I got this interesting question from one of my readers: how do I send an email so that my laptop shows I am visiting Australia? It does not matter why my reader needed this, let’s see how to solve the problem.
To find the IP of an email sender is, most of the times, an easy task. This info is kept in the header of each email sent or received, so what you have to do is to find the header and know where to look for the IP. You can read in one of my previous posts exactly how to do this.
Back to the problem, if you need to make in such way that the emails you send look as coming from another country, you need to change your IP address.
Email Sent Using Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird
If you are using Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird or other desktop application to send you emails the best solution is to use a VPN service. The downsides of this approach are that you have to find a VPN service with IP addresses in the country you need and you have to pay for them.
Good news for those that want to send emails from US, Netherlands, Japan, Germany and France. There are several FREE VPN services that can help you:
- United States: Hotspot Shield
- Netherlands: AlonWeb, ItsHidden
- Germany: CyberGhost VPN
- Japan: PacketiX VPN
- France: UltraVPN
For the others, I recommend using the webmail for sending your message. It is not worth to spend the money ($10-20) and the time to search for a proper VPN.
Email Sent From Webmail
If you want to send the email from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or webmail the solution is simple and effective. Here are the steps you need to perfom:
1. Go to proxy4free.com and look for a proxy from the country you need (Australia for the one that asked this). You should choose a high anonymous or anonymous proxy.
2. Set up your browser to use the proxy. Here is how for to do it for different browsers:
3. Go to MyIPTest.com and check your IP address. If it shows the country you need then it is ok. If not, search for another proxy.
4. Load the webmail page (GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc), login and send the email. It may run a little bit slow.
5. You are done!
If you want to make sure this works you could send an email to you and then check the headers of the email for the IP address.
