A Peculiar Blog

On the home page of Webwizny you will find a collection of free online tools that range from things like “Send your Xmas List to Santa”, Free Image Hosting and Downloading videos from YouTube, to finding out how old you are in days or analyzing the strength of a password and a few more.

One of those tools is “Send Anonymous Emails”.  It’s a simple form in which you fill in a fake “from” address, the address you’re sending the message to, an optional blind carbon copy that can be sent to another address and then the subject and body of the message.

While it does work, I think there’s a few things to consider before using this as anything more than having a bit of fun.  For example it would be fine if you wanted to send an email to convince somebody you were in the Outer Banks when actually you were in Atlantic city losing your shirt.  Of course, you could only get away with it if somebody didn’t decide to look closely at the email headers and do a bit of easy online detective work

I checked it out sending a test message to myself.  The test message arrived within seconds of being sent.  Fast delivery is good but from a security standpoint, some latency (delay) would be helpful to help disguise when it was sent.

The message headers contain enough standard information that would make tracing the email back to the server it came from easy.  From there it would be a simple matter of getting a court order for server logs to find out the time it was sent and the IP address of the sender.

While it’s labeled as anonymous email, that anonymity is only very casual at best.  A determined lawyer could very likely break that anonymity in a matter of hours.