The first question to answer here is why go for anonymous email when there are plenty of premium featured and free email services such as Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo! Mail available? Well, privacy and anonymity is a digital right — our digital right. These email services are ‘free’ because of the advertisements.

Although deemed necessary evils, ads are mostly tailored for the visitor or service user, and to do that, service providers need your data to show you advertisements targeted to you and your user group. These are ads that you are most likely to click and/or follow.

Moreover, the disclosure of the motives of secret agencies and their top-secret internet-censoring programs (such as PRISM) has raised concerns among digital privacy advocates. If you want to keep your emails away from prying eyes, this article will introduce to you the many options for sending and receving anonymous emails.

Recommended Reading: VPN Protocols: Preserving Your Sensitive Information Online

Anonymous email forms the basic foundation of anonymity over the web. Internet is no secure storage, but you have a say in who has access to your data and who doesn’t. If that is no, anonymous emails is one way to ensure your emails are not trackable online.

Note: Anonymity is not possible on the web without hiding your IP address, so you must use Tor, or any other proxy or VPN service before using the services below to remain anonymous on the Internet.

Encrypted / Anonymous Email Service

Here are some of the anonymous email services that lets you send and receive emails anonymously online. Some of them have encryption features, others are disposable or will self-destruct after a specified period of time. Here are 5.

Anonymous Email – TorGuard – This service provides you an anonymous inbox with lots of privacy and cryptographic features. You get 10MB storage, and end-to-end security using SSL encryption for connection and G/PGP encryption for securing the messages.

Tor Mail – Tor Mail is a Tor Hidden service that provides truly anonymous email service. It runs on the hidden service network of The Tor Project so you must use Tor to access and use it. Tor Mail is developed for super anonymity. As it’s built over the Tor network, it cannot be traced easily.

GuerrilaMail – GuerrillaMail offers you a disposable, self-destructible, temporary email address to send and receive emails anonymously on the internet. Mail is deleted after an hour. You only need to choose an email address; no personal data is required.

Secure Mail – This service encrypts your mail using 4096-bit key, which makes it unreadable by anyone except you. It doesn’t ask for your personal information or IP address to sign up. They also have a zero-tolerance policy aganist spam.

The Anonymous Email – Create an account to send and receive emails by signing up with your real email. None of your other personal info is necessary.

Send Emails Without Registration

Sometimes you just need to send emails without prior registration. In fact you don’t even need to receive any feedback. If this is you, here are 8 services that is essentially a form where you put in details of the email you want to send. Note that there is no way for the receiver to get back to you.

AnonymousEmail.us – Here you will find only a simple form to fill in the receiver’s address, subject and the email content (you can also attach a file to the email if necessary). To get a reply, opt to provide a reply-to email address, otherwise this is a one-way ticket to sending an anonymous email.

5ymail – Send and receive beautifully formatted messages using its rich-text editor without revealing your true self. You will have to give up a real email to receive your 5ymail inbox credentals. There is also a paid version for more features.

CyberAtlantis – It offers a simple interface to provide the receiver’s email address, subject, and the message. It strips off the IP address from your mail, and thus you can’t be traced easily. It asks for none of your personal information.

W3 Anonymous Remailer – Send anonymous emails to anyone. You only need to enter the receiver’s email address, subject and the message for the email.

Send Anonymous Email – This one operates with a plain interface to enter the sender and receiver’s address, subject and message. No other details are required to send emails with this. The IP addresses are logged in.

Send Email Message – You only need to enter the receiver’s email address, subject, and the message. Over 100,000 anonymous emails are sent every day for free.

VenomPen – It offers a simple interface to enter the message and details, and send the message to the recipient.

AnonEmail – You get to send anonymous emails without revealing any information about your identity.

Receive Emails

If you just need a disposable email to confirm links and don’t want to deal with the newsletter or other deals they might send you in the future, try these 7 email services. Accounts are created automatically when a mail is received for that address.

Anonymous Email – Hide My Ass! – Hide My Ass! offers a free anonymous email account, which can be used to receive (but not send) emails. You can opt for new email received notifications to be sent to your real email or even set your inbox to "self-destruct" with an expiration date.

myTrashMail – Get open and public email accounts created upon receiving mail or sign up for a private and password-protected one to receive mail. The accounts are temporary and will be deleted automatically after some time.

NotSharingMy.Info – NotSharingMy.Info provides you with a permanent anonymous email address to receive emails without providing any traceable and identifiable information. It only requires your real email address for signing up. All emails to the anonymous email address is forwarded to your real email address.

Mailnesia – Aside from inboxes generated automatically upon receipt of an email, Mailnesia even features an automatic confirmation-links click system which is useful if you make lots of sign-ups on web services.

Mailinator – Here is one that lets you create email inboxes quickly and even automatically. You can only receive emails with it.

Spambog – Spambog offers you a disposable (7-day purge), temporary, anonymous email inbox on the Web. You can receive, reply and forward emails but not send an original one. An email alias can be protected with a password.

TempInbox – Here’s another temporary, disposable, auto-automated email inbox service. Give any email alias to anyone and check that inbox on the website for your incoming mail.

Do you use any other anonymous email service? Please share with us through comments.

The increasing popularity of cloud computing and always-connected mobile devices has led to more and more businesses migrating their data and software onto the cloud. The cloud brings with it reduced costs, increased mobility and easier scalability, amongst other benefits.

Thus, software as a service (SaaS) providers such as Dropbox and Evernote and bring your own device (BYOD) policies are fast becoming the norm in the business world.

At the same time, however, the cloud also brings with it issues related to data privacy, security and residency. Although it would be counter-productive to turn your back on the cloud because of these issues, that doesn’t mean that you have to accept these risks as being part of cloud computing.

Recommended Reading: The State Of IT Security

If you’re running a business and want to take advantage of the cloud while still keeping your data secure, here are five tools to look at.

Cloud Apps And Shadow IT

But first, a bit about "Shadow IT."

The term refers to IT systems and services used without the knowledge and approval of an organization. It is not a new phenomenon, but has become a greater security risk with the rise of cloud computing, and the potential for SaaS applications being used without the company’s knowledge.

This only adds to the problems related to data security and privacy. Since the company is not aware of these apps being used, it’s impossible to implement policies to ensure the security of company data with these unknown cloud applications.

Three of the five applications in this list aim to mitigate this danger by implementing cloud application detection.

1. Bitglass

Bitglass, currently in beta, provides transparent protection for your business’s data. Useable on computers and mobile devices, Bitglass aims to reduce the risk of data loss and maintain your data’s visibility, even within the cloud as well as on mobile devices.

Bitglass combines a few different types of security into one package. As far as cloud applications are concerned, Bitglass is able to detect the usage of cloud applications and also encrypt data uploaded onto the cloud.

Bitglass can also track your business data anywhere on the Internet, so you maintain visibility even when employees upload data onto personal file-sharing services. In addition, Bitglass protects your business against the risk of lost or stolen mobile devices. Bitglass can also wipe data on a mobile device without needing to install any agents onto the device.

2. Skyhigh Networks

Skyhigh Networks discovers, analyzes and secures your use of cloud applications. It uses logs from your existing firewalls, proxies and gateways to quickly discover what cloud apps your employees are using.

From this, it provides you with a customizable risk assessment of all the cloud apps that are currently being used. Skyhigh’s analysis tools are able to detect inconsistencies in your security policies as well as potential data leaks.

Finally, Skyhigh Networks has what it calls 3-Click Security, which uses reverse-proxy technology to grant contextual access to the cloud, implement consistent policies across clouds and allow direct access to clouds without needing VPNs or device agents. In addition, Skyhigh can encrypt data and implement data loss protection.

3. Netskope

Netskope is a service that discovers and monitors cloud apps and shadow IT used on your network. Netskope monitors users, sessions, shared and downloaded content as well as the shared content details, and provides detailed analytics based on this information.

These analytics also allow you to ask business- or security-related questions in order to identify weaknesses or opportunities. In addition, Netskope’s analytics can construct a detailed audit trail in the event of security problems.

Netskope’s fine-grained policy enforcement means you can allow your employees to use their favourite cloud apps while only blocking unwanted activity. Your employees can continue using cloud apps for increased productivity without any compromise on your data security.

4. CipherCloud

CipherCloud is a cloud security software suite that works by encrypting or tokenizing data directly at your business gateway. Unlike the previous services, CipherCloud does not aim to discover shadow IT, but to ensure the security of data contained within known clouds.

CipherCloud encrypts data during the upload process, and decrypts during download. The encryption keys used for this process remain within your business network; thus, unauthorized users accessing data in the cloud will only see indecipherable text.

CipherCloud also comes with built-in malware detection and data loss prevention. There are specific builds for commonly used cloud applications such as Salesforce, Office 365, Gmail and Box, as well as a variant that can be configured to work with any cloud-based applications your business uses.

5. Okta

Okta differs somewhat from the previous solutions, in that Okta’s goal is to provide secure Single Sign-On (SSO) for all the cloud, on-premise and mobile applications used in your business. Okta is pre-integrated with common business applications from Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and others.

Okta’s features include automated user management, support for mobile devices and applications, multifactor authentication and flexible security policies.

It also provides audit logs, thereby enabling you to trace user access to cloud apps, as well as the ability to set access policies from a centralized position. Role-based administration is also available, which provides detailed granular control over Okta’s features and the administrative rights for these features.

Conclusion

Each of these services attempts to tackle and provide solutions for the data security issues present with cloud computing, yet their suitability for your business will depend entirely on your security needs and problems.

If shadow IT is a problem, perhaps Netskope or Skyhigh Networks will be the service for you; if encryption and the ability to trace your business’s data regardless of location is of a higher priority to you, Bitglass has to be first on your list.

At the same time, however, it’s important to remember that these services will not be able to rectify certain fundamental issues that might lead to compromised data security. If your employees resort to shadow IT cloud applications, perhaps you should look into why they feel the need to bypass your business’s IT department. And if your employees keep downloading business data in order to continue working at home, you should ask why they feel the need to do so.

Creating websites has been made very easy these days, thanks to many web-building services. Most of them have the WYSIWYG interface, where all you need to do is drag and drop elements, insert your content, touch up on the styles and font size/colors and you are good to go. It has its perks, but it comes with limitations too.

Your customization is restrained by the funtionality made available by the service provider. Want to gain more control and do more with your website? Learn to code.

Coding your own website is simplier than you may think. Created by Train Simple – an Adobe Authorized Training Center – HTML5 / CSS3 Training is a 17-hour, 6-course bundle that teaches you the fundamentals of building a website. It also covers tips and best practices when it comes to building your own website.

Here’s a gist of what the course (in video) covers:

• HTML5 Structure and Semantics
• CSS3 Fundamentals
• CSS3 Box Model
• CSS3 Typography
• CSS Layouts

With this bundle – available at only $59 (81% off) – you are getting the courses in downloadable videos tutorials. This means you can watch them anytime, as many times as you want.

• Get it now

OSX Mavericks is finally here, and probably installed on your Mac already. While Mountain Lion users may not find many changes in the free upgrade, they probably love what it did to power management, Finder tabs and quick-reply notifications.

It may also be the upgrade Safari needs to put itself into the browser race again (although we had a few good reasons to ask you to opt for Chrome instead). Well, it’s time to put this new OS to good use. Here is a list of keyboard shortcuts that can help you work faster and harder with Mavericks. If you think we missed any, let us know in the comments.

Recommended Reading: Clean Install Os X Mavericks

Shortcut	Actions
Command + 1	View as Icon
Command + 2	View as List
Command + 3	View as Columns
Command + 4	View as Cover Flow
Command + [	Go to previous folder
Command + ]	Go to next folder
Command + ↑	Navigate up one level
Command + ↓	Navigate down one level
Command + Control + ↑	Open folder that contains current folder in new window
Option + Double click	Open selected folder in new window + close current window
Command + Double click	Open selected folder in new tab
Command + Click window title	See folder’s path
Command + Tab	Cycle through opened applications (foward)
Command + Shift + Tab	Cycle through opened applications (backward)
Space	Launch Quick Look
Command + Y	Launch Quick Look
Command + A	Selects all items in Finder
Command + Option + A	Deselects any selected items
Command + Shift + A	Go to Application folder
Command + Shift + U	Go to Utilities folder
Command + N	New Finder window
Command + K	Connect to Server
Command + Shift + K	Open Network Window
Command + I	Get info of item
Command + J	Show view options
Command + Option + Esc	Force quit an application

Finder (List view)

Shortcut	Actions
←	Open selected folder
→	Close selected folder

Shortcut	Actions
Command + Delete	Move to trash
Command + Shift + Delete	Empty Trash
Command + Shift + Option + Delete	Empty Trash (Silence mode)
Command + drag file/folder	Move item to another location
Option + drag file/folder	Copy item to another location
Command + Option + drag file/folder	Make alias of dragged items
Command + L	Make alias of selected items
Command + D	Duplicate selected item
Command + C	Copy selected item
Command + X	Cut selected item
Command + V	Paste copied item
Command + Z	Undo action
Command + Shift + N	New folder
Command + Option + N	New Smart folder
Command + O	Open selected item

Shortcut	Actions
F1	Decrease brightness
F2	Increase brightness

Shortcut	Actions
Control + ↑	Launch/Quit Mission Control
F3	Launch/Quit Mission Control
Control + ↓	Application windows (See all)
Command + F3	Show Desktop
Option + Command + D	Toogle Dock On/Off

Mission Control (Inside Mission Control)

Shortcut	Actions
Control + ←	Move to space on left
Control + →	Move to space on right
Control + #	Switch to a specific (#n) desktop. Example: To switch to desktop 3, use Control + 3

Shortcut	Actions
Fn + F12	Launch Dashboard
Command + R	Reload current widget
Command + =	Show/hide widget bar
Command + ←	Scroll widget bar left
Command + →	Scroll widget bar right

Screen Shots

Shortcut	Actions
Shift + Command + 3	Screen shot entire screen. Saves as picture.
Shift + Command + Control + 3	Screen shot entire screen. Copies to clipboard.
Shift + Command + 4	Screen shot a designated area. Saves as picture.
Shift + Command + Control + 4	Screen shot a designated area. Copies to clipboard.
Shift + Command + 4, then Space	Screen shot a designated window.

Shortcut	Actions
Command + Space	Spotlight on/off
Option + Command + Space	Show Spotlight window

Shortcut	Actions
Command + F5	VoiceOver on/off
Option + Command + F5	Display Accessibility controls
Command + Option + 8	Zoom On/Off
Command + Option + +	Zoom in
Command + Option + +	Zoom out

Common for various applications

Note: This may not work for some applications

Shortcut	Actions
Shift + Command + /	Show Help Menu
Command + ,	Open App’s Preference
Command + `	Cycle through opened Apps (of the same type) windows
Command + Shift + ?	Open App’s Help Search
Command + H	Hide current window
Command + Option + H	Hide all running windows
Command + M	Minimize current window
Command + Option + M	Minimize all windows
Command + W	Close selected window
Command + Option + W	Close all windows
Command + Shift + W	Close file with its associated windows

Shortcut	Actions
⌽ (once)	Put Mac to sleep
⌽ (again)	Wake Mac up
⌽ (hold)	Force Mac shut down
Command + Control + ⌽	Force Mac to restart
Control + ⏏	Show restart/ sleep/ shutdown dialog
Command + Option + Control + ⏏	Quit all opened applications
Shift + Control + ⏏	Put dispplays to sleep
Command + Shift + Q	Log Out
Command + Shift + Option + Q	Log Out (immediately)

Shortcut	Actions
Option (hold)	Display bootable volumes
Shift (hold)	Start in Safe Mode
Left Shift (hold)	Bypass automatic login
C (hold)	Boot from other media
T (hold)	Start in FireWire target disk mode
N (hold)	Start from NetBoot server
X (hold)	Force Mac OS X startup
Command + R (hold)	Start in Recovery Mode
⏏ (hold)	Eject discs