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Creating encrypted reply blocks

An encrypted reply block is an encrypted text that a remailer can use to forward a message to someone else. By including such a reply block in your remailed message, you can allow people to reply to your message without giving away your address (or even an address on anon.penet.fi or a similar system). The trick is that the block contains all the necessary "Anon-Send-To: " headers, properly encrypted, but has no message body. A remailer will automatically append all text below the encrypted message (in this case, the encrypted reply block) to the outgoing message, so the text below the reply block will be sent along.

In other words, you can create a reply block by simply creating a message with chaining headers, but without any body, and with yourself as the final recipient.

You also need an encrypted reply block if you want to set up an account at alpha.c2.org.

Here is how I put together encrypted reply blocks

Get a copy of Private Idaho.
Get all the remailer keys for the cypherpunk remailers.
Install those keys into your PGP keyring (read the documentation if you don't know how to do this)
Update Private Idaho to recognize those keys (see #3)
Put your real address in the "To:" heading of Private Idaho
Select "Cypherpunk" from the "Remailers" menu
Choose "Encrypt to remailer" from the "Advanced Cypherpunk" section of the "Remailers" menu.
Set "Remailer" (middle of the window) to "chain".
Choose "Append info to message" from E-mail menu (I'm using version 2.5b. It may be different on earlier versions)
Choose however many cypherpunk remailers you want your message to go through before it comes back to you.
Click OK.
Private Idaho will shell to PGP a bunch of times. When it is done, your encrypted reply block appears in the message window. Remember: For it to work, the remailer that now appears in the "To:" window must receive the message FIRST.

Last modified: 23 Jan 1998
Author: Arnoud "Galactus" Engelfriet
Comments: galactus@stack.nl
This document was generated with Orb v1.3 for OS/2.