HOWTO
These are the fundamental instructions to understand how remailer messages are created:
if you use a specific client, you won't need to learn this process,
but this text can help you anyway to understand how remailers work.
If you want to send an anonymous message, first of all create a file containing:
- two colon signs ( :: ) in the first line,
- the phrase "Anon-To: e-mail address" in the second line
whereby the e-mail address should be the address the remailer will send the message to.
The third line should be empty and the message text will follow.
e.g.:
=============================================================
::
Anon-To: address@example.org
Write here your message
=============================================================
Remailers only accept messages encrypted through PGP or GPG, so your message must be
encrypted with the remailer public key, which you can get by sending a message to the remailer
(mixmaster@remailer.paranoici.org) and by entering "remailer-key" in the subject.
So the above message must be encrypted with the remailer PGP key and eventually sent to
mixmaster@remailer.paranoici.org by entering two colon signs at the beginning of the message and, in the second
line, the phrase "Encrypted: PGP" followed by the previously encrypted message.
=============================================================
From: joe@test.com
To: mixmaster@remailer.paranoici.org
::
Encrypted: PGP
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: 2.6.3i
owE1jMsNwjAUBH3gZMk9PClnUoBPUANpwElW2OBPZD8H0gd1UCP2gduuNDNfj
IcSHT4zCbQmtlbzGFM9T0jSD7QVvEzaPcUlBSSWHQclbnR9YWJNp5BFSLdR9s
CijF3NGxybry/1Rsqn4la3a0JiIhLvnYGCu9HFtiC8oIxnlkeuIYe+EH=HgDa
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
=============================================================
The remailer will decode your message and send it anonymously. If you want to include a subject
or other headers which shouldn't be filtered by the remailer, you can enter them as explained
below before encrypting the message for the remailer:
=============================================================
::
Anon-To: address@example.org
##
Subject: Re: Twofish
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 12 Jan 1999 22:47:04 EST."
<199901130247.WAA02761@example.com>
Message text
=============================================================
Even if PGP encryption is very safe, using a remailer in the simplest way is not the best system
for protecting your identity. Therefore, you can tell the remailer, for instance, to keep the
message you've sent for a certain period of time and to forward it later so as to avoid the
so-called traffic analysis.
If you enter the header Latent-Time: +2:00, your message will be delayed by 2 hours, while if you
use the syntax Latent-Time: +5:00r, you'll have a random delay between 0 and 5 hours.
The best way to use a remailer is by using them in a chain, by sending a message from one remailer to
the other before it reaches your address.
Let's make an example with the above message:
=============================================================
::
Anon-To: mixmaster@remailer.paranoici.org
::
Encrypted: PGP
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: 2.6.3i
owE1jMsNwjAUBH3gZMk9PClnUoBPUANpwElW2OBPZD8H0gd1UCP2gduuNDNfI
T4zCbQmtlbzGFM9T0jSD7QVvEzaPcUlBSSWHQclbnR9YWJNp5BFSLdR9CijF3
ybry/1Rsqn4la3a0JiIhLvnYGCu9HFtiC8oIxnlkeuIYe+EH=HgDq
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
=============================================================
you can encrypt this message with the PGP key of another remailer (e.g. Replay) and send the
encrypted message to this remailer: remailer@replay.com
Thus Replay will receive the message and decode it and will find the instructions to send it
to mixmaster@remailer.paranoici.org, which in its turn will decode it and send it to address@example.org