss of two-way interaction.   In a normal email exchange, if a message is not delivered, you will get a response.    If you need fully untraceable, this will not be possible as the end delivery unit will not know where the message originated.    So if it's very important your message is received, you might want to send the same message multiple times from different remailers.

Syntax (the structure of a message to a remailer)

Body:
::
Anon-To: 
  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
 

##
Subject: Subject of message

Type your message here. 

Online Remailers There are many places such as http://sendanonymousemail.net that will give you a simple web form where you can tap in the recipient, you're anonymous email address along with the subject and body.    Keep in mind any service like this will record your IP address to the message so if push comes to shove, they have your IP connected to the message.   Would normal people be able to gain access to this info?   No.   But in these days, what's normal?     To improve on this, it's better to connect to a proxy surf site like http://freeproxyserver.net and then go to sendanonymousemail.   Doing this will associate a different IP with the message, however you still have the issue of freeproxyserver.net tracking where your IP went.

The other method: The Human Remailer

If you have a friend you trust, and they have someone they trust, the other option is to have the email sent by the friend of a friend via their location.    e.g.  A person wanting to send an anonymous email to someone in Milwaukee could hand off the message to someone in New York, then to someone in China.  The China connection, unknowing of the original author, then sends the message to Milwaukee via a Hotmail type account.  (or whatever the equivalent is in China)

The downside of using public (automatic) remailers is that many servers will see these as something to block because anonymous email looks and smells like spam.   For example, I sent an anonymous message to myself via This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it when I began writing this and so far, nothing has been received.  I suspect my email service blocked that message at the server and never even told me about it.

In addition, anyone can easily block incoming messages from remailers by including this in a message to a remailer.   (the likelihood of someone blocking the remailer you plan to use is probably small, but blocking can be configured with little effort)

destination-block [email-address]

The downside of using human remailers:  Trust. As we all know, the more humans involved in something "covert" increases the chances of it being revealed.   As long as your connections are solid, and you involve at least two hops from the origin, this method is preferred.

If you plan to try the auto-remailers, then make sure you test it first.    You can begin by asking for instructions by sending a message to the remailer with remailer-help in the subject.    If you don't get a response, then you might want to try a different remailer.

Bottom line: Make sure you know what you're doing when deciding to send anonymous email.  Doing this properly involves more than just knowing the above.