When you send out an email, normally, you don’t have to worry about much. Sure, you send emails to friends and family, and it doesn’t present any kind of security risk for you, your identity, or the device you connect to the Internet with. However, when sending emails to organizations (private or public), you could be putting yourself at risk for getting your IP tracked. Time and time again, private organizations have proven themselves to do anything for a dollar, and if companies want to track your online activity to better pitch sales to you, they’ll find a way. The government? Who trusts the government to care about our privacy online anyway. So when sending emails to users you don’t know personally, you could use a VPN to hide your email IP address.
There are a number of possibilities for sending email. Most users just use free email accounts like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo!. These are accessed from your web browser, and hiding the email IP address of these accounts and email headers can be done easily. Simply sign into a VPN server (as provided by a VPN company online), and your email is hidden.
Using Thunderbird or other webmail accounts may be a bit different. Outlook is in the same boat. Because these are not accessed through your web browser, you may need to sign into the email account before you sign into the VPN server. Some VPN services may block the use of webmail over their VPN servers because of security risks involved. These risks are related to their servers, and not to the user, so don’t worry. Anyway, this issue is easily fixed by first signing into your webmail account and then to the VPN server. Once you do this, the outgoing mail will use the VPNs IP address.
By using a VPN to hide your email IP address, you can prevent other people and organizations from knowing your real location as seen by your IP address. This is not all you can do with a VPN. When you change your IP with a VPN, you can also hide your IP from the website servers you visit, unblock sites on networks that restrict Internet access, and change the country-indicator to access government blocked sites. Some users like virtual private networks just for the ease of mind knowing that your online activity will be private.