Sending and receiving e-mail through a proxy server
What are advantages of e-mail via proxy ?
There are some :
- increase of anonymity of mail sending / reception of mail
- If an organization uses a corporate proxy and the Internet access is possible only through it then using an external-mail without proxy is impossible.
There are some variants of access to mail and for the each one its own way to use proxy servers.
Web mail
Web mail - is a mailbox with web interface. An example for such mail are Hotmail, Mail, Yahoo! Mail etc. It is enough to have access in Internet and a browser to use such mailboxes. In this case both getting and sending mail will be anonymous if you adjust your browser's proxy settings.
Web interface for POP3 servers
To get or send mail via POP3 / SMTP servers you can use the web interface. The web interface is a gateway which gives you access to POP3 to a server through your browser.
In this case for anonymous mail check/sending will be enough to set a proxy server in your browser.
Remailer - anonymous mail sending
You can also use remailer for anonymous mail sending . Remailer is mostly like the web mail. However there are also essential differences:
- you can specify any e-mail as a return mail;
- remailer completely hides your IP address;
- you cannot receive mail using remailer. only to send!
Since working with remailer you use a browser, it also possible to use an anonymous proxy server to connect to the remailer (double anonymity : anonymous proxy + remailer ).
Readdressing of letters - anonymous mail reception
If you want to hide your IP address from a mail server during reception of mail, it not a problem. There is a function of "mail gathering" in many free mail systems. So if you specify one mailbox to collect mail from the others mail servers, it will connect to the mail the specified servers and download letters. And you can get these letters from it later.
POP3 / SMTP mail
It's a bit more complicated to use mailing programs because they are not able to work through proxy.
There are 2 ways to decide this problem:
- Socksification of mailing programs (+tunneling through HTTP proxy if possible);
- Port mapping through proxy + adjustment of mailing programs.
Go back to proxy FAQ