Steam – Is it possible to send a Steam gift card to someone not yet on Steam

There is currently no feature to allow you to invite a friend to Steam as such. The closest thing I can think of is either to:

Gift them a game

If you have a game in your Steam inventory, you can gift that to an email address that is not already on Steam.

This will send them an email with an invite to Steam and all the instructions they will need.

Do it manually

1. Navigate to https://store.steampowered.com/join/
2. Fill in your details and click CREATE MY ACCOUNT
3. Get them to download the Steam client.
4. Send them to your Steam profile page, "http://steamcommunity.com/id/{Your ID or Username}/".
5. Tell them to send you a friend request and then you can accept it.
6. Tell them to download your chosen game.

I tried sending myself a gift just now - the email contains the sender's email address, indeed. What you can do is send a gift to your own secondary email address, and send them the URL for redeeming the gift (the URL you receive by emailing the gift to yourself) . Hopefully you have some way of contacting them other than their steam profile; for example, give them the url written on a slip of paper.

Caution: The URL contains the email you sent the gift to. If you don't want the receiver to be able to guess who you are, and the secondary email you're sending to is obviously related to you, create a new email account to send to. Example URL, email highlighted:

https://store.steampowered.com/account/ackgift/1F631467BB7E?redeemer=Fadeway%40yahoo.com

With this method, the first time they learn the sender's name will be when they enter the URL into a browser:

If there's no way to transmit the URL to them without posting on their steam profile, that's a lost cause, unless you get a third person to act as an arbiter/organizer who friends everybody and distributes the links while keeping it a secret who sent which one.