Anonymous Email

Anonymous Remailers allow you to send Email (more or less) anonymously. There are various different kinds of remailers available which offer you different grades of anonymity.

  • The old style remailers simply match your own email address to a pseudonym. If someone want to reply to your anonymous email the server will simply match the pseudonym to your real email address and pass it on to you. The drawback of this is that this server knows which pseudonym goes with which email address. This means that if the server gets compromised or forced to give out this information, your anonymity is gone.
    anon.penet.fi used to be a service like this.

  • Cypherpunks Remailers

  • Mixmaster Remailers, they work in a roughly similar fashion as Cypherpunk Remailers. The idea is that of a chained remailer system which will pass your email along serveral servers to ensure that noone knows how to match your real email address to the pseudonym. In order to achieve this the packets get encrypted multiple times. You can imagine those encryption layers to be like multiple envelopes around your email. Your email is first encrypted with the public key of, say Server3, then with the one of Server2 and then with the one of Server1. When your email gets send, Server1 will decrypt his part and see that he's supposed to pass this on to Server2. After receving the message, Server2 also decrypts it (take it out of his envelope) and see that it has to be passed onto Server3. Server3 now also decrypts it and see that it's supposed to be send to the recepient, say joe@yahoo.com




    Mixmaster also 'mixes' the emails, which means they will not leave the server in the same order as they arrived. Instead the server will keep them for a certain amount of time. This is to ensure that no correlation can be made with your email arriving and emails being passed onto the next server.

    You can find a very nice descrption of this at www.thur.de.
    For a list of available servers look at http://kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu/mixmaster_list.html

    12/04/1999 Stephanie Wehner