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 saw that person following you, you would probably turn and tell them to stop it.
Would you let that person continue this if they told you that your life would somehow be easier by collecting this information about you?
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 your information is collected?
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 leave 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 always collecting data about you, 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 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 collecting and storing your data on the Internet, 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, as 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 send your personal information to a third party without your knowledge or consent.
Or maybe you need to email 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 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 someone 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 doctor-patient confidentiality, but is this always the case?
Unfortunately, it is not, and the amount of suspiciously accurate solicitations 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 emailing with your doctor or lawyer, 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 lot of personally identifying data about you, you must protect your identity.
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 regarding data protection thanks in no small part to the GDPR. Thanks to it, EU data controllers have to make 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 with 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 occasionally, 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 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 Keila because we believe it is the most bullet-proof and secure.
However, for posterity’s sake, we will also tell you about the other methods.
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 must do much more than that to remain anonymous on it. The biggest problem is that Gmail stores your IP address, which can be used to trace you.
If you use a Virtual Private Network or VPN, you can hide your real IP address and replace it with the VPN. This is because your traffic will be tunneled through the VPN server on its way from you to the final destination.
However, remember 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 from using a VPN.
Use a Burner Anonymous Email
If you need to send an anonymous email to someone quickly, 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 can’t receive it.
Let’s say, for example, that you need to send more than one anonymous email to someone or several to multiple people. That’s not possible with these email services.
Creating an Anonymous Email Account with Keila
As we said, only an email service like Keila can provide the privacy and security you require.
One of the biggest flaws of many anonymous email services is weak encryption. Keila uses 4096-bit encryption, which ensures that your email data is impossible to encrypt using standard methods and modern technology. Even quantum computers would find it an extremely difficult task to break such encryption.
With Keila, 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 Keila in a much more streamlined way.
All you need to do to protect your privacy and security is to go to the Keila sign-up page and select your preferred account type in the next window.
Keila offers plans for everyone’s needs and budget. For example, our Free Plan is best suited for individuals as you can have 1 Alias. Still, suppose you need an encrypted email for organizations with more storage. In that case, 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:
- Select your username and domain
This is how your name and domain will show up on Keila. 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 your username is Donald Duck, your domain will be donaldduck@Keila.com.
- Create your password
One of the main reasons online accounts get hacked so much is that so many services don’t store data like passwords securely. They often keep such data in 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.
- 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 is still no excuse to let someone store your login data where it is easily accessible to anyone.
At Keila, 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 you might forget your password, we recommend using a password management tool like LastPass.
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 commuting, including 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 Keila mobile apps for Android and iOS devices that will protect your account while on the go and 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 Keila 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 Keila, we always support those who 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:
- Download Tor from Tor Project. Tor is available on Windows, OS X, Linux, and Android.
- Find and execute the downloaded file and extract the Tor Browsers somewhere on your computer.
- 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://Keilapizuduxk3fkwrieizstx33kg5chlvrh37nz73pv5smsvl6ad.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.
- Never log in to your public profiles from your anonymous email.
You probably know you can use your email to log in to your social media and other online accounts. 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 in.
- Don’t include any PII in your login credentials
Your login credentials (username and password) on Keila 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.
- Don’t mention to anyone that you have an anonymous email account
We understand it’s pretty cool that you have an anonymous email account and are 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 in 2013, many people have opened their eyes to how 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 Keila, 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 Keila today.