A friend of mine asked me about Anonymous Email today. It would seem that someone on his job is slacking off and he wants to alert the upper management but wants to do it anonymously. His first thought was to use a free mail service like Hotmail or GMail. It's a good thing he only "thought" about it because never service is anonymous. the thing most people dont know about email is that each message comes with a "header". This header contains information on where the message originated. Free services like the ones mentioned above contain the sender real IP address within the header therefore, that trail leads directly back to the PC it was sent from. In the case of my friend, had he sent the message the IT department could have with very little effort tell exactly who sent the message! Surprising isn't it?
To send a TRUE anonymous message, the headers must be completely stripped. this can be made complicated or it can be made easy. the easy and quick way to do it is use an Anonymous remailer. An Anonymous remailer will strip the originating headers and forward the message to the recipient. Now the right complaints to a single remailer may get the senders information therefore to take all precautions you want to chain several remailers together.
There is a privacy service I like called Ultimate Anonymity. The offer some reallly cool tools to assist with totally anonymous email. They offer a secured (SSL) web based facility (see a sample of their anonymous web based remailer) that allows you to send anonymous email or newsgroup postings. Whats unique about this facility is that it allows you to manipulate the "from" line which means you decide what you want to appear in the from line that the recipient will see. Their web based facility handles everything. You just fill in the lines and hit the send button. It just does not get any easier than that. They also offer a program you can download to send messages right from your desktop using your own SMTP server.
In addition to their remailer the offer a full host of Online Anonymity and Privacy Tools.
The service is reliable and trustworthy. Ultimate Anonymity has been in business for over ten years. If you find the need for Anonymous Email then you might want to check out this service as it comes highly recommended.
Dolittle
