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Anonymity: Remailers: Cypherpunk remailers

If you want to mail messages without even an anonymized return address on it, then you should use a cypherpunk remailer. You can encrypt the messages sent to the remailer, and the remailer will decrypt them and send them on to the recipient, whose address is hidden inside the encrypted message. This means that someone who monitors your outgoing mail can't see who you are sending anonymous mail to. For even more security, you can also chain remailers, in other words use more than one remailer to send your message. Now not even the remailers you use know who is sending mail to who. Some remailers even allow you to post to Usenet.

Non-technical Anonymous Remailer FAQ (By Andre Bacard): An introduction to the principles behind remailers. It also discusses reasons for using a remailer, and explains some of the terminology used when dealing with these systems. It doesn't provide all the technical details, but it is required reading for all people who want to start using remailers.
List of reliable remailers: A list with the results of tests on all known remailers for their response time and reliability. Use this data to pick remailers for your anonymous messages.
Chaining remailers, an example (By Alex de Joode): Chaining is using more than one remailer to send a message. Basically, you send a message to remailer A with instructions to send it to remailer B, which in turn finds instructions to send it to remailer C, and so on. When for example A is in the USA, B is in the Netherlands, C in Finland and D in Cuba, tracing it back to the original sender may be a bit of a problem.
Premail, a program to automate remailing (By Raph Levien): Chaining remailers is a bit complicated, as you have to do a lot of editing, PGP encryption and other stuff that can easily be automated. This program (for UNIX systems) does it for you.
Mailcrypt, automates remailing (for Emacs) (By Patrick J. LoPresti): MailCrypt is a set of macros for Emacs that can help you to send encrypted mail. It is also useful if you want to send anonymous messages, as it can automatically compose messages which are sent through various remailers.
Private Idaho for Windows: Private Idaho, an MS Windows program, provides an easy interface to most anonymous servers. It helps you to send messages through multiple remailers and allows you to set up anonymous accounts at nym.alias.net. The Private Idaho FAQ is a good source of help for using the program.
Chainmail (for the Mac): This is an Applescript that helps you automate chaining messages. It requires ScriptTools 1.3.1, which is not available anymore. If you know something better, please let me know.
Creating encrypted reply blocks: A reply block is a chained message that only contains instructions to reach your real address. This can be used by others to send you mail, without even giving them an anonymous address.
Remailing over the WWW: An alternative to "normal" remailing is using a WWW site to remail your messages. It is not recommended if your message is very important, but if you want to try out remailers, then a WWW interface can be helpful.
Security: Encryption: Pretty Good Privacy: PGP is a file encryption program which is generally considered unbreakable. It is used extensively on the Internet, available for almost every platform and is required for anonymous remailers. It can also create digital signatures, which makes it easy to detect forgeries.

Last modified: 20 Jun 1998
Author: Arnoud "Galactus" Engelfriet
Comments: galactus@stack.nl
This document was generated with Orb v1.3 for OS/2.